Happy Holidays

I wonder if we have any real understanding of persecution in this country? A couple of weeks ago I heard someone say something about Christmas in church and followed up with “Isn’t it nice to be able to talk about Christmas? Outside of the church we can’t talk about Christmas, everything we hear is about the Holidays.” Have we run out of things to complain about? Where can you go to escape Christmas? Yet even when our culture is most saturated by a Christian holiday some Christian find a way to proclaim our victim status once again. Who the hell thinks they can steal our materialistic, consumeristic surfeit and get away with it? I’ve always loved Christmas and there is a lot of nostalgia involved that just makes me feel good. This weekend I saw video of people getting trampled outside a Wal-Mart and I read stories about other incidents on “Black Friday” and the good feelings started to erode. I’ve always known that this holiday has been perverted and it’s true meaning destroyed but I couldn’t help but sit there and think, “What have we done?” My first reaction was to tell Jenn that there would be no gift giving in our home this year. I don’t think that is necessarily the right way to go on this issue but a huge reduction in gift giving and distancing us from what this has become seems appropriate. Christians should be rejoicing that “Christmas” is being phased out for the more PC “Holidays” because what Christmas has become has nothing to do with the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. God bless us with the understanding and experience of persecution so that we might have a deeper understanding of what it means to be disciples. I am sure it is redundant for some of you who will read this but it is a challenge, to myself and others, to live in the reality that the kingdom has come through the incarnate Christ. When we embrace that reality it always takes us to the cross and we see that by dying we find life.

“Jesus therefore took up his own cross. He had come to see it, too, in deeply symbolic terms: symbolic, now, not merely of Roman oppression, but of the way of love and peace which he had commended so vigorously, the way of defeat which he had announced as the way of victory. Unlike his actions in the Temple and the upper room, the cross was a symbol not of praxis but of passivity, not of action but of passion. It was to become the symbol of victory, but not the victory of Caesar, nor of those who would oppose Caesar with Caesar’s methods. It was to become the symbol, because it would be the means, of the victory of God”—from Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright