Christmas and Culture

We got our first question via e-mail today!  Thanks to the person who wrote.  We'll always keep questions anonymous so you can ask whatever you'd like.  Most of the time I'll edit it down for clarity as well.  But if you can live with that, fire off a question to the inbox and we'll talk about it.

Pastor Dave,
I love and hate Christmas at the same time. How do you find the balance between the religious holiday and the secular celebration?

Click through for our discussion!

This feeling is pretty common nowadays.  Christmas is, and always has been, a joyous celebration.  Not many images in our faith are more powerful or lovely than the Baby Jesus in the manger.  The music, the candles, family gathering...it's hard to imagine anything more beautiful.  Plus we all remember the excitement of being kids and waiting for The Day.  Those of us who have our own kids get to re-live that experience a little through them.  Gifts and trees and watching Rudolph bring special seasoning to the season.

At the same time the whole package can get overwhelming.  Sometimes we put unreasonable expectations on the day, as if it will be a perfect occasion where the family ills of the other 364 days will disappear never to return, banished by the ideal expression of love (available for $89.99 at your local Wal-Mart!)  Even the expectation that we be happy may be too much.  Christmas is often a melancholy experience, especially if you've experienced a tough childhood or if you're missing loved ones.  Then there's the shopping.  Retailers depend on this season to make their years.  Shopping has become almost a patriotic duty.  The more you spend the better you are!  If you don't get just the right gift for your loved ones the whole holiday will be a failure.  Sales start earlier every year.  Deals are brayed louder.  Stores get more crowded, lines become interminable, and competition becomes fiercer.  Sometimes you just scratch your head and ask, "What in the world is going on here?"  There's no room at the inn for expectant Mary and her family because it's stuffed with presents and ad banners and row upon row of grumpy people with shopping carts.

Some respond to this by trying to draw a clear line between the various expressions of the holiday, sorting them into sacred and secular, labeling the former as acceptable and the latter the enemy.  One look at my yard right now will tell you that I'm not in this camp.  Anyone who claims they can find an expression of faith that is divorced from their culture is lying.  The environment in which we grow up affects our perception of everything, including God.  That's not a bad thing as long as we realize the strengths and weaknesses of our outlook.  It becomes dangerous when we don't admit that we have an outlook in the first place, when we claim that we are apart from culture and have pure, unadulterated godliness.  In reality we haven't left our culture behind.  We've just turned a blind eye to it.  In refusing to admit that it exists, in claiming that we know the True God apart from it, all we've done is elevate our now-hidden cultural biases to Godlike status.  We're still influenced by our culture, we just don't admit it's our culture anymore.  We call it God instead.

This is part of why I've always found the "We hate Santa, no gifts for you!" approach disingenuous.  In addition to making your children very, very sorry they were born into a family of faith (compared to those pagan kids who get nifty presents), you're making a claim about Christmas culture that the rest of your life can't stand up to.  OK...you've eliminated gifts from Christmas but do you still live in that nice house?  Do you still have two cars in your garage?  Got a job, a bank account, a retirement fund?  Do you shop at retail stores for your daily bread and household needs?  Then how exactly have you gotten rid of your culture?  You're just as much enmeshed in it as everyone else.  The only difference is that you have a grumpy, grandstanding Christmas when everybody else is trying to be merry.

Even if you succeeded in eliminating all traces of your culture--say by moving to a cave somewhere, putting on a shapeless sack, re-learning your language, and never speaking to anyone again--what good would it do?  With whom would your faith connect?  God commands us to love him and love our neighbors.  How in the world can we love our neighbors without the common connection that culture--even imperfect culture--provides? If culture is evil, it's a necessary one.  We can't reach other without it.


The trick, then, to Christmas or any other situation where faith and culture collide, is to have the culture serve the faith rather than the faith serving the culture.  There's no way to do this perfectly, so don't even try.  But in general you want to use cultural expressions to convey your love and care--lifting out their best aspects--without making that love and care dependent on those expressions.

Dr. Seuss is our model here.  Naturally the Whos in Whoville expressed their Christmas joy through decorations and presents and feasts.  How else would you celebrate such a wondrous event?  But when the Grinch stole all of the trappings of Christmas, both the Whos and he discovered that enduring love which was at the heart of the day.  It could not be stolen.  It was freely shared.  All of the trees and baubles and even the carved Roast Beast were just reflections of that central truth.

Our yard is full of Christmas lights because years ago, when Careen first left her family and moved to Iowa alone with a new husband, lit up trees made her smile in an otherwise difficult holiday time.  The collection has expanded far beyond that now but I still know it works because the little kids always walk by with smiles and their older counterparts hit their brakes and drive by more slowly when the displays are on.  It makes people happy.  What better expression of God's love could there be in the season than that?  It's certainly a cultural expression.  But it's a cultural expression of a deeper spiritual truth that I couldn't convey as clearly were I to preach a hundred sermons on it.  Lights and yard fixtures tell the story in a way unique to this time and place.

This is the goal with all of our cultural expressions of Christmas.  We teach that the day includes gifts without being about gifts alone.  We teach that Santa can still come to our youngest members and bring smiles to their faces because he's showing the love and generosity that Jesus taught us all in the first place.  It's also an opportunity to teach that Jesus loves us even when we're on the "bad list" and that God blesses all his children enormously even when Santa appears to favor children in fancy houses over children in smaller ones.  We pray before we enjoy the feast, we get together with family to heal rather than grab and judge, we take time to do service to strangers and those outside of our normal circle of relations.  None of that good gets done if we sit back and grump about how awful Christmas has become.  That's not our role as Christian people.

Getting back to the original question, I juggle the secular and sacred aspects of the holiday by remembering to fill all those secular rituals with the love that the sacred has given me.

• When I start getting impatient and angry waiting at a red light or in a checkout line when shopping I know I am starting to go astray.  I take a deep breath and remember I need to be here for the sake of goodness or not be here at all!  Then I smile and wave at my fellow drivers or line-waiters, let somebody else go in front of me, say a gracious word or two to that poor checkout person.  
• When purchasing things I don't think of the gift first but the person.  Stores always try to sell you things.  Instead I delight in thinking of people.  I know Derek.  I have heard him and delighted in him in the past year.  Because I know him so intimately I understand what things will delight him.  I try to find some of those things at a price I can afford and ignore the temptation of everything else.  I do this not so he will be impressed with something material, but so he will know that I have paid attention to who he is and that I love him.
• I don't cook birds or hams, I cook for the people I love.  Giving them something warm and wonderful and being together with them is far better than executing the perfect recipe.
• It may sound self-serving considering I'm the pastor, but it's true anyway.  The Christmas Eve service is really the center of the holiday for me.  We do such a wonderful job with the carol liturgy and the candles.  It's easy to fall in love with the beauty of the moment through that service...and that's exactly what we intend.  If I've had that story and that experience, the rest of the holiday falls into place.  Detached from it the other things take on too much importance and Christmas really does hinge on the perfect gift or a well-moistened slice of bird.
• I also take the time to smile and bid peace to everyone I pass during the season...a simple, quiet act that reminds me and the world what we're here for.

There are dozens more ways to infuse our culture with sacred significance.  I'm sure you have your own.  Whatever they are, practice and uplift them in this season and see if the more crass secular aspects (and the tension they cause) don't fade into a barely-audible buzz.

If all else fails, remember that Christmas is just one event.  Despite the heavy weight placed on it in our society, we are Easter people, Epiphany people, Lent people, Advent people as well.  Celebrate and find your grounding in those seasons and services as well and Christmas will fall into its natural place.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)