The Three 'Christmases'

In contemporary Australian experience there are actually three kinds of 'Christmas' celebration. In this short article I’d like to describe each of them, with a view to distinguishing a genuinely Christian way of doing Christmas.

1. Yuletide

The first kind is arguably the oldest, because it takes its inspiration from the pre-Christian midwinter festivals of the Germanic and Nordic peoples.  This festival, known in its Anglicised form as 'Yuletide', apparently culminated in a three-day celebration encompassing the winter solstice at which much ale was consumed, animal sacrifices were made and the blood of sacrifice sprinkled over representations of the gods as well as over their worshippers. The meat of the sacrificed animals became food for the feast. Toasts were dedicated to Odin, the king of the gods, to Njörðr and Freyr for good harvest, to dead ancestors, and to the chieftain who presided at the feast. Scholars have connected these events to the Wild Hunt led by Odin through the night sky to kill a sacred boar or stag, which signified the taking of life at midwinter which had the power to inaugurate the return of life with the oncoming spring. 

Contemporary neo-pagans are both reviving and creating Yuletide traditions which emphasise the cyclic nature of fertility in the natural world. They point out that many elements of contemporary 'Christmas' celebrations probably have their roots in paganism, including Santa Claus and his reindeer (Odin or Freyr on the Wild Hunt), Elves or other magic folk who give or seek gifts (symbols of the presence of magic or the 'other world' on midwinter's eve), Christmas trees (evergreen to signify the eternal power of life returning from death), mistletoe (the key ingredient in a druidic fertility drink), the roasting of a pig (a vestige of the tradition of fertility sacrifices), and the prolific use of the colours red (signifying sacrificial blood) and white (representing midwinter).

2. Christmastide

At least as old, perhaps, is the Christian festival of Christmastide, which celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ to Mary in Bethlehem as the Son of God and saviour of all the world.  Although never as important as Eastertide in the Christian imagination, there is clear evidence that a festival surrounding Christ's birth was beginning to take shape in the ancient Near East as early as the 3rd century CE.  Contrary to much public opinion, there is no evidence that the early candidates for Christ's birthday (December 25 and January 6) were chosen to coincide with pagan midwinter festivals in either the south or the north of Europe.  More likely is Andrew McGowan's proposal that since ancient Christians believed that Christ was conceived on the same day as his death (roughly March 25) he must therefore have been born on December 25.  

Between the 4th and 12th centuries, celebrations of the Nativity of Christ alternated between December 25 and January 6th. The latter date was celebrated in the Eastern church as the Epiphany (or 'manifestation') of Christ as Son and Messiah of God at his baptism.  Eventually, in the Western rite, Christmastide became a season that spanned the days between the eve of January 25 (when Luke's birth narrative about Angels and shepherds is featured) and the feast of the Epiphany (which, in the Western church, became the day when Matthew's birth narrative about Herod and the Magi from the East was ritualised as the first manifestation of Christ to all non-Jewish people).  Christians have long celebrated the season with joyful liturgies of word, carol and sacrament occurring on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, the Sundays of Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany (whenever it variously occurs). The one note of sobriety within the season is usually reserved for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec 27 or 28) which commemorates the infanticide visited by Herod on the children of Bethlehem at hearing that a Messiah had been born.  Contemporary churches in the ecumenical tradition often connect this event with the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, and therefore with the plight of refugees fleeing oppression and persecution in the modern world.

The period now known as 'Advent', beginning from the 4th Sunday before the Feast of the Nativity, probably began with a desire to prepare for Christmas in a way that paralleled the long-established practice of preparing for Easter baptisms with forty days of prayer, fasting, exorcism and theological reflection. In this spirit, the primary theme of Advent eventually became not the 'first' coming of Christ at Bethlehem, but Christian hopes for a 'second' coming of Christ at the end of the ages, when all that is evil and unjust in the world will finally be put to rights.  Advent therefore encourages Christians to consider their experience of hope - the 'not yet' of faithful expectation - and asks them what God would call them to do by way of prayerful self-transformation and common human service as they wait for the grace and justice of God to be revealed in all its surprising fulness. 

