Church on Christmas?

Reflections (not) on the Lectionary for Christmas Day

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

This is one of those years when Christmas falls on a Sunday, and it seems like churches never know quite what to do with this. Do you have worship as usual, on the premise that church should take precedence over everything else, and anyway, Christmas is a Christian holiday? Do you bow to reality and have some sort of altered service—maybe sing hymns or do something else that’s short of a regular service? Do you just count the Christmas Eve services as that week’s worship and call it good? I’ve seen all of these strategies, and none of them are very satisfying. But all of them point to one takeaway, for me: Christmas is not really, and has not been for some time, a Christian holiday. Sure, its trappings are Christian. The mythologies, iconographies, traditions, and narratives of Christmas are all Christian, but the fact that churches alter or cancel services when it falls on a Sunday tells us that Christmas is really far more about culture and kinship than anything purely Christian. (NB: there is no such thing as anything “purely Christian,” and if you are reading this in my voice, please say that phrase with a lot of sarcasm).

This might be the place where you expect me to get really indignant about this, because lots of people sure do. That New York Times article that I linked in the first paragraph has some of that perspective in it (and also a quote from my friend Tim Beal, and also an anti-Jewish quote from an evangelical pastor). We hear a lot from folks who think that Christianity is under attack, and that Christmas is one of the front lines. “Keep Christ in Christmas,” they insist, while yelling about whether Starbucks’ holiday cups are orthodox enough. It’s the same basic argument as keeping prayer in schools, making everyone say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” and putting up a nativity scene at city hall. There’s a vocal contingent of Christians who understand themselves as perpetually persecuted, who like it that way, and who manufacture outrage at every turn. If a church bends to the secular celebration of Christmas and alters its weekly schedule, these folks seem to suggest, then that’s just one more step down the road to godless humanism.

Obviously I don’t feel that way at all. If people are so invested in celebrating Christmas with their families that they won’t come to a Sunday morning worship service on that same day, what’s so wrong with that? If they’d rather sip cocoa in their pajamas and watch the kids open presents, why are we angry that they aren’t at church? When we insist that formal worship services are the only proper mode of celebration and piety, we miss something important about Christianity: that it's fundamentally a social structure, a measure of kinship and belonging, and a quotidian practiced tradition than anything institutional. I’m not speaking here about what ought to be true (though I would probably say similar things), but simply about what is true: that Christianity is and always has been intertwined in other fabrics of social cohesion. It’s less about what we believe and more about shared practices and common dispositions. Christmas is arguably the greatest expression of that in American Protestantism, even when (or especially when) those celebrations happen outside of formal worship services.

All that is to say that it’s tough to write anything about “the lectionary” for December 25th, because more than any other Sunday of the church year, Christmas (especially when Christmas is on a Sunday) is not the kind of shared textual and liturgical experience that the lectionary sometimes or often creates on other days. Probably no other day of this year will see such wide variation in what congregations do, with some staying closed, some following the lectionary texts, and most probably doing some version of a hymn sing, so that the pastor, who’s exhausted from the Christmas Eve services, doesn’t have to write a sermon. So there’s not much use in going through the lectionary texts. Instead, I want to think for a moment about the four canonical gospels’ approaches to the story of Jesus’ birth, and ask what these stories tell us about Jesus and about Christian tradition(s).

There have been many (so many) arguments about the dating of the gospels, with lots of innovative theories, but for the purposes of this post, I’m going to keep it simple and stick with what might be the most widely-known version: that Mark was written earliest, around 70, and that Matthew and Luke followed after somewhere around the year 80 and then John sometime around the year 90 or afterward. (Just because a theory is widely-known or popular does not make it right, but in this case, where none of the theories are 100% convincing, I still see a lot of merit in the so-called “Markan priority” way of seeing things). If we go with this dating, then an interesting pattern emerges when we look at the birth stories. (The same basic pattern pertains to resurrection stories too, but that’s a post for Easter). In the earliest gospel (Mark), we find no birth narrative at all. In the so-called “second-generation” gospels Matthew and Luke, we find elaborate birth stories—the shepherds (Luke) and magi following a star (Matthew), the census (Luke), Bethlehem (both) and the manger (Luke), and the donkey Mary rode on (found in none of the canonical gospels, but in the non-canonical text The Protevangelium of James). Then, by the time we get to the Gospel of John, we get the poetic logos hymn in chapter 1, placing Jesus’ origins with God and the creation of the universe, and ignoring any human birth.

I tend to view this trajectory—from no birth story to elaborate birth stories to cosmic origin story—as a parallel to the way Christology evolved during the late first century. In the years following Jesus’ life and ministry, people struggled to make sense of who he had been and what he had meant. As time went on, structures of meaning-making started to adhere to Jesus and his story. People began to claim him as prophet, as healer, as messiah, as divine, and as eternally alive and resurrected. As the special-ness of Jesus coalesced in early Christian theology, birth stories were a natural outcome. When Mark was written, perhaps there hadn’t been time enough for these stories to gel, but by the time of Matthew and Luke, the special nature of Jesus had begun to express itself in stories about his birth and claims about its supernatural nature. Then, by the time of John, we get a deeply theological argument for Jesus’ being, not rooted in a human birth (which is almost incidental in John; have you ever noticed that Mary doesn’t get a name in that gospel?), but in a cosmic unity with God the creator.

By tracing this trajectory, I want to claim two things that might seem contradictory. First: the biblical stories about Jesus’ birth should not be relied upon as historical texts, because they are not trying to be historical texts. Second, the biblical stories about Jesus’ birth should be understood as theological texts that are making claims about Jesus’ special and unique being, and as such can tell us about early Christian views of Jesus. The second claim is that we should pay attention to these stories, while the first might seem to say that we shouldn’t. But really, I view them both as claims about how Christians should be thinking about biblical stories about Jesus’ birth. These stories aren’t meant to tell us anything historical, but they’re meant to signal Jesus as someone whose being and nature have been remarkable all along. It’s easy to hear “biblical birth stories aren’t historical” as a denial of biblical authority, but that would be a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. I’m saying that biblical authority is working differently in these texts, and that the stories of Jesus’ birth are claiming authority for Jesus in ways that aren’t rooted in history but are rooted in theological claims.

That’s not to say that you need to throw out your nativity scenes. To the contrary; stories (and their expressions in art and material) help structure our thinking and give solidity to our sense of belonging. Christmas is an extremely “secular” Christian holiday, but that’s only because cultures where Christmas tends to be celebrated are already to saturated with Christianity. We can talk about “Santa” (“saint”) and put up a creche, and watch the gang from Charlie Brown Christmas act out Luke 2, because the stories of Jesus’ birth have been woven wholly into the fabric of our common belonging. Even people who make no claims about Christianity and reject its theologies know these stories, and often participate in Christmas in some ways. This is, I would argue, perfectly fine, and it speaks to the success of the gospels’ birth stories, not their failure. When people stay home from church on Christmas morning to open gifts with their families, they aren’t voting against religion, they’re voting for it, in a very real way. They’re voting for the kind of familial, relational, lived, and material religion that characterizes many (most?) expressions of piety anyway. While the view of these practices from the perspective of religious institutions and religious professionals might be a bit derisive or scolding, I would argue that the folks skipping church to celebrate Christmas with their families actually understand their religion very well, and they are engaging in its practices and rituals in a way that couldn’t be accomplished by packing everyone into the car on Christmas morning and heading to church.