Dragging Christmas to the Curb

A man in our neighborhood used to drag his tree down to the street right after his midday feast and just before his afternoon of viewing football.

I thought of this man’s action recently when I read of author Jan Leong's rush to put everything about Christmas in the trash or in the attic as soon as possible:

“Like me, our neighbors had dragged Christmas to the curb.”

Mrs. Leong stuffed her garbage can as full as possible and thought she had — with assistance from her teenage son — successfully dragged Christmas away. But then, her son came dragging a dying potted tree someone had deposited across the street.

Mother and son battled verbally till she recalled he had something of a green thumb. Her energy at low ebb, she agreed to let him keep his newfound treasure —  stipulating that he had to clean up dying needles as they fell from the tree.

The way we “do Christmas,” we feel depleted, physically and emotionally, not to mention financially, and want to forget all the headaches that go with the season. 

But if we can rid ourselves of Christmas by dragging it to the curb, what is Christmas anyway? 

“We’re going to have Christmas early because it’s Sarah’s year to be with her in-laws.”

“Christmas will be late. We have to wait till Sam finishes his tour in Afghanistan.”

“We just can’t do Christmas this year, since Mother died last week.

These explanations equate Christmas with family gatherings, lavish meals, presents, and generally good times together.  Maybe even better with a little snow.

British author Edward Rutherfurd’s historically based novel London describes a holiday celebration in the seventh century that offers us perspectives on Christmas.  

Great excitement mounts as they anticipate lighting the Yule log. They feast on venison and beef and other meats. They enjoy apples, pears, mulberries and other summer fruit they had preserved. They drink morat, from fermented mulberries.

The people in the story expect visitors to come from a distance. These  holiday guests have to be fed and be bedded down on pallets of straw:

These seventh-century scenes from Rutherfurd’s novel have a familiar ring to them.  We associate the Yule log with Christmas.  And any family these days who has prepared for Christmas visitors can recognize the stir of activity in getting food ready and arranging places for their company to sleep. 

But the scene in Rutherfurd’s book is not a Christmas celebration at all.  It is a Yule celebration. 

 Christianity was new to England in the seventh century. These people are pagans. They burn the Yule log when the days grow shorter as a sign of hope for the longer days of spring.

Most of these Londoners in the seventh century have never heard of Jesus.

In modern terms:

You can wrap a mountain of gifts that reach to the ceiling.

You can have decorations that win prizes in the Home Christmas Tour.

You can write enough Christmas cards to fill the nearest post office.

You can cook enough pies and cakes and turkeys to fill a restaurant.

Nothing wrong with any of those things, but if that’s all your Christmas, you probably should drag Christmas to the curb — and the sooner the better.

For most of my life, the 12 Days of Christmas meant simply the partridge in a pear tree along with 12 lords leaping, seven swans swimming, three French hens, and the like. 

Then, not many years ago, I became aware of the church year or liturgical year that encourages us to extend our focus on the birth of Jesus for 12 days instead of one, leading on to the arrival of the Wise Men and also Jesus’s baptism, then on to other events in our Lord's life throughout the year.

Long-time Methodist pastor Ellsworth Kalas reminds us how we tiptoe around what Christmas really is about.  He said:

God is love. “That’s what Christmas is all about.” 

God loved us and sent His Son.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God, for Christ’s sake has forgiven you.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

Whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.  “That’s what Christmas is all about.”

With those thoughts and actions, you will not hurry to drag Christmas to the curb.

Mrs. Leong looked back some 30 years after she tried to keep her teenage son from saving a dying pine tree. When she wrote her story, she had no desire to drag Christmas to the curb. And -- by the way -- her son’s pine tree was still alive.

Jan Leong, “Evergreen,” All is Calm, All is Bright, ed. Cheryl Kirking, Grand Rapids, MI.: Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2001, 2008.

Home for Christmas

Adapted from my Christmas Memories from Seven to Seventy.

I’ll be home for Christmas If only in my dreams. – Kim Gannon and Walter Kent

The call to come home is as old as the human race. In the holiday season, that voice reverberates through the echo chambers of our souls.