The origin of gift-giving at Christmastide is unclear. Some surmise that the practise was taken over from pagan mid-winter festivals when offerings of food were given to the gods or else to vengeful ancestors in order to guarantee their blessing for the year to come.  A more likely origin is strictly theological: gifts are given to the poor and marginalised in imitation of God's gift of Christ to all who are poor, broken or despised by the world. This theology is certainly at play in the story of St Nicholas of Myrna, whose feast day is celebration on December 6.  St Nicholas is said to have distributed alms to the poor and desperate of his diocese anonymously, under the cover of night.  The migration of this tradition to the English-speaking world also seem to have effected a migration of St Nicholas' gift-giving to the Eve of the Nativity, perhaps under the influence of some of the pagan traditions we note above about Odin or Freyr. Certainly, the modern Santa Claus myth created by American advertisers owes more to pagan than Christian sources.

3. Consumertide

Christmas as it is celebrated in contemporary Australia certainly owes more to the re-weaving of traditional devotional practices by capitalism than it does to anything that is more genuinely pagan or Christian.  Capitalism is like a magpie that seeks to feather its own nest by stealing the treasures of others. And 'Christmas' has become the most prominent example of this. A consumer festival that begins in early November and continues through to the early weeks of January, this 'Christmas' evokes traditional religious practices and desires, but transforms and channels them for its own overriding purpose: to produce profits.

The new 'Christmas' temples are neither pagan nor Christian but vast shopping centres like that at Chadstone in Victoria.  If you visit these temples you are strongly encouraged to participate in the worship of Capital.  The sound-systems spew forth sentimental 'carols' that evoke traditional religious feeling, but redirect that feeling toward buying.  Carefully prepared 'Christmas' pantomimes are filled with elves, fairies and Father Christmases who have the power to grant one's every wish. Instead of encouraging worshippers to surrender themselves or their livelihoods to Christ or to those most beloved of Christ (the poor and marginalised) like St Nichlas of Myrna, the rituals associated with Santa Claus encourage consumers to buy gifts solely because either they or their loved-ones desire them. For Christmas is now almost exclusively about 'family' - the pilgrimage to far-flung family, spending time with family, spending money on family, feeding one’s family - and all to the most hideous levels of excess.  Obscenely, to my mind, the multi-billion-dollar industry that provides Christmas wrappings, tree ornaments and decorations, is run almost entirely off the back of cheap- child- or slave-labour in vast manufacturing compounds found in China, India, Mexico and Bangladesh.  

The consumertide which is the modern Australian 'Christmas' allows no room for those spiritual disciplines associated with Advent, disciplines like prayer, waiting, and fasting - all of which are about NOT getting or having what you most desire. Indeed, what these disciplines traditionally inspired and encouraged was the transformation of human desire into the more holy desire of God, thereby bringing light, love and hope to those in most need of such things. Consequently, Advent as Advent has been completely obliterated.  Advent has become simply another part of the consumertide that is 'Christmas', a season of feasting, buying, gift-giving, and sentimental storytelling about the importance of enriching one’s own family. It is no longer about a disciplined waiting for the grace of God made known in Jesus. And this is increasingly the case not only in the many 'evangelical' protestant churches that have most always followed the deepest impulses of secularism, but also in the ecumenical churches that are supposedly committed to the disciplines preserved in the observance of the liturgical year. Even in these churches, Christmas very often arrives in the first or second weeks of Advent, with parties and carol-singing and nativity festivals as far as the eye can see.

Conclusion

It seems to me that Christians are faced with a choice at Advent and Christmastide. Either to be carried along by the tide of neopagan and consumerist desire or else to choose the disciplines preserved in the genuinely Christian liturgical year. For these disciplines, if we listen and participate in them fully, teach us who the God of love is, what we are worth in God's estimation, and what the world could be if we would only give ourselves over to God's desire, rather than our own.  And that, I submit, would make all the difference in the world.

Christmas: the gift of peace

Texts:  Isaiah 62.6-12; Psalm 97; Luke 2.1-20

A moment ago we heard the story of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, and how the angels sang ‘glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favours’.  But what is this peace that the angels sing about?  And what has it to do with the birth of this particular child?

