Here's the sermon I gave on Dec. 15, 2013, on the so-called war on Christmas. There really is such a war, but it's not what you've probably been told it is.
The War on
Christmas
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor
December 15, 2013
Scripture: Luke
2:8-14; Luke 1:46-55
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations
of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our
redeemer. Amen.
We’ve all heard about it. There’s a war on Christmas. Didn’t you know? Christmas is under siege! Christmas is being assaulted. Christmas is in danger of falling to its
secular enemies! It’s awful! People tell us to say Happy Holidays rather
than Merry Christmas! People write Xmas
rather than Christmas so they don’t have to say the word Christ! The forces of secular liberalism don’t want
America to celebrate Christmas. They
don’t want us to celebrate Christmas because they hate Jesus and they hate
Christians. The forces of Christ must
rally to defend the celebration of his birth.
If we don’t, our ancient and sacred faith is doomed. There’s a war on Christmas. To arms, everyone!
Have you heard that kind of
nonsense spewed by people who believe it, or who at least want you to believe
it? I have, and it is all utter and
complete garbage. Those two aspects of
it that we hear condemned all the time, Happy Holidays and Xmas, are actually
quite proper. Happy Holidays simply
recognizes that we are a multi-religious society as well as being one in which a
great many people aren’t religious at all.
How would you feel if everyone went around wishing you Happy Hanukah or
Happy Ramadan when you aren’t Jewish or Muslim?
Well, that’s how Jews and Muslims feel when people wish them Merry
Christmas. And Xmas? That’s in fact quite Christian. The X in Xmas is actually the Greek letter
chi, and Christians have used chi, the first letter of the Greek word Christos
from which our word Christ comes, to designate Christ virtually from the
beginning of the faith. So those false
prophets on Fox News and elsewhere who proclaim that Happy Holidays and Xmas
constitute a war on Christmas are just flat wrong.
They’re wrong that those things
constitute a war on Christmas, but here’s the thing. As Marcus Borg has recently said in a blog
post of his, there actually is a war on Christmas going on. It’s not a war on superficial things like
Happy Holidays and Xmas, it’s a war on what Christmas really means. It is a war on who Jesus was and is. Now, I’m not much taken with the war language
here. I use it only because it has
become so common among us; but it is nonetheless true that there are at least
two things going on among us today that change and even tear down what
Christmas actually should mean to us.
One of them has to do with our society and our secular culture. The other has to do with Christianity itself. The first is the rampant secularization of
Christmas. The other is what
Christianity has done to Jesus. Let me
explain.
We all know about the way that
Christmas has gotten secularized.
Christmas among us isn’t so much about celebrating the birth of Christ
any more. It’s mostly about giving gifts. Now, there’s nothing wrong with giving gifts,
or at least there isn’t if it is done in a spirit of love. But gift giving has become an obsession, a
mania even, among us. People get
trampled on “Black Friday” as others force their way ahead of them to get a
bargain price on a flat screen TV or the latest toy rage. Ads tells us, especially us men, over and
over again that if we don’t give the woman in our lives a diamond or a $50,000
car we don’t really love her. We buy our
children and grandchildren so many toys that Christmas overwhelms them, and
what should be an occasion of joy becomes an occasion for an exhausted
tantrum. And it all has nothing to do
with the birth of Christ. Yes, the magi
give three symbolic gifts to Jesus in Matthew’s birth story, but giving gifts
didn’t become part of the celebration of Christmas for well over one thousand
years after Jesus’ birth. Christmas has
come to be a whole lot more about helping retailers end the year in the black
than it is about celebrating the birth of Christ. That, my friends, is a true abasement of Christmas. Fox News won’t talk about it a lot because
saying it doesn’t help their corporate sponsors and wealthy supporters, but it
is a true secularization of Christmas that diverts us from the holiday’s true
meaning.
The church has diverted us from
the holiday’s true meaning too. For me,
this part of the real war on Christmas is more subtle, more hidden, and much
more dangerous than is our society’s secularization of the holiday. The church has waged a war on Christmas
through who it has turned Jesus into.
