Church closings and war on Christmas

Posted by Sappho on December 21st, 2005 filed in News and Commentary

This is where I belatedly pull together links and comments on two stories that have nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that they both have something or other to do with Christmas. One, which is alarming O’Reilly of Fox News greatly, is the fact that clerks at stores are wishing customers “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” The other, which is alarming O’Reilly not in the slightest, is the fact that some megachurches are cancelling their regular Sunday services for Christmas.

War on Christmas first. My sister sent me a link to a column in the Madison newspaper The Capital Times which takes on O’Reilly:

What to do? It appears that the only proper response to Mr. O’Reilly is a profoundly Christian one, rooted in the biblical imperatives of sympathy and understanding.

Mr. O’Reilly and his compatriots suffer, by all accounts, from a weakness of belief. Their Christian faith is apparently so fragile that it could crumble if an underpaid clerk at a retail store wished them “Happy Holidays,” rather than specifically referencing Christmas.

Now, there are plenty of Christians who practice a muscular faith. I have walked the fields between Bethlehem and Jerusalem with shepherds who embrace a Christianity that they can trace to the days when the Nazarene walked the same paths they now follow. Somehow, they carry on, even as their Jewish and Muslim neighbors offer Hebrew and Arabic greetings that do not include the words “Merry Christmas.”

I have traveled with African and Asian Christians, living in overwhelmingly Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist countries, where they are sometimes threatened with violence because of their beliefs. Through it all, they maintain their faith.

Lots of blog comments, some funny, some thoughtful, but the one that particularly caught my eye was where Ross, guest blogging at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, linked an old Noah Millman post from last year in reference to Hanukkah really being a pretty minor holiday:

Hanukkah, then, makes the Top Ten holidays list (counting the recurring Sabbath as one holiday) but not the Top Five.

Now, the business about how minor Hanukkah really is relative to Christmas is old news, and fairly obvious if you know the least thing about Judaism, but Noah’s post got interesting to me because Noah went beyond that, to reflect on what Jewish holiday might really come closest, in its underlying message, to Christmas:

If I had to compare Christmas with a Jewish holiday, meanwhile, the best candidate would be Tabernacles – Sukkot, in Hebrew. Sukkot is referred to in Hebrew as “The Season of our Joy” (Passover is “The Season of our Liberation” and Pentecost is, “The Season of our Receiving the Torah”). The holiday commemorates the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness prior to entry into the Land of Israel. But the thrust of the holiday points forward, to Messianic days when the Temple will be restored and, as Isaiah prophecies, all nations will worship at God’s holy mountain. Significantly, unlike the Passover sacrifice which only Israelites could partake of, the sacrifices of Sukkot could be joined in by any nation who worshipped the one true God. Sukkot is a major holiday, of comparable religious significance to Jews as Christmas is to Christians; and it is a holiday with a particularly universal message, and one of joy and peace and Messianic fulfillment, just as Christmas’ message is.

There are even below-the-surface resonances. For example: on Sukkot, we dwell in booths, temporary structures open to the elements, to symbolize our dependence on the Divine for protection and to recall the wandering in the wilderness. That surely resonates with the Christian story of Jesus born in a manger (and for all I know there’s a historic connection between the two; you tell me).

I find this cool, because I always did like Sukkot, for its temporary structures, and, yes, come to think of it, that does resonate, for me, with Jesus as helpless infant, born in poverty, with no room in the inn, and all the rest.

This Sunday, I was supposed to teach the elder elementary kids (but my class didn’t show up, probably getting ready at home for the meeting Christmas party), and the curriculum I had meant to use had vanished from the library. This is life as usual in a small Quaker meeting; someone else has borrowed your curriculum, but it’s all OK, because your class doesn’t show up anyway. So, before meeting I was trying to figure out some new take on a Christmas lesson by browsing through the meeting library, and ran across an article demythologizing the virgin birth. It set my mind to thinking, what, in the Christmas story, would actually offend me, if you turned it on its head and said it was false. What would trouble my faith, if you could somehow absolutely prove it didn’t happen that way? In the “Jesus married Mary Magdalene” story that the Da Vinci Code took over from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, what bothered me most was not the proposal that Jesus might have married Mary Magdalene. I don’t think he did, and in fact I think it unlikely that he was married at all, but Jesus’ apparent celibacy isn’t the most central, to me, of the things that story contradicts. Rather, it’s the fact that, in the Holy Blood, Holy Grail account, the story of Jesus turns into yet another story about some royal lineage, which then gets preserved by some kings in France, and Jesus becomes a God-King like Pharaoh.

Jesus in the nativity stories is different. He may be of David’s blood, but there’s no earthly reason to expect him to inherit David’s throne. He’s an ordinary baby, from a family poor enough that they can only offer doves (the gift of the poor) for the sacrifice a family must give for a first born son. Ordinary shepherds are the first to hear of his birth. We are to understand that he is, in some sense, a king, but it’s in weakness that he comes to us.

Shifting gear, I now turn to the church closings. My first thought on hearing this story – well, a few years ago, I ran across what struck me, at the time, as one of the silliest arguments in favor of Catholic priestly celibacy that I had ever seen. Understand, I say this believing that there are other defenses of celibacy that aren’t particularly silly at all. But this particular article posited a possible family conflict for a priest; his wife wants him with her family for Christmas, while he is supposed to do Mass. What’s a priest to do? And I rolled my eyes, and marvelled that anyone could think a wife would do any such thing. Because, after all, I’m the great-granddaughter of a bishop, the great-niece of another, and the great-niece of yet another priest, and one thing I know about Episcopalian clergy families is that they do not demand that the priest vanish from the church on major holidays. I mean, pick a more realistic family conflict, right? If you want the priest to have trouble celebrating Mass on Christmas, put his kid in the hospital.

I guess I was wrong. Not totally wrong; it’s still the case that Episcopal churches manage to celebrate Christmas every year with married priests, and, if the day ever came that celibacy was no longer mandatory for Catholic priests, I’m sure Catholics would manage to do the same. Because the liturgical year matters to Catholics, as it does to Episcopalians. But it doesn’t to everyone, and it turns out that, for the megachurches, family is a good reason to cancel Christmas services.

Perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised me, since Quakers don’t make much of Christmas, either. This past Sunday, one of our co-clerks asked for a show of hands on who was going to be at meeting for worship on Christmas, just to make sure people would be at hand for whatever needed to be done – as individuals, some people will be elsewhere, travelling to see family or whatever. At the same time, I have to say that the Feminarian has a point about the “family values” justification for cancelling regular Sunday services altogether for Christmas being a little weird:

This is one more way the Evangelical subculture has supplanted Christianity with American values. How on earth can one believe that our faith is about spending time with family rather than with God? The New Testament (the whole Bible, really) has crappy family values, people. It’s not about the people who birthed us. It’s about the Church.

Anyway, I’m ambivalent. Church on Christmas Eve, church on Christmas – it doesn’t hugely matter which day you pick. Just be sure that family values aren’t at the center of your faith; family is good, but it’s not really about family.