Is the peace of the angel’s song the ‘peace’ promised by superpowers like China or the United States, the peace you get if you are big enough and strong enough to cower everyone else into submission?  Is the peace of the angel’s song the peace promised by a good many infamous leaders in this past century, that specifically fascist kind of peace which says ‘Don’t be afraid.  I know best, trust me.  I’m taking away your freedoms in order to protect you from our enemies?’  I doubt it very much.  The child born in Bethlehem grew up to say things like ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ And ‘If your enemy strikes you on one cheek, offer him the other as well.’  And as to who one might trust with one’s life or liberty, he said: ‘Do not call anyone on earth teacher.  The Christ is your only teacher.  Put your faith in God alone.’

Well then.  Is the peace of the angel’s song like the ‘peace of mind’ you apparently get if your house and contents, your car, your health, your mortgage, and even your life are fully and comprehensively insured against disaster?  I suspect not.  The child born in Bethlehem was not, apparently, insured in this way.   Indeed, his whole life might be described as totally un-insurable!  First he becomes a religious nutter, then he neglects his responsibility to contribute to the family’s economic fortunes, then he goes all anti-globalisation, preaching against the powers that be.  Finally he is executed by the Roman State as a dangerous criminal.  As far as I am aware, neither he nor his family received any compensation for any of it.  And I doubt that a modern insurance company would have paid them out either.

So then, perhaps the peace of the angel’s song is more like that ‘inner peace’ promised by the ‘new’ spiritualities and therapies?  You know, the calm you are supposed to feel by getting away to a deserted beach or mountainside, where the factions and fractions of our tumultuous world cannot intrude?  Or that ‘peace’ you are supposed to receive, in Buddhism, when you rid yourself of every desire?  I doubt it very much.  Now don’t get me wrong.  The child born in Bethlehem was very often alone in prayer or meditation.  But when he was, it seems that the tumult of his world went with him, so that he wrestled inwardly with a deep sense of care and responsibility for the lost and broken all around him.  He wrestled also with his own desire, praying earnestly that he might be delivered from the temptation to seek the safe and easy way through life.  But that should not be taken to mean that he was a good Buddhist.  For instead of doing away with desire altogether, as the Buddha taught, Jesus immersed himself in the desire of another, that one he called his ‘Father’, the God of Israel.  His whole life, it seems, was filled with the strongest kind of longing, a groaning and a pining towards a world in which the poor were no longer poor and the rich no longer rich.

Well then, is the peace of the angel’s song finally a certain kind of political peace, a democratic tolerance of all our many differences?  You could certainly get that impression if your only exposure to Christianity was the many ‘Carols by Candlelight’ celebrations that have colonised the countryside in the past couple of weeks.  You know their message well, I’m sure: ‘We’re all different, we have different aims in life.  Some of us are less well off than others.  But let’s not bicker.  Live and let live.  Let’s just get on with each other.’  Is this the peace promised by the angels?  Again, I doubt it very much.  When the child of Bethlehem was grown, he got himself into all sorts of trouble because he was certainly not very tolerant.  He was intolerant towards poverty.  He was intolerant towards the indifference of the rich and the powerful towards their suffering neighbours.  He was intolerant towards the racism of his fellow-Jews towards non-Jews.  He was intolerant of the way his society relegated women and children to the bottom of the food-chain.  But deeply imbedded in all these intolerances was the intolerance that motivated them all:  his refusal to accept that human beings can find a real and genuine peace apart from a relationship with God.

For it is this peace—the peace that God gives to all who acknowledge, deep down in their hearts, that there is no peace apart from the loving favour of God—that the angels announced at the birth of Christ.  The peace given by Christ is also the peace given by God.  It is not a peace that can be generated by either prayer or politics, insofar as these attempt to create something out of the raw material of the human heart.  For the whole of human history bears witness against us.  We cannot make a peace that lasts.  Even now, we are at war, and many of these wars are being waged against phantoms of our own devising, demons hidden in our own souls that have been projected onto the faces of others so that we will never have to acknowledge our own failings. 

And for all our fantastic progress in science and research, for all our privileged economic fortunes, can we really claim to be reconciled, to be at peace with our neighbours and ourselves?  I doubt it very much.  There is considerable research now to show that the more prosperous we become the more possessive, and then we become 'unhappy', in proportionate measure.  I have spoken about these things often in this church.  I shall not go on with all that again this morning, except to say this:  that peace, a peace that lasts, seems to elude us.  And Christians are not immune from his experience.  Insofar as we have been seduced by modernity, Christians are at least at troubled as everyone else.

