In December preachers like to remind us that secular thinking is taking over Christmas.  I have struggles with a certain mythical figure, which will go unnamed.   A guy with a white beard has completely superceded our holiday.  This week I’ve pondered about how Christmas has always been a blend of the secular and the sacred. The fact that Jesus was not born on December 25 illustrates this point. We are not really sure of the date of his birth because he was born a peasant. Peasants were born and died and their lives were never recorded.  Even up to the present time in our world today, we are not meticulous about keeping up with the poorest of the poor.  It’s almost as if they don’t exist. But we know from certain things that we read in the two different stories of Jesus’ birth, one in Matthew and one in Luke, that Jesus was either born in the spring or in the fall. Different scholars debate about that because if there were shepherds out in the field by night, it would have been at those times of year, not in December.

So you ask, “Why is it that we celebrate in December?”  One of the reasons that Christianity was successful and grew as rapidly as it did in the first four centuries of its life was its amazing ability to simply adapt those cultures to the Christian message.   The Romans were extremely debaucherous, even more so on December 25^th.   The Pope figured out that if he would fix Jesus’ birthday on the 25^th during this pagan holiday, he could Christianize the Roman holiday.  The church has been trying to Christianize Christmas ever since without a whole lot of success. It’s still about debauchery, maybe not the Roman kind but still a form of debauchery.   From the very beginning of the celebration of Christmas the church tries to grapple with secular values and un-Christian ways of doing things.

Look at our Puritan ancestors.   We sometimes give our Puritan ancestors too much criticism.  We read them not against their time but against our times and we judge them more harshly than we should. We who love Christmas get upset when we think about the Puritans who forbid the celebration of Christmas because they did not approve of the way it was celebrated in England.  The English were doing debaucherous things just like the Romans, and the Puritans wanted no holiday that would mix such pagan practices with the Christian faith.  We may think the Puritans were extreme, but if you look at the England of the day and age in which the Puritans lived and saw the way that people were oppressed and the poor were mishandled and mistreated while rich people lived in lavish luxury, you may agree with them.   The Puritans were not afraid of making money.  They were part of the middle class that developed during that merchant period. But they believed that God should guide the way money was used to the benefit of all God’s people.

This morning I, like you, struggle about how much debauchery I want in my Christmas.   The buying of material goods for me and for others who have all that we need. The eating far more than I ought to and putting on more weight, knowing that in January I and millions of other Americans will begin the annual diet because of the debauchery of overeating. The frenzied pace of December--the parties and the “good times”.  With the Christian faith we always talk about taking things in moderation, and doing things at a reasonable pace. We all struggle with the secular versus the message of the season.

This week I meditated as I read Micah and looked at this painting by an American artist from the museum of fine art in Philadelphia. I love this picture because Mary looks much more like a human being than the kind of stylized versions that we’ve seen of her. As I reflect upon the text, I’m reminded of the  church’s views of Mary and the cross.  The church split between east and west soon after the Roman world was completely Christianized. It’s often been seen as a split between who was in power. As is true of all great rifts in human kind, there are much more subtle cultural differences between Western Europe and the eastern part of the Roman Empire. I’ve often thought of the Christian faith and how the East and West elements of the church have given it more balance. You don’t go into any Christian church that came from Western Europe without seeing a cross at the center, whether it’s a crucifix that we find in Catholic churches or the plain cross that we find in Protestant churches. It’s a legacy of how the Roman world saw the life of Jesus. When you step into an Orthodox Church there is not a cross at the center of that great labyrinth chancel area. But there is a statue or an icon of Mary holding Jesus in her lap. What is that all about? For the Eastern Church, it is not so much that Jesus is dead, but it is Jesus’ birth that marks that incredible thing of what God did in Jesus. God became one of us; God who was the creator and the most powerful One of all made himself weak so that we might be redeemed. God and Jesus come to know the subtleties of life.

The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for love, and a time for hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. There are times in life when there are times to gather stones and times to scatter them.  We know the rhythm of life too well.   The central message of Christmas is that a young woman has brought forth a child, and in that child we have come to know God and God has come to know us.  Two thousand years later as we struggle with that secular and that sacred part of Christmas in each of our lives, we are reminded that God has come among us and loved us and has not left us.. He still lives among us and renews us and calls us again for his love and his grace in this world.

Let’s bow our heads now for a word of prayer.