Early in life, I learned I was expected to be home for Christmas. So I was with my parents every Christmas for 34 years. In those 34 years, I had graduated from high school, college, and seminary; I had worked full-time as a minister, college professor and writer-editor; I had taken unto myself a wife; I had lived in Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.

Even after I became a father, for as long as my parents were alive, a strong inner voice silently yelled, “Let’s go to Texas!”  Sometimes that call still comes, though Daddy and Mother and three of our siblings have gone to that Eternal Home, leaving only three brothers.

When Johnny Mathis gives out with “I’ll be home for Christmas; you can count on me,” in my mind’s eye and in my heart of hearts, I am once again part of a happy throng of six brothers and sisters, spouses, and children, overflowing one of the modest houses or apartments Mother and Daddy called home over the years.

I have missed a great deal over the decades by not being around my brothers and sisters and their spouses and oncoming generations. Now, our sons have followed my example as they live and work in New York and Chicago, far from their parents. They have their own individual patterns for the holidays, and I say, “God bless them for it.”

People often ask, “Don’t you wish your sons would come home for Christmas?” I usually just smile or grimace, but I think to myself: “I would love to see them, but they are at home. They’re

away from us, but they have their homes in Chicago and New York.  They have their lives. They have their responsibilities. It isn’t easy to travel long distances, especially with children.”

In “The House of Christmas,” G. K. Chesterton described the call to come home this way:

For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun,

And they lay their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done.

Those lines suggest that every human being is away from home.

The Christmas story is about One who left his Father’s home, who was born in a manger, who in adulthood had no place to lay his head, who was buried in someone else’s tomb, who identified his family as larger than his mother and birth brothers and sisters, a family “born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will  of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

So, whether we are with our human families this Christmas or spending the time alone, we need to listen for the call of God, welcoming us to the warmth of his family. Jesus came to earth to call all his brothers and sisters back to his Father’s house.

A Three-Inch-Tall Jesus?

When I was about twelve years old, the Sears, Roebuck store in Sweetwater featured a real-live Santa Claus who was just three inches tall.

His tiny house sat on a table. Through the picture window, you could see the little man Sears called Kute Kris Kringle.  He sat by the fireplace in his easy chair in his living room with greenery, ornaments, and packages under the tree.

This Tom Thumb-sized Santa would get up and walk around the room, look out, and wave at us.

Most exciting: He had a tiny telephone on a table by his chair, connected with a full-sized phone on the table near his house.  You could pick up the receiver and tell him what to bring you.

Parents would get their kiddos to wave at the Jolly Old Elf.  If the little folks were brave, they could pick up the phone and tell him their hearts’ desires.

Because I had parted company with Old Saint Nick a few years earlier, I tried to figure how Sears, Roebuck managed to get the real-live man to look so small.

Television was still a dream in West Texas in the mid-1940s, so I doubted that Sears had a television studio set up in some remote corner of the store.

I guessed they used the principle of looking through the “wrong end” of a telescope.

One day, I picked up the phone to talk to Santa.  That was OK with him .  .  .  the first time.  When I left the area and came back and called him several more times, the big man behind the three-inch illusion strongly suggested that I find something else to occupy my attention and leave the phone line open for younger boys and girls.

As I think back to Sears shrinking Santa Claus to a manageable size, it occurs to me that we do the same thing with Jesus.  A three-inch tall Savior is much more convenient than the full-sized One on the pages of the New Testament.

The creche on a table in our family room is a bit larger than the Sears house where Santa lived, but the Babe in the table-top cradle may be just about three inches long.  Tree ornaments with cattle stall and figures in it sometimes are reduced to no more than three inches.  So we find ways to keep the whole scene small enough not to worry us.  Then, too, when the season is over, we can pack them all up and get them out of our way without great inconvenience. 

We see other ways --more serious ways -- of keeping Jesus small, beyond confining Him to the creche at Christmas.

Some people shrink Jesus by saying He was a great teacher.  Nothing more. 

