What If Christ Doesn’t Want Any Part of Our Christmas?

As the Christmas season approaches, so too does the seemingly inevitable onslaught of talking heads ginning up concern about some pervasive conspiracy to take Christ out of Christmas—the “war on Christmas” as it has become known in infotainment-speak. It’s a story-line that has no doubt been very profitable for those who promote it, but frankly, I think many of us are pretty weary of it.

Perhaps it’s what we should expect in a society that seems to worship wealth, success, and the unbridled accumulation of stuff above almost anything else. So-called news organizations are less and less encumbered by devotion to facts and more and more intent on plumbing the depths of fear and uncertainty in an effort to submerge us in their revenue stream. It feels more like water-boarding to me, allowing us to come up for air just long enough to catch our breath and listen to a few more ominous warnings about assaults “they” are launching on the things we hold dear before inundating us in a flood of generally deceptive, manipulative appeals to consume, consume, and consume some more.

Notably, however, it’s often not the idolatry of stuff that we’re being warned about. Instead, we’re told we must be incensed when market-savvy business owners instruct their employees to greet cash-laden customers with “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Never mind that some of those cash-laden customers happen to be Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus, or atheists for that matter; we should still be outraged. We should be outraged, those talking heads insist, that a business person whose primary ambition is to entice customers to hand over their dollars eschews a very religion-specific greeting in favor of a greeting less likely to give non-Christian customers a reason to think twice about letting go of those dollars.

Frankly, that has never stopped me from replying with a hearty, “Merry Christmas,” and to date, I haven’t been beaten, berated, jailed, or even refused service for doing so. Of course, all I’m seeking from the business person is an honest sale of a reliable product at a fair price, so his or her religious background really doesn’t figure in to the transaction.

Let’s face it, the birth of Christ has been recast into big business opportunities in the United States. The 2014 holiday season generated something north of $600 billion in retail sales. Six hundred billion dollars. Many businesses, large and small, realize between 20% and 40% of their annual sales while we wait expectantly for the Savior. It’s not unreasonable, I think, to speculate that without Christmas, our entire economy could collapse. That doesn’t sound to me like the world Christ envisioned when he told his disciples to leave everything behind to follow him.

If there’s really a war on Christmas, whoever launched it appears to be losing. Badly. Christmas the retail bonanza has a firm upper hand on things, it appears. The war business in general, on the other hand, seems to be alive and well, and might sustain us should Christmas ever disappear…

I think those of us who lament the absence of Christ from Christmas may be talking about something else, though… Perhaps the real issue is that we’ve lost sight of what Advent and Christmas really mean. Maybe we’ve come to worry more about non-Christians who prefer not to bend to our wishes than we do about celebrating the arrival of the one who came to save us from our idolatry of stuff.

As I see it, if Christ is the reason for Christmas, then we ought to be Christ to those around us—and especially to those who aren’t even able to participate in the annual spend-fest. That $600 billion that changes hands during the season? According to some estimates, poverty in the United States could be eliminated for about one-third that amount… Yes, it would involve a greater focus on assistance programs that some are fond of labeling “socialism”, but I don’t recall the Christmas story being rooted in “capitalism” either.

The other $400 billion? Well, how about using it to extend that anti-poverty effort beyond our national boundaries? I suspect we could build a lot of clean water wells in Africa, as an example, for a fraction of that money. We could educate people in how to grow their own food and provide them the tools they need to do so. We might develop new sources of energy, taking the increasingly unbearable strain off the earth we were given to protect. There may indeed be better ways of spending our dollars this Christmas than giving Uncle George another tie that he’ll never wear.

We’re not likely to actually give up our Christmas purchasing, though. And maybe that’s OK, as long as we remember that not once does the Bible mention the pursuit of profit in recounting the Christmas story. And maybe it’s OK as long as we remember that Christ most likely wouldn’t want any part of what Christmas has become for many these days. There’s a significant distance between Bethlehem and Wall Street and I feel certain that keeping Christ in Christmas is not a primary goal on that hallowed thoroughfare.

It should be a primary goal of ours, though, and there are ways of achieving that goal without ad campaigns and storefront placards. It just takes quiet, unassuming effort to transform lives—the kind of quiet, unassuming effort that Emily Mahoney tells us about in the cover story of The Cumberland Presbyterian this month. Without fanfare and without seeking recognition, Ms. Mahoney, through the B.R.I.G.H.T. Lights program, is on a mission to help girls and young women grow in their faith and to become all that God created them to be.

We also have a little Christmas recollection from Rev. Dr. Thomas Campbell’s childhood—a lesson from, well, let’s say “a while ago” in which he learned how easy it sometimes is to turn others into outcasts, but how quickly and thoroughly Jesus turns outcasts into children of God.

The current issue of The Cumberland Presbyterian is the last one for 2015, and with it the editorial staff would like to wish all our readers a warm and wonderful Thanksgiving, a hopeful season of preparation for the Savior, and a joyful Christmas.