Merry Bogus Christmas

Anyone who’s ever read my blog during the Christmas season knows I consider it a bogus holiday.

Not totally bogus: Jesus was born: though almost-certainly not on the day we celebrate His birth.  Not that that's a big deal, or at all unusual.  Even as recent an event as July 2nd 1776, we celebrate on the 4th.

That God was born into the world in human flesh, and lived in this world among human beings, IS a truly big deal.  It's the most important event that ever happened, for the human race, and for our understanding of God . . . except when He willingly died an unjust human death to set human beings free from death, and sin.  Which was His reason for being born as a man.

In previous years, I've gone into the bogus history of Christmas in detail, at length.  That Christians of the first centuries didn't celebrate Christmas, for example: that Christian writers in those centuries ridiculed pagans for celebrating their gods' birthdays.

One of the major pagan "birthday" celebrations in Rome was for "Sol Invictus" ("the unconquerable Sun") on December 25th.  It also fell on the last day of Saturnalia, the great feast of the god Saturn: a period (which got longer, and more riotous, through the centuries) celebrated by giving gifts, and drinking, and decorating trees.

Both those Roman "holy-days" continued among pagans into the early years of Christianity's official status as Rome's religion.  It seems pretty clear that the invention of "Christ's Mass" in that same period was a deliberate attempt to give the people a Christian holy-day like the ones they were used to.  Even the Christianizing Emperors weren't brave enough to tell people the new religion did away with their favorite, most licentious, birthday party.

It seems significant that many of God's purifying moves for His Church since the 300s A.D. have taken direct aim at the pagan custom of Christmas.  Particularly significant for American Christians, because most of the reforming churches of our colonial ancestors considered the celebration of of Christmas (in the words of Puritan Governor William Bradford) "pagan mockery:"
 
The story of how the celebration of Christmas became resurgent, and dominant over Christianity's teaching against it, is well told in a biography of Charles Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas.  The title says it all.  Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" (which notably does not contain the name "Jesus," nor the title "Christ," except as an element of the words "Christian" and, especially, "Christmas") was the origin of modern Christmas: not Jesus' birth.

Many people of course have warm sentimental feelings about the Christmas season. That's obvious.  Good for them.  That is, however, not what Christmas is about, or what Christmas celebrates.  Personal sentiment has no place in validating Christian truth.

I can testify that God still speaks past, or around, the bogus sentimental religiosity of churches' "Christmas," to anyone who will listen for Him.  But I can also testify that the Christmas season is, for anyone who wants to listen to God and worship Him, the year's greatest season of Spiritual drought.  For the whole month of December (and sometimes longer), all the Church' thoughts and efforts are mostly...sometimes entirely...toward, and for, and about, the holiday.

This basic incompatibility of "Christmas" and Christianity is particularly well-illustrated this year by the churches in my area.  Several area churches (including my daughter's church, in a nearby area) have cancelled their Sunday services on the 25th...because that's Christmas day.

I don't say this to censure those folks.  In our cultural context (and our "Christian-culture" religious reinforcement of it), their decision is practical.  Many church-members will be traveling, or have a houseful of out-of-town family.  Opening all the Christmas presents takes up the whole morning.  Preparing Christmas dinner (especially for a large family) takes hours and hours of exhausting work.

It is nevertheless a telling example of core Christian purposes marginalized in favor of the purportedly-"religous" holiday.  Church-people like to chirp that "Jesus Is The Reason For The Season."  Get down to it, I have to doubt that's anything more than an empty slogan.  It's something of a real-life parable this year, that worshipping God is canceled because of Christmas.