Others bring Jesus down to size by denying He performed miracles. When He appeared to be walking on the water, they say, the disciples’ boat was at the shore, so Jesus simply took a few steps over to the vessel.  Or when he supposedly fed several thousand people with a few pieces of bread and fish, here’s what they say really happened: He shamed the crowd into admitting they had brought food with them for the day’s outing, so they took out their hidden food and shared with one another  —  turning it into an outdoor covered-dish luncheon.

With miraculous cures, the Jesus shrinkers say He was a great psychologist who used the power of suggestion to help people recover from psychosomatic ailments.

When it comes to the New Testament’s greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus, some modern interpreters say his followers wanted so badly for Him to come back, they believed He actually was raised from the dead.  But it makes little sense to suggest daydreams or wishful thinking could have caused the small, insignificant movement to catch fire and grow, even in the face of persecution, imprisonment, and death.  Likewise, if the resurrection was a delusion, how do we explain millions across the centuries whose lives have been transformed morally and spiritually through a fairy tale?  The course of Christianity history cannot be so handily dismissed.     

Some simply dismiss the entire Bible out of hand or rewrite it to suit themselves.  President Thomas Jefferson published his own version of the Gospels: basically Jesus’ teachings but none of the miracles.  The Jefferson Bible ends with Jesus being buried.

As we consider these and other ways people try to shrink Jesus to fit their own specifications, we acknowledge the miracles in the Bible are not based on scientific evidence.   It takes the eye of faith to see Jesus as more than a great teacher, more than a healer of diseases of the mind, but as the One who rose from the dead and brings everlasting life.  

Faith and science need not be seen as mortal enemies.  Many scientists are devout Christians who believe God used the evolutionary process to bring about life on earth, over millions of years, beginning with the simplest one-celled animals and developing all the way to human beings.   These scientists do not believe Jesus must be shrunk in size in order for us to see the validity of the scientific process. 

Science is based on measurable evidence that can be evaluated under the microscope or in laboratory or field experiments. Thus, Christian claims regarding the person of Jesus and the wonders ascribed for Him in the New Testament cannot be examined scientifically.  But this does not mean they did not happen.

We are blessed by countless wonders of science.  In our technological era, we rely on science every day, at every turn, for our health, jobs, transportation, communication, and entertainment.  So followers of Jesus can ill afford to dismiss science.  Neither should scientists attempt to dismiss the realm of faith which lies beyond scientific proof.

Someone offered this distinction: Science explains HOW it all happened, and religion explains WHO  made it happen.  They need not be at war.

Albert Einstein, often considered one of the most brilliant persons who ever lived, said he did not believe in a personal God and referred to himself as agnostic, but he often spoke kindly to people of faith.

I have fewer problems with avowed atheists or agnostics than with professing Christians who seek to whittle Jesus down to size. I have heard internationally famous Bible professors state categorically that certain incidents in the Bible simply did not happen, could not have happened.  They offer no evidence to support these assertions.

Several years ago, a group of scholars formed “the Jesus Seminar,” with the self-assigned task of analyzing all the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Four Gospels to determine which are authentic and which are not.  By their self-declared authority, they grouped the sayings as authentic, questionable, or definitely not from Jesus.  They declared the Fourth Gospel contains no bona fide sayings of Jesus.   This approach doesn’t even leave Jesus three inches tall.

To my thinking, the most significant whittling down of Jesus is described in what we might call Paul's Christmas Story in chapter 2 of Philippians.  He describes Jesus as being in the form of God but leaving that behind for our sakes.  Rather, Jesus did His own whittling as He “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).  

Charles Wesley, one of Methodism’s founding brothers, in his song, “And Can It Be,” described Jesus’s willingness to lay aside His heavenly perks: 

He left His Father’s throne above
So free, so infinite His grace—
Emptied Himself of all but love,
And bled for Adam’s helpless race.^*

But the Jesus in the Bible Story did not remain in the grave and did not remain in the whittled-down form.  Instead, God the Father restored Him to His full stature:  “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).

No three-inch Jesus here!

^* Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be,” The Baptist Hymnal.  Nashville, Tenn.: Convention Press, 1991, p. 147.