Biblical Foundations » A Puritan Christmas

Adreas Kostenberger put together an intriguing article describing the 16th and 17th Century Puritans and their attempts to snuff out Christmas. I enjoy much of what I read from the English Puritans and have gleaned great spiritual benefit from them in my personal life over the past twenty years. But, should we go to the same extreme as they when it comes to Christmas?

My wife has done an excellent job of decorating our house for the holiday season. From Thanksgiving through next week, we will have had just over 100 people in our home for holiday celebrations. For Christmas day, we will travel to Texas to see family and friends and perhaps even have a white Christmas. Kelly has a collection of Christmas CDs that she plays often in our home during this time of year. In my car is Handel’s Messiah which I have enjoyed listening to over and over. Today our choir will have a special outreach performance of our Christmas concert at a local senior mobile home park and Sunday we will have four services (two normal morning services and two Christmas concerts) connected with the Christmas season. All of these will be geared toward strengthening the hearts of the saints in their commitment to Christ and exposing the lost to the Gospel of Jesus. In this sense, I love Christmas.

But there is another sense that makes me almost sick (literally) when I think about Christmas.

It fuels pride. How so? This should be obvious. Pride is fueled at Christmas time as it exposes the rank materialism that exists among us and within our own hearts. I have found this to be even more true since moving to Southern California. Money seems to be everywhere around here and thus the expectations for spending it liberally (and far beyond one’s income) are virtual demands.

I have already seen some of this pride in a number of young parents who have incredible pressure placed up them to spend themselves into an economic disaster in order to demonstrate the prowess of their pride, not only before their children, but before their other family, friends and neighbors. They don’t want their kids to be the ones to go to school (or church) and have little spectacular to share with the others about what “they got for Christmas.” The concern is not so much for the ego of the little ones, but to salve the public conscience of the adults who will eventually catch wind.

Such pride and materialism is not only present due to the expectations of children, but adults will arrogantly prod one another probing around to find out how extravagant one has been toward his/her spouse. And for what reason? The price of the gift is, after all, the indication of the amount of a husband’s love for his wife, isn’t it? Being considerate and generous on this one day out of the year should make up for the neglect throughout the past year shouldn’t it? Pride through materialism is rank during this time of year.

Another sickening aspect to our modern Christmas celebration is that it makes Christ a commodity. This is nothing new. Our American way of life is now comfortable with Christ being a commodity to market, a motive to be excessive, and an excuse to look and sound more secular. Christmas simply seems to be the crowning angel on top of the tree of our normal year of how we weekly market Christ and the gospel as a commodity through our seeker services full of ‘how-to’ sermons that rape the Bible of its intended meaning and impact. At Christmas, Christ the commodity, becomes merely a higher priced, more decorated and highly elevated means of making ourselves central. Christmas tends to be not a treasuring of Christ Himself, but rather treasuring the treasures by which we use Him to achieve. Too readily we elevate Christ as a mere commodity to promote self-help and self-actualization. The commodity Christ-child sours me on much of what happens at Christmas.

A final thought about the downside we see at Christmas is that the season tends to enslave the Church as a servant to the culture. We saw this in a major way last year, when the Lord’s Day was dismissed or canceled in some churches because it was Christmas. I still can’t understand the reasoning, but I do understand the sickness. It will no doubt happen again this year that the church will curtail its gathering because family, friends and the cultural power of Christmas will prevail as a higher priority.

So, back to the Puritans and their war against Christmas. From my reading of the Puritan people, I have found them to be some of the most serious-minded, slavishly devoted disciples, who were fervently focused on the glory of God when it comes to the Bible and its practical application to all of life. So, if Christmas is a cultural distraction from what they were deeply devoted, I can understand their rejection.

I would not advocate that the “religious right” begin a legislative push to cancel Christmas from our culture. But in our keeping the Christmas holiday, we have not become more Christ-centered. In other words, by overcoming the excessiveness of the Puritans’ rejection of Christmas, we have not avoided our own excessiveness in becoming Christless in our celebrating Christmas.

I find myself wanting to be more serious minded, Christ-centered and evangelistically active. My heart is at war with the ways of my world and I can cave too easily, and I don’t want to. I’m not on a crusade against Christmas. Instead, I want to crusade more fervently and intentionally for treasuring Christ, not His gifts, in my heart, my family, my church and my culture.