The peace that Christ gives cannot be given by the world or anything in the world.  It cannot be generated by either prayer or politics.  The peace that Christ gives is, as Titus would have it, a gracious gift: the gift of a deep and profound communion with God that transforms every dimension of one’s life, whether in body, soul or community.  The peace of Christ is something that, as the apostle Paul wrote, transcends our understanding.  The peace of Christ is not, therefore, something you can make a project of.  It is not a feeling you can induce by thinking happy or positive thoughts.  It is a state that comes upon you slowly, wheedling its way through your defences, making its way into your heart like a transfusion of life-giving blood from another’s body.  It is a gift.  It is pure communion.  It is a deep down sense and conviction that because God is for us, nothing can prevail against us:  not other people, not our own misguided desire, not the present, nor the future, not anything in all creation.  It is a peace that comes to us as we look and listen for God’s word of favour in the story and event of Jesus, who is called the Christ.

May the peace of Christ wheedle its way into your heart and your community today.

This homily was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mt Waverley, on the Feast of the Nativity in 2007.

The Fast that Satiates our Hunger

Texts: Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11

This morning I want to talk about a spiritual practice that, like most spiritual practices in modernity, is rarely practised anymore.  Fasting: going without food. Allowing oneself to experience genuine hunger.

Fasting used to be a very important part of Christian discipleship, especially during the season of the church year that began on Wednesday, the season of Lent.  ‘Lent’, which means ‘spring’ (somewhat anachronistically for us in the southern hemisphere) has served, since its inception in the second century, a dual purpose: (1) to prepare the newly converted for their baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Christ; and (2) to renew the baptised, all the people of God, in the life and discipline of that same Easter faith.  The practice of fasting was seen as an essential part of this purpose because it taught people the discipline of letting the old desires go—the desires that belonged to the old, pre-Christian, way of life—in order to embrace a radically new set of desires, the desires planted in our hearts by the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  Here a clear connection was being drawn between desire and hunger.  The church reasoned that if one could learn to discipline the body’s basic desire for food and drink then one might also learn to discipline the wayward desires of the heart, that these might come to more accurately reflect the love of God in Jesus Christ.

With that history in mind, it is perhaps easy to see why fasting is no longer seen as a particularly relevant or beneficial thing to do, even by many a good Christian.  Modern wisdom has become suspicious, after all, about any practice that would seem to limit or deny what the body (or the soul) feels it ‘needs’. According to the prevailing common-sense, self-denial is a bad thing, an ancient evil, a form of repression which turns perfectly happy, actualized, assertive and confident people into miserable door-mats for others to wipe their feet upon.  What is wrong, after all, with getting what you want?  Greed may not be good, but don’t we all have a right to be happy, and to follow whatever path we choose in order to obtain that happiness?  What is so wrong with eating, or drinking, or sex, if it feeds one’s inner hungers?  What is so wrong with gaining the world through financial or social 'success' if it enlarges one’s happiness?  If I were to name an anthem that sums up all this modern mythologizing, it may well be the Queen song, ‘I want it all’, which seeks to re-define the traditional notion of love so that it is no longer about putting limits on one’s own wants or needs for the sake of the other person, but about enlisting the other person -  indeed all things -  to the cause of one’s own insatiable desire.

Of course, as well as accepting and absorbing the popular mythology, many contemporary Christians have found additional reasons not to fast. Baptists, for example, often reject the practise as too 'Catholic', too much to do with working one’s way to salvation and not enough to do with being saved by God’s grace alone.  The irony here is that many of the first Baptists were very diligent fasters.  Not because they accepted the supposedly Roman Catholic notion of working one’s way to God through good works and self-discipline, but because, for them, fasting was a way to make room in one’s life for a different kind of feasting, a feasting upon the word of God.  One cannot attend to God or God’s word, which is the only source of life, they argued, unless one also, and at the same time, seeks to put aside the many false gods which clamour for our attention.  Like the god of one’s stomach, for example.  In this, ironically, the early Baptists were closer to both Catholic and biblical teaching than they are to a great many of the moderns who bear their name.

