Too Much Christmas???
I recently read a book entitled Christmas Messages which is a collection of Christmas addresses given by George W. Truett who served as pastor of the historic First Baptist Church of Dallas for 47 years (1897-1944). The little book presents addresses he gave between 1929 and 1943. If you know your American history you know this period covered The Great Depression of the 1930s and most of the years of WWII.
What I found encouraging in these messages was the consistent tenor of hope without too much presumption. Truett did not actually know the future, but he did know the Lord who did! People may have been struggling with making ends meet, and Christmas may not have had all the bells and whistles we have come to expect today but it was still about what it always had been about!
We have long heard warnings about the commercialization of Christmas. Truett even talks of that being a problem in the 1930s! How much more so today, 80 years later! Quite simply, I do not believe we will ever get away from the commercialism of this holiday/season. I was listening recently to John MacArthur and he was talking about how we have moved to a point where our greatest pitfall during this season is what he called “overindulgence.” Essentially people “feast” themselves on everything which pleases their flesh. We make jokes and songs about drinking too much eggnog at the office Christmas party, eating too much candy and cheese log, and spending way more money than we really should have. Have you noticed Christmas songs written in recent years have less and less to do with the actual meaning of Christmas, but more and more celebrate superfluous things like snow, and the other mystique of the season? Really, we have come to grasp for anything that produces a desired feeling. Television ads this time of year feature promotion of purchasing everything from automobiles to scratch tickets, enrollment in the Cake of the Month club to gift certificates to McDonald’s. Everyone, it seems, is after their piece of the financial pie.
The “incarnation” of Jesus and the celebration of it by the Roman Catholic Church in a once-per-year mass known as Christ-Mass became the origin for the holiday we now celebrate. We do not know, of course, when Christ was actually born. It is far more likely He was born sometime closer to spring, around the time we generally celebrate Easter. The holiday season has, in many regards, grown into a raving beast which very loosely holds on to any strains of its glorious past. There may not be anything we can do to stop it on the larger scale, however we can step back from the expected norm of overindulging ourselves in seemingly every way.
One of Truett’s points which stood out to me is that which is celebrated at Christmastime should be the focus of celebration throughout the entire year. The fact Jesus became a man to live among men and die for men is cause for celebration 365 days a year, not just on December 25th! Truett wrote in a time when people, by-and-large did not have any excess to deal with. They barely had enough to get by if they were so blessed, but he reminds them of where the focus should remain, in lean times or in prosperity. Recently on the local news, a family was interviewed in their living room and I watched the mother and father lament that, because of the tough economic times, they were not going to be able to take their annual trip to Disneyland for Christmas. Maybe it is time we took a few steps back and looked at our lives – what we have become. No people in the history of the world has ever had as much as we do. As I write, the economic situation in our nation and world is tedious. We are undergoing a long awaited “adjustment.” Maybe it is also time to reorient and refocus ourselves around what is really important. Not just at Christmas, but all throughout the year! We can never really have too much “Christmas,” however we are far too guilty of accepting substitutes for the real thing!
In Christ,
Pastor Allen Raynor