The War on Christmas

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.