Merry Xmas
Stories
Lectionary Tales for the Pulpit
Series VI, Cycle B
Object:
This is a glorious time of year. Charles Dickens wrote, "I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round ... as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely ... And therefore ... though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it." Merry Christmas ... merry, merry Christmas!
Or, perhaps we should say, "Merry Xmas." After all, that is the greeting with which we are annually faced. We see it in department store windows. It is on the cards we receive. Nine glorious, gilded letters are strung, sagging in the middle across doorways and halls and aisles all over the English-speaking world cheerfully celebrating one of the great events in history ... the birth of "X." Merry Xmas!
Has that ever bothered you? Merry Xmas? Years ago, C.S. Lewis, in Letters to an American Lady, wrote, "Just a hurried line ... to tell a story which puts the contrast between our feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly 'Xmas' racket at its lowest. My brother heard a woman on a bus say, as the bus passed a church with a crib outside it, 'Oh, Lor'! They bring religion into everything. Look -- they're dragging it even into Christmas now!"1
For years, folks have complained about that "Xmas" abbreviation. They shout, "Keep Christ in Christmas," decrying the commercialization of the whole season as much as the use of "X." Half of the complaint is valid. No one would deny that the season has been taken over by the wizards of mass marketing in their quest to be the firstest with the mostest. Most of us remember the not-too-distant past when Christmas advertising began on the day after Thanksgiving. Now we get it in late September. I am told that buyers for the major retail chains begin their search for Christmas merchandise in February and March. There is no question as to the over-commercialization of Christmas.
As to the other part of the complaint -- the X -- there is less validity. To the English-speaking world, X is simply the 24th letter of the alphabet. But to the Greeks, the ones in whose language the New Testament was written, those diagonally crossed lines are the letter "Chi," the first letter in the name Christos, the Messiah. Through the years it has been an acceptable abbreviation for Christ. If you look at the lecture notes I took years ago in seminary, you will see it all over the place.
To backtrack a moment, I am less than accurate when I say that "X" to us is only a letter of the alphabet. Any math student would happily correct me. In algebra, it represents an unknown: 2+3=X ... 3x3=X. But suppose for a moment that the "X" in Xmas also represented an unknown, not "the Word made flesh," as our lesson puts it. Suppose the Babe of Bethlehem was just another of the countless millions through the centuries who are born and die with no notice taken of them by any history. In short, suppose Christ had never come.
It would not be difficult to imagine those in Bethlehem not realizing that anything remarkable was taking place that night. To the travelers who had arrived before Mary and Joseph, there may have been some twinges of compassion at the sight of the young couple (with the woman very pregnant) making their way through dark and dusty streets, but none apparently made any offers of help, not for an "X." To the Roman legionnaire who stood watch, on guard for any signs of trouble in the crowded town, the unborn "X" was just one more potential rebel in that troubled land.
What if they had been right? Assume they were and picture the result for the world. Several authors have written books through the years on the condition of this planet if indeed that Bethlehem child had been merely an "X" ... not Christ at all. Henry Rogers was one of those and his work was called The Eclipse of Faith.2 In it, he imagines that some powerful hand has wiped the influence of Christ out of our civilization, as a hand would clean a blackboard in a schoolroom. Rogers represents himself as going into his library to find no trace left of the life or words of Jesus. All had vanished. The law books that provided protection for widows, children, and the poor showed pages blank except for the numbers at the bottom. Chapters had important paragraphs missing turning them into meaningless jargon.
Suitably alarmed, he turned himself to his histories of art, and where The Transfiguration and The Last Supper had been, he found empty spaces. He pictured a tour through the great galleries of the world and found frame upon empty frame that had once contained the work of the great masters. As a lover of architecture, he envisioned the beautiful cathedrals of Rome, Paris, and Milan; he saw what was once Westminster Abbey. In each case, the only thing remaining was a huge, gaping crater of a cellar. After all, they had been constructed in the design of a cross, and without the one who had been sacrificed on the cross, there would have been no call for constructing a building in the shape of one. He considered the greatest poems of Dante and Milton, of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and again found empty pages and, indeed, empty books. Finally, Rogers realized that, if Christ had not come, the beautiful philanthropies, the missions, the hospitals, the schools that have had such a magnificent influence both at home and abroad, would all perish, as if shaken down by some cosmic earthquake. It was a shattering view.
