Christmas Traditions

When you gather around the Christmas tree or participate in Christmas eve service, you're taking part in traditions that stretch back thousands of years — long before Christianity entered the mix.            

Pagan, or non-Christian, traditions show up in this beloved winter holiday, a consequence of early church leaders melding Jesus' nativity celebration with pre-existing midwinter festivals. Since then, Christmas traditions have warped over time, arriving at their current state a little more than a century ago.   

As Christians spread their religion into Europe in the first centuries A.D., they ran into people living by a variety of local and regional religious creeds. Early Christians wanted to convert pagans, but they were also fascinated by their traditions. Perhaps that's why pagan traditions remained even as Christianity took hold. The Christmas tree is a 17th-century German invention, but it clearly derives from the pagan practice of bringing greenery indoors to decorate in midwinter. The modern Santa Claus is a direct descendent of England's Father Christmas, who was not originally a gift-giver .    

The Church was slow to embrace Christmas. Despite the spread of Christianity, Midwinter festivals did not become Christmas for hundreds of years. The Bible gives no reference to when Jesus was born.  With no Biblical directive to do so and no mention in the Gospels of the correct date, it wasn't until the fourth century that church leaders in Rome embraced the holiday. At that time, many people had turned to a belief the Church found heretical: that Jesus had never existed as a man, but as a sort of spiritual entity .If you want to show that Jesus was a real human being just like every other human being, not just somebody who appeared like a hologram, then what better way to think of him being born in a normal, humble human way than to celebrate his birth?    Midwinter festivals, with their pagan roots, were already widely celebrated, “O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born, Christ should be born," one Cyprian text read.

But if the Catholic Church gradually came to embrace Christmas, the Protestant Reformation gave the holiday a good knock on the chin. In the 16th century, Christmas became a casualty of this church schism, with reformist-minded Protestants considering it little better than paganism, The Puritans hated the holiday This likely had something to do with the raucous, rowdy and sometimes bawdy fashion in which Christmas was celebrated .In England under Oliver Cromwell, Christmas and other saints' days  were banned, and in New England it was illegal to celebrate Christmas for about 25 years in the 1600s.  

Gifts are a new and surprisingly controversy tradition .While gift-giving may seem inextricably tied to Christmas, it used to be that people looked forward to opening presents on New Year's Day.   They were a blessing for people to make them feel good as the year ends. It wasn't until the Victorian era of the 1800s that gift-giving shifted to Christmas. According to the Royal Collection, Queen Victoria's children got Christmas Eve gifts in 1850, including a sword and armor.                                                                                                  

There are many different traditions and theories as to why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th.     

A very early Christian tradition said that the day when Mary was told that she would have a very special baby - Jesus, (called the Annunciation) was on March 25th - and it's still celebrated today on the 25th March. Nine months after the 25th March is the 25th December!  March 25th was also the day some early Christians thought the world had been made, and also the day that Jesus died when he was an adult.    

The date of March 25th was chosen because they thought that Jesus was conceived and had died on the same day of the year.                                                 

Some people also think that December 25th might have also been chosen for Christmas because the Winter Solstice and the ancient pagan Roman midwinter festivals called 'Saturnalia' and 'Dies Natalis Solis Invicti' took place in December around this date - so it was a timewhen people already celebrated many things.        

Christmas  has emerged from many traditions, but Its meaning has only deepened for Christians.

         

The Gift of Judas

Many infamous persons appear in the pages of the Bible, including in the New Testament, but perhaps the most infamous one, is the man who “betrayed” Jesus to the Roman and Jewish authorities; a betrayal which led to Jesus crucifixion. The word “Judas” is not only the name of perhaps the most infamous person in the New Testament, but has become an accusatory synonym for a turncoat or snitch, one who betrays his friends for selfish reasons. So why refer to Judas as a ”gift?”

 
Judas was one of Jesus most trusted disciples. How do we know this? Because Jesus gave to Judas the trusted responsibility of being the group’s treasurer; the one who kept the money that Jesus & his disciples used to live on while traveling the countryside. However, Judas is rarely mentioned until his rise to infamy at the end of Jesus ministry. And this action tells us much about the private, inner life of Judas.

By the time Jesus chose his inner core of 12 disciples, he was already famous. Thousands of people came out to see and hear him. Being Jesus “disciple,” one of his chosen insiders, had to be a great and widely recognized honor. However honor and public recognition always contain the danger of hubris, of pride overcoming humility. And we know that all of Jesus’s disciples were infected with the human need for recognition, and even fought over being ”first in his kingdom.”