For what does the Bible actually teach us about hunger, desire, and fasting?  Well, there’s the story from Genesis, for a start, the story about Adam and Eve eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil.  Note, here, that in contrast to many contemporary assumptions about the story, the problem is not that Adam and Eve gave in to desire as such (for God had told them that they could eat and drink pretty much anything else they desired from the garden in which they lived), but that they desired more than was actually good for them.  It might just be possible, you see—despite what the prevailing wisdom says—that desire and need are often rather different.  It might be possible, in fact, that some of the things we desire are really rather poisonous.  Unfortunately, a great many poisons do not advertise their nature as a matter of course.  They can look and taste rather heavenly! That in no way mitigates a poison's essential function and identity, however: ultimately to do little else but injure, deceive or destroy whomever would take it to one's lips or heart.   

That is why I often think of the serpent (who first introduced the ludicrous idea that poison might actually be good for you) as the very first advertising executive!  Just as the serpent argued that the fruit of the tree would not kill Adam and Eve, but make them like God, so modern advertising tries to convince us that bigger and shinier houses, cars, toys, drinks, gadgets and television programmes will make us the masters of our own destinies and fulfil our every hunger.  In truth, of course, they cannot and they do not.  More usually, these many shiny things make us miserable because we don’t actually need them: they do not fill the hole that is a non-possessive relationship with God, neighbour and creation.  For that is really all we need, according to Scripture: relationships of love in which there is nothing to possess, because everything we need has already been given us.  The truth is that all this other stuff, this consuming of things, does little else than distract us from what is really real: God, and who were are in God’s embrace.

Paul deepens the point in his reflection on this story in the letter to the Romans.  While sin and death came into the world via Adam’s desire for something he had never desired before - through his trust in the serpent’s lie - life and relationship come into the world through the simple and foundational reality of the gift, or grace.  I mean, think about it for just one second.  God has already given us all that we need in creation, and in the revelation that God, from eternity, desires nothing other than to know and love us.  The gift of Jesus Christ, says Paul, is first of all the good news that this is still the case, in spite of the fact that we have woven for ourselves so many other desires, desires for things that succeed only to maim or destroy human life.  Yet, in Christ, there is the further gift of forgiveness.  In Christ God teaches us that even where we have harmed and maimed and killed for the sake of our desire, even where we have forsaken the gifts or God for the sake of so many chimera without any substance or gravity whatsoever, God is willing to forgive.  To go searching for us in the wilderness of our sin, to take us again to Godself and give us the gift of life and of healing.  If only we will let go of our poisonous addictions!

The temptations of Jesus, as they are enumerated in Matthew’s account, make this point yet again, but in another way.  According to this story, the practise of fasting is indeed about the denial of self, but the self that is being denied is the self that buys into the lies of the devil.  For the self that desires to (1) turn the whole world, as if by magic, into something that I can consume; or (2) turn God into someone who is only there to confirm and serve my desire; or (3) turn every other being into my slave, engaged only to confirm and serve my desire; is ultimately a false self that has tragically retreated from the fulness of a world already given us in grace and love by God.  It is a self that indeed dreams of becoming like a god, but certainly not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.  For the Father of Jesus is a God who invites and pleads and remonstrates with his creation, but never bullies or coerces or forces us accept his path.  The god we would become, on the other hand - by all our misplaced faith in demonic lies - is a god who sucks our loved ones, the true God and, indeed, the whole world, into despotic slavery.

Therefore, when Jesus resists such lies, when he resists the temptations of the devil, he is not harming his essential self, the self that is God’s and belongs to God’s way of love.  It is the other self he is harming: the accumulating, consuming, magical self, the inner demon who would make all the world its food and its slave.  It is the self that Thomas Merton rightly called ‘the false self’, ‘false’ because it is built upon a lie.

As followers of Jesus, we too are called to resist such a self, and to do so because what we desire most of all is not a house built of lies on a foundation of sand, but the firm and real house that is God’s welcoming love.  This home is a gift of God, given in creation itself, and given again in Jesus Christ, who comes to us anew each day in the stories of Scripture, the sacrament of bread and wine, the call of the neighbour and the witness of the faithful.  In this perspective, to fast from all that is a lie in order to listen to what is true, to fast from all that would poison in order to drink from the waters of life, is not really a fast at all.  It is to quieten one's heart and its false desires, in order to listen for the one word, the one gift, that is able to save us from ourselves. It is to make room in one's longing for the immeasurable gift of God’s friendship, that is alone finally able to satisfy our deepest hunger and quench our deepest thirst.

Glory be to God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as in the beginning, so now, and for ever.  Amen.