I suppose there are those who would not find the sight so devastating. They would be willing to sacrifice some art, some literature, some history for the sake of argument. They would admit that it would be sad to lose these great masterpieces, but life would go on. After all, the innate genius of the human spirit would make up the difference. "Every day in every way we get better and better." Nice thought ... but it is a lie! Libraries could be filled with the gory tales of "Man's inhumanity to man." The Bible is more realistic -- it calls us all sinners.
But the humanist comes back and says, "No! Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, Haditha -- these are done in the name of institutions, not humankind. Men and women are good! It is the institutions that are evil. If poverty and ignorance were wiped out and each one got a slice of the pie, everything would be all right." Nice try; I wonder how often through the centuries have utopian societies been attempted, only to fail every time. Is it because they have become institutions, or is it because they were populated by human beings? The latter, I fear, because after all, institutions are merely our creations to better organize society. Mark Twain said it best -- "Man is the only animal that blushes ... or needs to."
No one would deny that we still live in a terribly imperfect world. We continue to be plagued with horrible examples of what people do to each other -- the holocaust of the Nazis, the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the third world today we see governments more concerned about fighting rebels than feeding their starving millions. The news is filled with stories of individual murder, rape, and robbery ... all in spite of 2,000 years of the influence of the God who loved creation so much as to take on its form to show us ever after how we are expected to live. How much worse could it have been without that influence?
Had Jesus been nothing more than a nameless, faceless "X," how would we manage when our lives begin to tumble in around us? When we have lost someone more dear to us than we could ever express? When our families are falling apart? When the job is lost or when business goes down the tubes? In the middle of the darkest night, as we lie there thinking about the disaster area we call life, to whom would we go ... if not to Jesus?
We needed Jesus that night in Bethlehem. We need him now. And we will continue to need him in the same way until he comes again ... not as a helpless infant, but as a mighty conqueror. Then there will be no question as to whether or not he was more than an "X." In that day, every knee will bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
____________
1. C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 80.
2. Henry Roberts, The Eclipse of Faith (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861).
Or, perhaps we should say, "Merry Xmas." After all, that is the greeting with which we are annually faced. We see it in department store windows. It is on the cards we receive. Nine glorious, gilded letters are strung, sagging in the middle across doorways and halls and aisles all over the English-speaking world cheerfully celebrating one of the great events in history ... the birth of "X." Merry Xmas!
Has that ever bothered you? Merry Xmas? Years ago, C.S. Lewis, in Letters to an American Lady, wrote, "Just a hurried line ... to tell a story which puts the contrast between our feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly 'Xmas' racket at its lowest. My brother heard a woman on a bus say, as the bus passed a church with a crib outside it, 'Oh, Lor'! They bring religion into everything. Look -- they're dragging it even into Christmas now!"1
For years, folks have complained about that "Xmas" abbreviation. They shout, "Keep Christ in Christmas," decrying the commercialization of the whole season as much as the use of "X." Half of the complaint is valid. No one would deny that the season has been taken over by the wizards of mass marketing in their quest to be the firstest with the mostest. Most of us remember the not-too-distant past when Christmas advertising began on the day after Thanksgiving. Now we get it in late September. I am told that buyers for the major retail chains begin their search for Christmas merchandise in February and March. There is no question as to the over-commercialization of Christmas.
As to the other part of the complaint -- the X -- there is less validity. To the English-speaking world, X is simply the 24th letter of the alphabet. But to the Greeks, the ones in whose language the New Testament was written, those diagonally crossed lines are the letter "Chi," the first letter in the name Christos, the Messiah. Through the years it has been an acceptable abbreviation for Christ. If you look at the lecture notes I took years ago in seminary, you will see it all over the place.
To backtrack a moment, I am less than accurate when I say that "X" to us is only a letter of the alphabet. Any math student would happily correct me. In algebra, it represents an unknown: 2+3=X ... 3x3=X. But suppose for a moment that the "X" in Xmas also represented an unknown, not "the Word made flesh," as our lesson puts it. Suppose the Babe of Bethlehem was just another of the countless millions through the centuries who are born and die with no notice taken of them by any history. In short, suppose Christ had never come.
