CREEDE HINSHAW: Nostalgia can trivialize the real Christmas story

The danger for our day is that many churches are trivializing Christmas by selling nostalgia. I write these words as one who grows more sentimentally nostalgic the older I get. The glow of my Indiana Christmases in the 1950s — in home and church — grows warmer and dearer each passing year.

Yes, there is something indelibly nostalgic about Christmas. But there is also something indescribably dangerous about Christmas. Herod didn’t try to kill the infant Jesus because he enjoyed killing babies. It was not any baby he wanted to murder. Herod instinctively understood that Jesus would eventually unmask the hypocrisy, brutality and greed of megalomaniacal, murderous dictators everywhere.

A popular Christmas study book encourages readers to “believe in Christmas.” That’s a lovely sentiment, but it is not the holiday season, with its profusion of candy, candles and caroling the Bible calls us to believe. It is Jesus, the one destined to overturn all kings and kingdoms.

The birth of Jesus should threaten those who fancy themselves so clever and powerful that they need no repentance. The birth of Jesus should upset those who believe assertively saying “Merry Christmas” is the highest form of obedience to the gospel. The birth of Jesus should disturb those who presume that their baptism and/or church membership will protect them from judgment.

I pray that Christmas might be the occasion when the church speaks as powerfully about peace on earth in the face of nuclear weaponry as it does about the blatant destruction of the unborn. I hope that Christmas might lead us to see the image of God in every person, regardless of race, citizenship, economic condition or gender. I yearn for the spirit of Christmas to convict every person who has sexually taken advantage of another to find the courage to repent and offer a contrite, truthful confession, rather than the phony non-apologies of so many men.

Large swaths of American Christianity make the manger far too comfy and Jesus far too cuddly. The little drummer boy never stood outside the manger. The sentimental song asking whether Mary knew the baby Jesus’ future reveals an ignorance of the birth narrative. Even before Jesus’ birth, Mary knew her son would bring down the powerful from their thrones and send the rich away empty (Luke 1:52-53) and that her own soul would be eventually be pierced. (Luke 2:35). There is clear-eyed realism in the Christmas story and Mary was no naïve, dreamy eyed teen.

Jesus, who proclaimed he came to set the world on fire and wished the conflagration had already started, surely has something to say about the Rohingya, the Palestinians and Jews, the impoverished immigrant, the violence and increasing hatred in our society towards the immigrant and the minority, and the militarism of nations.

Nostalgia is probably inescapable at Christmas. I’m okay with that. I even enjoy it. But the “joy to the world” over which we sing is far richer than recalling Christmases past. Everything is made new in Jesus, a proclamation with shocking, revolutionary impact.

Email columnist Creede Hinshaw, a retired Methodist minister, at [email protected].