Now, there’s an impertinent question.
But realistically, with commercialism now
dominant in our cultural environment, that has to be asked of our Christian
Advent and Christmas celebrations and worship.
Here’s what commercial preparations
for Christmas are like this year where I live: Sears’ Wish Book catalogue arrived in July. Christmas decorations went up soon
as Hallowe’en was over. Advertising and sales started at the same time. Black
Friday madness spread to Canada the day after American Thanksgiving trying to keep
Canadians at home for their Christmas shopping. And so on … and on … and on….
It isn’t as simple to fix as suggested
by the once popular slogan, “Put Christ Back into Christmas.” Many who attend
our Christmas Eve service doubt the whole story, but cannot bring themselves to
admit it. Do their childhood memories still
haunt them?
Nor are the traditional “Christmas
Pageants” sufficient to dispell the ghosts of Christmases past. Everyone expects the same drill telling the now familiar composite
story: The Babe born in a manger in Bethlehem while angels sang overhead.
Shepherds hastening from their pastures and three wise men arriving from the
east carrying symbolic gifts.
Or was it that way? The narratives in
Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels cannot be pushed together without
doing violence to both.
Of course, biblical scholars have long
raised serious doubts about the whole legend of the Nativity. It is story but not history, they say. Two of the four Gospels, Mark and John, make no
mention of it. In one of his letters written a decade or more before the
earliest Gospel of Mark was composed, the Apostle Paul didn’t say anything
except that Jesus “was born of woman” and “born under the law.”
Paul knew Jesus’ brother, James, but said nothing more about his parents. He seems
to have assumed that the birth was perfectly natural for any human being
then or now.
Progressive views have tried to turn
the Christmas story from doctrine to reality. Geza Vermes has written one of
the best studies of the event in his
The Nativity: History and Legend. (London, Penguin 2006). He presents the “virgin” birth as a totally human
event in the life of the Mary. He suggests that she may have been a child bride
who had not yet begun her menstrual cycles. So she was still a virgin in terms
of Judaism of that day.
John Shelby Spong
states unequivocally in his latest book, Re-Claiming
The Bible In A Non-Religious World (HarperCollins and HarperOne, 2011): “While no reputable scholar
today thinks of these stories as literal history, we do find some historical
links in the stories that we can use for dating purposes.” He cites King
Herod’s death as recorded in 4 BCE, so Jesus must have been born before that
for his birth to have been historical. Contrary to his usual counsel against
literalism, is that his attempt to make it history? He doesn’t mention that it was Saint Dionysius the Small who
established the year 1 as Anno Domini. That wasn’t until 625 AD/CE.
For
several hundred years after the Christian faith tradition began its spread from
Palestine to Rome and beyond, the Church did not mark Christmas at all. It
wasn’t an important feast on the Christian calendar. Now, like any other religious
holiday in the present secular and multicultural age, it is becoming less and
less important for most people.
The local congregation where I worship
is waiting to see if the traditional three Christmas Eve service will be well
attended this year. An online discussion about the beginning of Advent raised
serious concerns about the discouraging downer of the scriptures read during
the four Sundays of Advent before Christmas.
The question for all Christian
churches is whether we change our liturgical celebrations of Advent and
Christmas to match the advances of modern biblical scholarship or match the
massive impact of commercialism.
And yet ….. A colleague writing the
back page article in The United Church
Observer for December 2011 has told us to “stop looking for theological
loopholes and simply rejoice in the mind-exploding miracle of the birth of God in
the very human child of Bethlehem.”
Isn’t that what Christmas is about?
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