Title: Why Celebrate Christmas?
Text: Joshua 4:4-7, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Romans 14:5-6
Time: December 25th, 2011
Today is Christmas and millions around the world are remembering the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. It’s a unique Sunday because Christmas falls on a Sunday. Some large churches have canceled services, while most are having the regular Sunday service, only maybe an abbreviated version, in order to let families visit and be together today. As we gather today for Christmas church let’s remember the reason why we celebrate Christmas. Not all Christians have deliberately celebrated the birth of Jesus with a special holiday. After all, if you remember, the Puritans – those first Christian settlers to North America – didn’t formally celebrate the Christmas season. They abstained from it for spiritual purposes, believe it or not. What was their problem with Christmas? To understand their logic you have to understand the scene in Europe at the time. Puritans were called “puritans” because they sought a pure form of biblical Christianity without all the traditional trappings the established church brought to the Christian faith. In other words, they were reformers of the Christian faith who felt it was important to limit Christianity to only what the Bible specifically taught, nothing more. In Europe at the time most of Christianity was operating under a state church system, meaning, that each country had it’s own official state Christian church. For example, in England there was the Anglican Church. In Spain, there was the Roman Catholic. In Norway, Sweden and other Northern European countries, Lutheranism was the official state church. And these state churches controlled the public expression of Christianity, including how Christmas was celebrated. The Puritans rejected these ideas. For them, Christmas was a time, yes, to remember the birth of the Savior Jesus Christ, but in a simple, modest way. The feast days and holiday celebrations of the established churches had gotten out of hand, out of control in their revelry and indulgence. Now what true Christian today can’t sympathize with our Puritan forefathers in their criticism of overdoing Christmas celebrations? Don’t we see this happening all the time today, although in a new, modern way? The overly commercialization of Christmas, the extra secular trappings constantly added year-after-year, the strong link between Christmas gift-giving and materialism and consumerism, the emphasis on celebrating the celebration rather than the reason for the season, Jesus. Yes, if our Puritan forerunners were here today they’d probably vote all the more to pass on Christmas because of what it has become today, as well as their original reasons. But as Christians today, we must ask the question anew, “Is the condition of the modern celebration of Christmas so bad that we totally abstain from the holiday altogether, like the Puritans?” In answering this question, I conclude that the sad state of the Christmas holiday season, as bad as it is and as bad as it’s getting, still doesn’t give us reason for doing away with all of it. We are free to celebrate Christmas in any way we choose today, so we aren’t forced into one, established Christian or church expression that the Puritans faced. We are free to emphasize any aspect of Christmas that aligns with our biblical Christian convictions. But even though we are free to celebrate Christmas according to the biblical emphasis, that doesn’t mean we aren’t led astray by our mostly secular, pagan culture – we can be led astray and we often are led astray because of its strong influence today, especially with television. So we need to listen to the Puritans, even though we decide against their radical reaction to culture’s excessive holiday celebrations. Let’s look at a few reasons why we should celebrate Christmas using a number of passages from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. (more…)
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