Church on Christmas Day

Allow me to stick up for the normies.

All my people—church folk, academics, readerly believers—are worked up about (the always excellent) Ruth Graham’s New York Times piece from two days ago about Christmas Day falling on a Sunday. And rightly so: it should be a no-brainer for Christians that Christmas Day is a day to go to church. A day to worship God. A day to gather with sisters and brothers in Christ to worship the child Christ. A day about him, not a day about us. The reason for the season, you might say.

No one is wrong about this. But there’s a touch of mercilessness in the proceedings, underwritten by a lack of context, which both ups the ante and elides understanding. So let me give a cheer and a half for staying home on Christmas, or at least for grasping, in something other than shock and disbelief, why it is so many devout believers do so.

First, we aren’t talking about catholic Christians. We’re talking about Protestants.

Second, we aren’t talking about Protestants in general. We’re talking about low-church, evangelical, biblicist, frontier-revival, and/or non-denominational American Protestants.

Third, for two centuries or more this specific subgroup of American Christians—I like to call them “baptists,” the lower-case “b” coming from James McClendon—have studiously avoided any and all connection to sacred tradition, particularly the liturgical calendar. In the Stone-Campbell movement, for example, most churches would studiously avoid mentioning even the existence of either Christmas or Easter, especially (as it always does in the case of the latter) when it fell on a Sunday. In other words, what you’ve got with American baptists is a wholesale lack of a Christian calendar governing, guiding, or forming their theological, liturgical, and festal imaginations—much less their family practices.

Fourth, and simultaneously, the practice of Christmas as a cultural event has been wholly subsumed by the wider society. Advent simply doesn’t exist; Christmas—all six to eight weeks of it—does. Asking baptist Christians to go to church on Christmas Day strikes many of them like asking them to go to church on Thanksgiving. Is this historically parochial? Yes. Is it liturgically lamentable? Yes. Is it a sad reflection of the total secularization of Christmas as a national holiday? Yes. Should this occasion anger and bewilderment at the millions of laypeople who have been successfully formed by both their churches and their culture to understand and celebrate Christmas in just this way? I don’t see why. The problem is the catechesis, not the catechumens. To overstate the matter, it’s an odd instance of blaming the victim, seasoned with overripe overreaction.

Fifth and finally, in a mitigating factor, most baptist churches of which I am aware have, over the last few decades, added or expanded a major liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth, in imitation of their more liturgically catholic neighbors: a Christmas Eve service. This has come to function, albeit accidentally I’m sure, as something akin to an Easter Vigil. It isn’t the prelude to the feast on the following day. It is the feast, or rather its beginning. Just as the sun sets, God’s people gather in darkness and candlelight to mark the moment when God came to earth in a manger. They sing and pray and celebrate and remember—prior to opening gifts or doing Santa. Only once this is complete do they disperse to their homes to begin the festivities, which continue into the following morning. And since it’s only every so often that Christmas Day is on a Sunday, it’s an odd and somewhat confusing eventuality when it does. Like Catholics who opt for Saturday 5:00pm mass, these baptists intuitively sense that they have already paid homage to the child Christ the night before. Christmas Day, even on a Sunday, becomes a kind of family Sabbath. Not necessarily (though granted, surely often in fact) to Mammon and his pomp, but to gift of multiple generations of family, grandparents and grandchildren in the same home, gratitude and feasting and toys and surprise gifts and laughter and exhaustion all giving glory to God in the domestic church of one’s household, free from work and duty and consumption and travel and the rest. You don’t do anything on such a Sabbath. You don’t go anywhere. Even, as it happens, to church.

What I’m saying is: I get it. It isn’t hard at all to understand why this default setting makes all the sense in the world to normie, mainstream, low-church American Christians. I’m not angry about it. I’m not sure you should be either. I even see the Christmas Eve service as a step in the right liturgical direction. Would I prefer for baptists, like catholics, to grasp in their bones that Christmas Day is a day for church, for worshiping Christ as Christ’s body, gathered in a single place? Yes, I would. Is it reasonable to expect that to be true at this moment, given our history and where the church is today? No, I don’t think so. To get from here to there, it seems to me, is the work of generations, a decades- or even centuries-long process of cultural, familial, liturgical, and ecclesial change. I’d like to see that change happen. I think it’s happening even now. But no shade on my neighbors.

Like I say, I get it.

Three R. S. Thomas poems for Advent/Christmas

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

*

Nativity

The moon is born
and a child is born,
lying among white clothes
as the moon among clouds.

They both shine, but
the light from the one
is abroad in the universe
as among broken glass.

*

Coming

To be crucified
again? To be made friends
with for his jeans and beard?
Gods are not put to death

any more. Their lot now
is with the ignored.
I think he still comes
stealthily as of old,

invisible as a mutation,
an echo of what the light
said, when nobody
attended; an impression

of eyes, quicker than
to be caught looking, but taken
on trust like flowers in the
dark country toward which we go.

Publication round-up: recent pieces in First Things, Journal of Theological Interpretation, Mere Orthodoxy, and The Liberating Arts

I've been busy the last month, but I wanted to make sure I posted links here to some recent pieces of mine published during the Advent and Christmas seasons.

First, I wrote a meditation on the first Sunday of Advent for Mere Orthodoxy called "The Face of God."

Second, I interviewed Jon Baskin for The Liberating Arts in a video/podcast called "Can the Humanities Find a Home in the Academy?" Earlier in the fall I interviewed Alan Noble for TLA on why the church needs Christian colleges.

Third, in the latest issue of Journal of Theological Interpretation, I have a long article that seeks to answer a question simply stated: "What Are the Standards of Excellence for Theological Interpretation of Scripture?"

Fourth and last, yesterday, New Year's Day, First Things published a short essay I wrote called "The Circumcision of Israel's God." It's a theological meditation on the liturgical significance of January 1 being simultaneously the feast of the circumcision of Christ (for the East), the solemnity of Mary the Mother of God (for Rome), the feast of the name of Jesus (for many Protestants), and a global day for peace (per Pope Paul VI). I use a wonderful passage from St. Theodore the Studite's polemic against the iconoclasts to draw connections between each of these features of the one mystery of the incarnation of the God of Israel.

More to come in 2021. Lord willing it will prove a relief from the last 12 months.