Monday Morning Music Ministry

12-21-15

I don’t know about you, but along about Thanksgiving time I start getting really tired of Christmas.

It’s not that I have anything against religious holidays. But Christmas is not really a religious holiday any more. This will not be a message about how Hallmark Cards and Rudolph and Santa’s elves and striped candy canes have overtaken Christmas. Or the rush of parties and presents and cookies overtaking the “meaning” of Christmas. We say that each Christmas… and every next Christmas too.

This will not be a message complaining about those things. Oh. Wait. I already have. Well, it won’t be a message about those things alone.

It seems, year after year, that those traditional (?) complaints have been distilled to a new bitterness. Now Christmas also is a political holiday; more political than the way America celebrates the Fourth of July these days. A holiday that is so “inclusive” that it includes everything; therefore, nothing. Things that were once sacred, whether foundational to the culture or intensely personal, have been sacrificed on the altar of Political Correctness.

As our society has been spared the litany of beloved carols of the season in schools and public places, I will spare you the litany of crude attacks on our “free exercise” of religion; and the successful “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” by courts, legislatures, the press, schools, and the entertainment-industrial complex. There. You have been spared.

Once upon a time the New Totalitarians in our midst rejected charges that they engaged in many and varied forms of prior censorship and bigotry. Now, rather, they boast about such things.

Christians have been reduced to defending displays in public parks and shopping malls and maintaining that YES – Santa Claus and red-and-green ribbons ARE symbols of Christianity. Fine. I wonder how close we are to seeing mainstream churches, in the spirit of “welcoming” “compromise,” will suffer the little children to believe that it was the Easter Bunny who was nailed to the cross.

When Christmas and its essential theological centrality becomes no longer a “holy day,” and a mere holiday, in our culture, it becomes the least necessary holiday. We can, after all — and should — hug children and celebrate family every day. That’s not what Christmas “is about.”

But what can we, the remnant, do to salvage our spiritual self-respect? Sure: free ourselves of the fetish of wrapping paper, cartoon specials, and annoying secular seasonal songs – not necessarily in that order. We can reinforce the lessons that largely survived as artwork on Sunday-school bulletins:

That we give gifts because God’s greatest gift – the Lord Himself incarnate – is thereby honored;

That Jesus could have come as a King in the clouds, but instead was a baby lain in a dirty manger from which animals ate, is a reminder to be humble;

That innumerable threads of prophecy, from many times and many places, written by many hands, were all fulfilled in Jesus’ birth;

That countless MIRACLES – not poetic convergence or imputations of wisdom – occurred that day, that week, in that place, to those people; and to us;

That sinful humanity, unable to reconcile itself before a Holy God, was graced with a Person, a plan, to redeem itself, receive eternal forgiveness, and embrace the Savior of their souls.

Those are the elements of the Christmas story. “Oh, yes, we know,” people absent-mindedly might say, as they put a David Bowie Xmas CD in the car player. “Chestnuts Roasting,” indeed.

The best observances and celebration of the Christmas story would be for households and churches to shift it, and tell parts of it in, say, May, July, and October. To listen to Handel’s “Messiah” at Eastertime – it is about the Savior’s entire life, after all. Let’s exchange gifts at Pentecost, and contemplate God’s spiritual gifts that He offers. Or, at any time of the year, gather to buy or make and wrap gifts… and send them to needy neighbors or foreign missions. And so forth.

The Christmas holiday is one that many scholars (not Orthodox scholars) believe is arbitrarily observed on December 25, perhaps an early-church marketing ploy to attract pagans on one of their holy days. I have no problem with marketing ploys, in that case, if they draw upon, meaningfully observe, and point to the Savior.

In that sense our Christmas is perhaps the most superfluous of the church’s holidays. The Person of the Christ, His moment of birth as God-with-us, was the nexus of history. In the baby Jesus all that was before, everything that had been prophesied, all the miracles and teachings, the scourging, crucifixion, sacrifice, Resurrection, and Ascension, were manifest. The Creator of the Universe became flesh and dwelt among us. The Hope of humankind came to us as a baby who would be able to identify with our needs, hurts, temptations, joys, and sorrows.

It does seem unnecessary, and perhaps should be redundant, that we reserve “Christmas Day” to think on these things. More than any other holiday, the entire sweep of the Bible coalesces here. Too often we let it become “only” on December 25. Yes, Jesus came as a baby; but to freeze that image in amber – or in snow globes – can cause us to forget that Jesus grew up! From a manger to a throne to our hearts.

Oh, it is good marketing to choose a day to remember Christ’s birth; or so we hope. To write meaningful hymns, at least before they are overtaken by jingles and reindeer songs.

But it is a sin to compartmentalize the Incarnation. Let us observe, contemplate, and celebrate it every day of the year. We don’t need a “hook” to remember what “Christmas” is all about. In that sense Dec 25 is the least necessary of our holidays.

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Music Video:

I want to take you back as far as we can travel, musically, to the worship of Jesus’ time and place.

It is not known exactly when this Hymn of the Nativity (Christmas Troparion and Kontakion) was written, but it was a mere few centuries after the life of Christ on earth. It is from the early Byzantine era, although not from Byzantium (Constantinople, present-day Istanbul), and its words are Greek of the time. They exist too in Syriac and Aramaic (Aram being another name of Syria), and other local and ancient tongues. These primitive tropes are what early music sounded like, in the Middle East, and into Europe.

I choose this not only for its historic or informative function this Christmas, although interesting enough. But the changes I refer to in the essay, our culture’s onslaught on Christian traditions, are made evident by this music, and the images – look at the the images! (They are all labeled at the end of the clip.)

A few short years ago, the world took note of persecution against Christians in totalitarian states like China and North Korea. Christianity was proscribed in Muslim, Hindu, atheist, animist, and Communist societies. But today, many thousands of Christians are being slaughtered every year. Tortured, raped, crucified, beheaded. Threatened with death if they do not renounce Christ. Forced from homes by the millions.

Some of those homes and their church communities go back to the times immediately following Jesus’ ministry. For the first time in history, often, these communities of believers are being martyred, “cleansed” from their 2000-year-old homelands. Do we know? Do we care? Sadly, many of these people are being as betrayed and forgotten by the church, as Jesus was by his “friends” at Crucifixion.

Our president does logical contortions to explain away Islamic radicalism in our midst. Yet persecuted Christians around the world receive scant notice from our government. Islamic refugees are welcome; displaced Christians are not. A sin.

These are people from Christ’s time and place; and the music video here shows sites and churches and shrines from those times and places – birthplaces of Christianity. Here are images of the mighty ruins of Petra (where the Wise Men reportedly stopped on their journey); from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; significant sites in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan; the West Bank. Places where Jesus walked. Now being swept of Christianity.

Be filled with wonder; and with sorrow. And be reminded of our heritage. Have a blessed Christ’s Mass.

Hymn of the Nativity