Everyone knows how the Christmas story goes. As Stanley Hudson vehemently asserted in the most recent episode of The Office (8.10 Christmas Wishes) regarding the sensitivity to celebrate everything but Christmas during the Holidays: I want Christmas! Just give me plain-baby-Jesus-lying-in-a-manger Christmas! When our culture boils down the Christmas event it looks like this: baby Jesus in a manger. We’ve seen live nativity scenes and some of us have small-scale versions of it around our homes. Luke 2 is on the...
We’re Getting Christmas Wrong Over the past few Christmases, I’m noticing an uptick in blog posts and essays about how Christians are “getting Christmas wrong,” that our old quaint stories about Jesus being born in an animal stable are historically implausible, and that our hymns and advent traditions are being “spoiled” by eminent historians who are at last able to redirect our wrong-headed traditions by breaking in new shafts of light from the historical insights...
Last week we celebrated Christmas, and later this week we’ll be celebrating Epiphany. Although you wouldn’t know it from the way that Christmas is typically celebrated in America – beginning sometime in November and culminating on December 25th – Christmas is a 12 day celebration (hence the famous song). Christmas (in the West) officially ends with the start of Epiphany on January 6th. What is Epiphany? This is the day in which the church celebrates...
This week, a woman at my church faces the harrowing decision between two Christmases. On the one hand, she could join a few friends and the son from which she has been estranged, risking the possibility of running into the guy who things “didn’t work out with.” It would be too uncomfortable for her to ask the hostess whether this man has RSVP-ed one way or the other. On the other hand, she could join the just-this-month widowed...
Enough for him whom cherubim, Worship night and day, A breastful of milk, And a mangerful of hay; Enough for him whom angels Fall down before, The ox and ass and camel, Which adore (A Christmas Carol, Christina Rossetti) It’s hard to imagine the King of the universe, the Word of God through which everything has been made, being content with a stomach full of milk, laying in a manger of hay. For the rest of humanity,...
O come! O come! Emmanuel! And ransom captive Israel; That mourns in lonely exile here, Until the Son of God appear. Advent is a time of mournful waiting. Participants in this season undergo a theatrical embodiment of the struggles of the people of God. In this drama, the Church relives, in a sense, a time in history in which the Messiah had not yet visited his people. We participate in such a drama in order...
As a scholar of the decades preceding the Great Outage of 2059, I am always intrigued when a “paper” document of such tremendous historical and cultural influence surfaces from the clutter of the past. Rumors of the cultic devotion attributed to pagan deity Santa Claus have circulated through academic circles for years. However, it wasn’t until my habitually clumsy and inordinately inarticulate graduate student (whose name is not even worth mentioning in this prestigious platform),...
For those who don’t know, I am getting married in about 30 days from now. The prospect of this fills me with such joy, primarily because my wife-to-be is my best friend and someone I choose not to live without. There will be so many practical benefits to our marriage: Cutting commute time in half, functionally saving up to thirty hours a month; less sleep; more sleep; building a home of our own. Yet, I...
I appreciate the season of Advent – not just for the joy of Christmas parties, decorations, carols, eggnog, gift-giving and receiving, and celebrating the holiday with family and friends, but also for the longing and anticipation that comes with the Advent season. I’m grateful being reminded that the joy of Christmas and the reality of Christ’s incarnation only happened after Israel waited and anticipated for hundreds of years for the Messiah to come. Even in...
This year, my wife and I had the pleasure of participating in the Christmas Eve services for the first time at our new church in Berkeley. We were originally planning on attending just one service, until one the pastors asked me if I was willing to be crowd control for the Family Service. I was hesitant to commit to another service, but I couldn’t help but wonder what was happening that needed crowd control. Were...
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