DARE I SAY “MERRY CHRISTMAS”?
by Thomas C. Lewis

Another Christmas season has arrived, and if experiences with the past indicate anything, there is a month-long, annual campaign about to be launched by the Churches of Christ against being religious in December. This is the season to be jolly, string the tree, and hang the holly, but, for goodness (literally) sake, keep Christ out of Xmas! Give gifts if you expect to receive them, but please don’t bring up wise men. Sing Christmas carols if you must, but only because you like them. Be sure the singing is detached from religious meaning, and don’t let the songs make you feel any more conscious of God than you always feel.

Why must we go out of our way to ignore Christ in December? The most obvious reason is that Christmas is a time of accelerated religious activity among our religious neighbors. And Christians must be set apart from the world. What better opportunity is there for us to prove to others that we are a “peculiar” people? It is an effective method. And we like being a minority group (“few there be that find it”). We feel righteous when we “put down denominational error.” We feel persecuted (“blessed”) when others think we are obnoxious. Each time we can get ourselves offended about Christmas, we deposit another salvation point in our Merit Bank, recording each one in the “suffering” column of the ledger of life. Just like a savings account. Or, as I have heard and seen, an insurance policy.

The other reason we de-Christ Christmas lends support to the primary one. Our attitude is scriptural. We can go to our Bibles and pluck passages from them just as we can take vegetables from our gardens. The great Apostle Paul established the pattern for our behavior when he wrote to the apostates at Galatia. “Ye observe days and months and times and years; I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed labor on you in vain.” (Gal. 4:11 ) It makes no difference that he was combating legalism as the Jews taught it. It doesn’t matter that the Galatians were being bound by the orthodoxy of the old law by men who still felt uncomfortable in Christ’s freedom. Indeed, Paul wasn’t talking about the error of legalism at all, he was merely replacing a law of observance with a law of abstinence. And all of God’s true children know that this is the very principle for which Christ came to life and was crucified; i.e., to turn the garment wrong-side-our, to reverse the “law” of the Jews and knit a new religious garment of arabesque laws. That is what is meant by “putting on Christ.” The salvation sweater is surely knit, and it is made of close stitches.

There is an abundance of passages on “our side,” too; our garden is full. Anyone who doubts the validity of our conclusions based on what the Galatian letter says may also read Col. 2:18, another passage penned by Paul, and see that he was unequivocal on this matter of observing religious holidays: “let no man judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day: which are a shadow of the thing to come; but the body is Christ’s.”

How could he say more clearly the sin of observing a day such as Christmas? Of course, when he condemns religious days here he did not mean for us to take him literally on the matter of drink. No good Christian would touch an alcoholic beverage, since that is always the first step to alcoholism and debauchery. We may judge a person who drinks a glass of wine, because the New Testament always talks about wine in the sense of “grape juice.” People were always getting drunk on new grape juice back then.

Now, if those proofs do not convince the Christmas observers, we can even show them in the Old Testament, which doesn’t apply to us, that God hated religious days then. He began them himself through commandment, but they got out of hand, so he changed his opinion. “Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble unto me; I am weary of bearing them.” (Isa. 1:14) Conclusive evidence that Christmas and Easter are abominations before the Lord.

Most of my readers will recoil from the spirit of the above arguments. The case sounds too smug, too self-righteous, too “cute”. I am fully aware that the satirical tone is biting and repulsive. But the awful fact is that many of us accept the passages quoted as teaching just the attitudes and orthodoxy they represent here. We usually --- those of us who have the least smattering of sensitivity and regard for the feelings of fellow human beings --- try to say those things with more tact. We need tact and we need kindness. But the trouble is that most of us do try to say those things, those arguments.

I have used satire, a very cleansing tool though sharp, to exaggerate, to make vivid the contentions that are offered against the observation of Christmas and Easter and other such religious times. The honest reader who has come so patiently with me this far will not balk to examine the contexts of the scriptures cited. It is my conviction that not one of them can fairly be construed as condemning a religious observance of days such as Christmas. What is condemned, in each case, is the legalism that would prompt anyone to trust his salvation to such performances rather than to God.

The problem Paul confronted with the Galatians and with the Colossians was the problem of legalism. Change is difficult to accept. Lord Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon” tells of a man imprisoned in a dungeon so long that when he was set free he didn’t care to go. This situation was typical of the Jewish converts to Christianity. They had lived in bondage to law and orthodoxy so long that they were afraid to be freed. So they kept going back to circumcision, passover, and other exact points of the law. These they felt comfortable with, for these were part of their history and inheritance. When they attempted to put them on the new Church, they put them there with all the fervor and dogmatism that they knew under Judaism. They accepted them as things to do that placated God. They made God one to be served stoically rather than one to be sought through love. Such an attitude could only nullify the teachings of Jesus. Their legalism shut out love, and Paul reproved them because loving God is the most important thing there is. Paul does not write because they are using a particular means to make God more real to themselves, but he writes because they are stopping at the means, forgetting God as one to love, and reverting to forms, laws to replace the end itself.

The same was true when Isaiah wrote. God was not angry because the people kept new moons, feast days, and sabbaths; he was grieved and broken-hearted because the people thought no more of him than to believe he could be bought off with a few sacrifices and hours of pious posture. Isaiah says, “your hands are full of blood.” Holy days were not abominable when the people were holy at other times. But the hypocrisy of formal worship was an abomination because their hearts were far from serving God.

If any scripture passage speaks against form worship without devotion, the second chapter of Colossians does. If any thing is said there, it says legalism is dead. Christ “blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us . . . “ We do not now live by law but by love, which is God, which is Christ. Conscience and integrity is what we put on when we put on Christ, not another and tighter, more suffocating sweater than the Judaic law system. As a body we are to find our coherence in the head, which is Christ, not in a system which is extraneous to him.

I have ventured dangerously in using the terms “conscience” and “integrity” as the essence of Christianity, and yet I can know of no other thing that makes one Christian except those qualities. Certainly our baptism is a shallow burial without them.

Again it is Paul that exalts the conscience. The only good thing he could say about his life as a persecutor of Christ is that he did it in good conscience. Paul was, even then, a man of great integrity, for the Lord chose him to do his greatest work. Later, when he had become wholly dedicated to the work of Christ, he again wrote of the importance of conscience:

But him that is weak in faith receive ye, yet not for decision of scruples. One man hath faith to eat all things: but he that is weak eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth set at nought him that eateth not; and let not him that eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. Who art thou that judgest the servant of another? To his own lord he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall stand; for the the Lord hath power to make him stand. One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let each man be fully assured in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord: and he that eateth, eateth unto the Lord, for he giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, unto the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks. --- Rom. 14:1-6.

I will worship God this Christmas as I did last Christmas. To me, it is a time very special, not because I am convinced of its historical authenticity on that date, but because I like to emphasize and exalt the coming of Christ at a time when others become more sensitive to him. The day of Christmas or of Easter is not holy, nor are they commanded. But God help us to see the importance of utilizing every means toward the glorious end, which is God.

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Thomas C. Lewis (B.A., David Lipscomb College; M.A., George Peabody College) is an instructor of English at Western Kentucky State College, Bowling Green, Kentucky. A native of Miami, Florida, he is a lifelong member of the Church of Christ, and was recently on the faculty of David Lipscomb College in Nashville.