Dearest Ren Family,
Merry Christmas!
Have you noticed in so many stores now they won’t say, “Merry Christmas.” If you are lucky you’ll get a, “Have a happy holiday.” But I’ve been noticing that the most common farewell from the store is just, “Have a nice day.” It’s strange, right? It’s as if people are pretending Christmas doesn’t exist. It’s a sort of unconscious movement to undermine what was the single greatest moment in all of human history—the birth of Christ!
I was thinking the other day of how crazy the world went when we sent a man to the moon. When millions of people around the world watched on their little TV sets as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon on July 20th 1969—the planet erupted with joy! What a moment it was!
But how much greater of a moment it was when God came to earth in the form of a newborn baby !!! No wonder all of heaven exploded into praise.
Luke 2:13-14
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”
There are reasons why our society is getting less and less comfortable with the idea of Christmas. I don’t mean that the holiday season is in jeopardy of fading. Not at all. People make a lot of money in December. People buy more and drink more. People love to party, and kids love getting presents. People even love all the lights and decorations. They love the music! And the thousands of low budget Hallmark-style “Christmas” movies. People love to eat. No, none of that is going away anytime soon. But what I think many people would love to be done with is, well, Jesus. It seems that Jesus is making people uncomfortable at Christmastime.
This is all part of the sad trend to push God away in this generation. Christianity is in serious decline. Many people who grew up Christian no longer identify as Christian. Perhaps worse, churches who were thoroughly biblical just a couple decades ago now only accept the parts of the Bible that fit in with popular society’s ideas. We are on path to becoming another post-Christian society like so many of the European nations. New England, especially, is feeling less and less Christian. Again, I know a lot of people (maybe 50%?) claim to be Christian or Catholic. But it seems like there are fewer and fewer people who are serious followers of Jesus.
By the way, I’m not mad at people who don’t say, “Merry Christmas!” after I just bought something at their shop. It just makes me sad. To be fair, some shop owners may, in fact, be Christians who celebrate Christmas fully. But they choose to say, “Happy Holidays!” to be sensitive and inclusive. I guess we can appreciate that. Maybe they feel like saying, “Merry Christmas” to someone who is Muslim or Jewish or Atheist would be offensive. I can understand that. After all, we don’t live in a Christian nation (we were never a Christian nation). America is a pluralistic society where all people are free to worship however they want. But it’s hard not to feel sad that something has been lost along the way. Take a drive through New England and you’ll see that in the center of almost every town there is a historic church. Because, once upon a time, the Church played a central role in society. New England is home to some of the greatest Christian revivals the world has ever seen! Now, however, the Church is pushed to the margins and is even considered unnecessary to human flourishing.
In some ways, being a post-Christian nation is worse than not being Christian at all. The difference is that the post-Christian society has heard about Christ. They know the story: Jesus was born 2000 years ago. He was God. He came to die for the sins of the world. And those who believe in him shall never die but have everlasting life. Blah blah blah. It’s old news to them. It’s a dead fairy tale. It’s a stupid story that unenlightened people are stupid enough to believe. It’s just another manmade way to explain the world. It’s empty. The post-Christian individual has heard it all before—and they aren’t buying it. They are utterly biased against it. It has almost become dead to them. Some post-Christians may even find themselves in a church this Christmas, dragged in by a family member. But it won’t touch them. They’ve already decided that they are way too smart to be sucked into an outdated religion for fanatics and losers. They’ll hear the gospel on Christmas, but it’ll sound to them like the lo-fi chicken squeaks of the teachers in an episode of Charlie Brown.
Sad.
But not everyone has closed their heart. There are still many people, even in New England, who believe that the one who was born in a manger in Bethlehem 2000 years ago was and is the Savior of the World. That he is the creator of the world and the one who holds all things together (Col 1). That this newborn baby, called Jesus Christ, has forever changed the world. Christ opened the way for humans, who are all born at enmity with God, to become the friends of God! Christ came as the great mediator to reconcile God and people. He came to atone for the sin of the world! Sure, the Christmas narrative in Holy Writ is pretty outrageous to believe. But the fact is that there are over 2 billion people on the planet who believe it. In fact, more have been martyred for this belief in recent decades than ever before in human history.
So, be encouraged. Christmas isn’t going away. In fact, it will grow brighter and brighter. Eventually, the glory of God will cover the whole earth. Eventually, there will be a new kind of society (Rev 21-22) where everyone is in a perfect harmonious relationship with God and one another. Eventually, all things will be made new. The day will come when there is no more sorrow, no more suffering, no more sickness, no more death, no more sin, no more depression, no more stale bread, no more bad days, no more poverty, no more atheism, no more idols, no more anxiety, no more boredom, and so on. All things will be made new in this city whose designer and builder is God Himself.
Friends, meeting God is a heartbeat away. Some of you may return to the Creator before January 1st. Any of us could go at any time. Life is a mist that appears and vanishes. It’s like the grass of the field that rises in the morning and is scorched in the afternoon sun. But let death come when it comes. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, Christ, the Savior, the One who was born in a manger. Yes. We still believe it. And many of us can even say, “we know!” Selah.
Merry Christmas,
Scott