We’ve all heard it. Many of us
grew up with it. Why was Jesus
born? For the last seventeen hundred
years the church has answered: To die as
an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
That’s it. Just that. The reason we celebrate Christmas, we’ve been
told, is because at Christmas our Savior is born; and that means the one is
born who will die so that we can get to heaven.
We’re told: This man had to be
born so he could die—for us. Now, I
think Jesus did die for us; but I don’t think it was as an atoning sacrifice
for sin, and I don’t think dying was why he was born. The church has changed Jesus into something
he wasn’t, and isn’t; and that changes the meaning of Christmas for us. So if we don’t celebrate the birth of Jesus
because he’s going to die for us in a few months, at least a few months on the
church’s calendar, why do we celebrate Christmas? Who is this whose birth we’re
celebrating? You may have different
answers to those questions. Here are at
least a good part of mine.
We celebrate the birth of Jesus
because in and through him we know God.
Jesus came to give the world a new and different vision of who God is, of
how God relates to us and to all of creation, and of what God wants from
us. He came to give us that new vision
in how he lived his life, what he did, what he taught, and even—or perhaps
especially—how he died. Obviously
there’s a whole lot more to say about why Jesus matters than I can say in one
short sermon, but if I had to summarize what Jesus was all about I would say
that he was about a call to transformation.
He called us to transform ourselves, and he called us to transform our
world. You might well think that the
birth of someone whose significance lies in a call to transformation is not
worth celebrating. After all,
transformation isn’t usually a lot of fun.
It isn’t easy. It may involve
gain, but it also almost certainly involves loss, at least for those of us who
are relatively well off by the world’s standards. Well, so be it. Whether we like it or not, Jesus is all about
calling us to transformation.
The transformation to which he
calls us starts with us, with each individual person. Violent revolutionaries in Jesus’ time wanted
to transform the world through violence.
Jesus, the ultimate prophet of nonviolence, wanted us to transform the
world by transforming ourselves. He
called us out of our selfishness. He
called us out of our self-centeredness.
I called us to give up our individual need to survive so that we could
truly live out of ourselves for others and for God’s world just as he did. The Christian tradition has waged war on that
aspect of Jesus’ meaning for at least the last seventeen hundred years. It has told us Jesus is about our own
personal salvation. It has told us that
he’s not about transformation in this life, he’s about how we get to heaven in
the next one. Well, the truth is that in
the Gospels Jesus says very little about getting to heaven in the next life,
but he says a great deal about transformation in this life. If Christmas is about the birth of a Savior
who calls us to radical transformation in this life, and it is, then Christ’s
own church has waged war on Christmas for a very, very long time.
But as I just said, Jesus was
also about transformation of the world.
That’s what his talk of the Kingdom of God was all about. The Kingdom of God isn’t a heaven up in the
sky somewhere. It is the world
transformed to correspond to God’s will and ways. It is a world transformed from greedy
materialism to selfless sharing. It is a
world transformed from the ways of violence to the ways of peace. It is a world transformed from injustice and
oppression into a world where all are equal and all are free. Jesus calls us to that transformation too,
and that transformation starts with the transformation of our hearts. Jesus wants to change the world one
transformed person at a time, and he calls us to that work of
transformation. His church has waged war
on that part of Jesus’ meaning too. It
has said don’t worry so much about poverty, hunger, illness, oppression, and
injustice in this life; worry about how you get to heaven in the next. That message betrays Jesus, and if Christmas
is about the birth of the one who calls us to transformation, and it is, then
that message is a war on Christmas being waged within Christ’s own church.
So in ten days we will celebrate
Christ’s birth. Let me suggest to you
today that before we do we need to figure out why we’re doing it. As Christians why we’re doing it isn’t, or at
least shouldn’t be, about presents. It
isn’t about a big Christmas dinner that we enjoy while others go hungry. It isn’t even about get-togethers with
family, as good and meaningful as those can be.
It is about recognizing who this person whose birth we celebrate was and
is. It is about recognizing his meaning
for us. That meaning is salvation to be
sure, but it is salvation through transformation. Transformation of our selves, and through
transformation of ourselves transformation of the world. In ten days, will we recognize that that’s
what we’re commemorating? I hope
so. If we do then the real war on
Christmas will have failed, and we can truly celebrate the birth of the one we
call Lord and Savior. May it be so. Amen.