 
In the gospel stories - all of which should be understood as teachings, metaphors for human living, not just as literal history - Judas’s betrayal of Jesus is a tragic story of human hubris taking over one’s life. It makes plain to us of the danger of living one’s life without awareness of one’s inner need for recognition; for notice of one’s accomplishments; for being rewarded for one’s cleverness and achievement.

Judas’s was offered 50 pieces of silver to be a participant in achieving the plans of the highest authorities of the nation and it played right into Judas’s need for recognition and achievement.

 
Judas is a major Biblical example of our own betrayal of our highest values, our best selves, by the hidden drive of our inner self, our suppressed dark need for recognition & for achievement. We all need and secretly desire public acknowledgement of our worth by “important“ people even to the betrayal of our own deepest values.

The Judas story is a “gift” to our awakening, to our becoming aware that a deep part of ourselves is willing to betray the “Christ” within us in exchange for our ego’s need for public recognition. This story is, for all Christians, “the gift of Judas..”

Reflection on Aging

As I approach Eighty-Eight years of age, I find myself less preoccupied and involved in the concerns and problems of the world than I was in my earlier years. Instead, I’m living in a quieter, more reflective mood as I engage the world of today. I am aware, with a equal measure of sadness and hope, that as my grandchildren ask me to perform their wedding services, that this world & its problems and needs is largely in their hands now.

This is true to some degree of many of the aging members of our churches as we witness many of our siblings and friends dying and whose reality for us is held only in our memories and hearts. Death is not a distant, nearly out of sight reality as it used to be.

As people of faith and hope we begin to take time – years, days, hours and yes, even minutes - more seriously, to examine, value and seek to fill each moment with thoughtful attention, to be more awake, more aware of the precious gifts of life and love in each moment of time.

Wendell Berry, the American poet, essayist and author of 40 books has written this bit of wisdom about aging in his poem, “Awake at Night:”

Late in the night I pay

the unrest I owe

to the life that has never lived

and cannot live now.

What the world could be

is my good dream

and my agony when, dreaming it.

I lie awake and turn

and look into the dark.

I think of a luxury

in the sturdiness and grace

of necessary things, not

in frivolity. That would heal

the earth, and heal men.

But the end, too, is part

of the pattern, the last

labor of the heart:

to learn to lie still,

one with the earth again,

and let the world go.

Patriotism vs Nationalism

         Patriotism and Nationalism: these two terms express related but distinguishable human attitudes and behaviors which have existed in human societies far back into antiquity. 

         Nationalism is defined by Webster, as “identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.”

      Patriotism, on the other hand, is defined as “love of one’s country; or devotion to the welfare of one’s country.”

      The tribal societies of antiquity, including those described in the Bible, were clearly of the “nationalist” variety. The Old Testament prophets railed against the “nationalism” of Israel out of a patriotism or love for their country. They understood, along with Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the New Testament, that to be “patriotic” was to demonstrate the love of God for all people. To see themselves as God’s “chosen” people was not a sign of privilege, but of responsibility. They were chosen to demonstrate what it meant to be God’s people, to be “Patriotic”, that is, to love & be proud of one’s country precisely because it kept high ethical & value standards toward “every nation (people) under heaven.” 

      So today we can properly call our country “Christian” only if it sets high standards of value & behavior – love & justice - for all persons of every race and tribe (“nation”) under heaven.

      This places a high calling on all Americans who identify themselves as “Christian,” to express their patriotism through acts of love and justice; of valuing all persons and demanding that their government do likewise. Only then can we claim to be patriots but not nationalists, and thus, true followers of Jesus & the prophets.   

The Song of the Heart

 

         There is a voice inside the body

         There is a voice and a music,

         A throbbing  four-chambered pear

         That wants to be heard, that sits

         Alone by the river, with its mandolin

         And its torn coat, and sings

         For whomever will listen

         A song no one wants to hear.

 

         But sometimes, lost,

         On the way to somewhere significant,

         A man in a long coat, carrying

         A briefcase, wanders into the forest.

         He hears the voice and the mandolin,

         He sees the thrush and the dandelion,

         And he feels the mist rise over the river,

 

         And his life is never the same.

         For this having been lost -

         For having strayed from the path of his routine,

         For no good reason..”

 

 “ A man lost by a river”  in Days We Would Rather know,  by Michael Blumenthal