It would not be difficult to imagine those in Bethlehem not realizing that anything remarkable was taking place that night. To the travelers who had arrived before Mary and Joseph, there may have been some twinges of compassion at the sight of the young couple (with the woman very pregnant) making their way through dark and dusty streets, but none apparently made any offers of help, not for an "X." To the Roman legionnaire who stood watch, on guard for any signs of trouble in the crowded town, the unborn "X" was just one more potential rebel in that troubled land.
What if they had been right? Assume they were and picture the result for the world. Several authors have written books through the years on the condition of this planet if indeed that Bethlehem child had been merely an "X" ... not Christ at all. Henry Rogers was one of those and his work was called The Eclipse of Faith.2 In it, he imagines that some powerful hand has wiped the influence of Christ out of our civilization, as a hand would clean a blackboard in a schoolroom. Rogers represents himself as going into his library to find no trace left of the life or words of Jesus. All had vanished. The law books that provided protection for widows, children, and the poor showed pages blank except for the numbers at the bottom. Chapters had important paragraphs missing turning them into meaningless jargon.
Suitably alarmed, he turned himself to his histories of art, and where The Transfiguration and The Last Supper had been, he found empty spaces. He pictured a tour through the great galleries of the world and found frame upon empty frame that had once contained the work of the great masters. As a lover of architecture, he envisioned the beautiful cathedrals of Rome, Paris, and Milan; he saw what was once Westminster Abbey. In each case, the only thing remaining was a huge, gaping crater of a cellar. After all, they had been constructed in the design of a cross, and without the one who had been sacrificed on the cross, there would have been no call for constructing a building in the shape of one. He considered the greatest poems of Dante and Milton, of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and again found empty pages and, indeed, empty books. Finally, Rogers realized that, if Christ had not come, the beautiful philanthropies, the missions, the hospitals, the schools that have had such a magnificent influence both at home and abroad, would all perish, as if shaken down by some cosmic earthquake. It was a shattering view.
I suppose there are those who would not find the sight so devastating. They would be willing to sacrifice some art, some literature, some history for the sake of argument. They would admit that it would be sad to lose these great masterpieces, but life would go on. After all, the innate genius of the human spirit would make up the difference. "Every day in every way we get better and better." Nice thought ... but it is a lie! Libraries could be filled with the gory tales of "Man's inhumanity to man." The Bible is more realistic -- it calls us all sinners.
But the humanist comes back and says, "No! Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, Haditha -- these are done in the name of institutions, not humankind. Men and women are good! It is the institutions that are evil. If poverty and ignorance were wiped out and each one got a slice of the pie, everything would be all right." Nice try; I wonder how often through the centuries have utopian societies been attempted, only to fail every time. Is it because they have become institutions, or is it because they were populated by human beings? The latter, I fear, because after all, institutions are merely our creations to better organize society. Mark Twain said it best -- "Man is the only animal that blushes ... or needs to."
No one would deny that we still live in a terribly imperfect world. We continue to be plagued with horrible examples of what people do to each other -- the holocaust of the Nazis, the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the third world today we see governments more concerned about fighting rebels than feeding their starving millions. The news is filled with stories of individual murder, rape, and robbery ... all in spite of 2,000 years of the influence of the God who loved creation so much as to take on its form to show us ever after how we are expected to live. How much worse could it have been without that influence?
Had Jesus been nothing more than a nameless, faceless "X," how would we manage when our lives begin to tumble in around us? When we have lost someone more dear to us than we could ever express? When our families are falling apart? When the job is lost or when business goes down the tubes? In the middle of the darkest night, as we lie there thinking about the disaster area we call life, to whom would we go ... if not to Jesus?
We needed Jesus that night in Bethlehem. We need him now. And we will continue to need him in the same way until he comes again ... not as a helpless infant, but as a mighty conqueror. Then there will be no question as to whether or not he was more than an "X." In that day, every knee will bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
____________
1. C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 80.
2. Henry Roberts, The Eclipse of Faith (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861).
