Two Sundays ago, our LPC Choir presented its annual Christmas cantata. This year’s, “The Mystery and the Majesty,” was especially good, I thought. You can view it here if you’d like.
Over the years I have become the default narrator for the cantatas, and I count it a great honor. More than that, Holly Waterson, our amazing choir director, trusts me to revise the narration as I wish. I usually wish. Let me just say that the people who write church cantatas are typically better musicians and lyricists than wordsmiths or theologians.
“The Mystery and the Majesty” did not require as much editorial tinkering as many of our cantatas, but I tinkered here and there. In the last narration, after a beautiful final piece, there was something about how we should make “Christmas all year long.” It rhymed with “angel song.” I thought the cantata deserved more than such a hollow cliché as its final word. I came up with something else.
The idea of Christmas all year long is that for a brief time every year people seem a little nicer, a little more generous, and maybe a bit more tolerant. We stuff a ten-dollar bill in the Salvation Army kettle, bring a gift to the annual toy drive, and say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” – it doesn’t matter which – to strangers in the store. Scrooge buys a turkey for the Cratchit family feast and George Bailey realizes it is a wonderful life.
Christmas all year long sounds like a good idea. I say, “Bah! Humbug!”
Or maybe not.
The Incarnation is not about civility or manners. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, it is about new people, not nice people. It is about redemption, not improvement.
Each Advent I read George MacDonald’s Christmas Poems. There are five of them, and they are short. It seems as if one of the five speaks to me in a new way year by year. “A Christmas Meditation” has struck me heart and mind this year:
He who by a mother’s love
Made the wandering world his own,
Every year comes from above,
Comes the parted to atone,
Binding Earth to the Father’s throne.
Nay, thou comest every day!
No, thou never didst depart!
Never hour hast been away!
Always with us, Lord, thou art,
Binding, binding heart to heart!
MacDonald answers a different kind of “once a year” piety; a Jesus is born again each Christmas sentimentality. “Nay!” he answers. “Thou comest every day…Thou never didst depart! Never hour hast been away!”
In last Sunday’s sermon I called Christmas a schizophrenic holiday. I will stick with that. But it is more than just Christ’s Day and Santa’s Day. We diminish Christ if we think he comes again and again each Christmas day, as if he left sometime in early January. We diminish Christ if we think he comes to make us nicer and wish a little niceness would linger all year long.
Always with us, Lord, Thou art.
Christmas all year long? Not “Bah! Humbug!” as much as I like saying it. Christmas all year long! To God be the glory.
See you Sunday