Christmas Devotional

I read an interesting article recently about the movement among many Protestant churches to more faithfully and fully observe the Christian season of Advent. The most compelling point the author made was that while we may be doing a better job at observing Advent, we sometimes forget to fully celebrate the season of Christmas afterwards, which defeats the purpose of the penitential waiting we have done in the four weeks leading up to Christmas. If we are going to recapture the spirit of Advent (which I believe is an extremely necessary and counter-cultural act), then we must also recapture the festivity of the Christian season of Christmas, which begins on Christmas Eve and runs through Epiphany on January 6.

Part of the problem is that our culture—driven by the consumerism that has built up around the American celebration of "Christmas"—tells us that Christmas begins on Black Friday (sometimes before that...) and ends on Christmas Day. For those whose churches who are trying to faithfully enter into Advent while the surrounding culture is already in full-on Christmas bonanza, the all-too-common tendency is to feel all the tension of not celebrating Christmas with the outside world during Advent, but then to give up with everyone else after Christmas Day, leaving no time for the meaning of the Incarnation to unfold and for the celebrating of God with us to occur "in the fullness of time." This is the genius of the liturgical year as handed down to us by the Church. When we try to reinvent the wheel and reject the wisdom of our forebears, we often end up settling for something less than what God wants for us. If we believe that both Advent and Christmas are important, we have to learn to do both and ignore the attempts of our money-driven culture to tell us when our holy seasons should be celebrated. It will feel strange to wait to sing the Church's wonderful hymns about the newborn Christ until Christmas Eve, and then to continue singing them until Epiphany Sunday long after the radio stations have gone back to their typical playlists. But we Christians were never meant to feel comfortable with our surroundings. We are a peculiar people...

In order to help with your meditation on the meaning of the Incarnation during Christmas this year, the ministerial staff at Greenwood Forest will be posting a devotional for each day beginning with the first day of Christmas, December 26 until Epiphany on January 6. Since we have been resisting the temptation to sing many of the church's carols during Advent, we will focus on a well-known Christmas hymn each day so that we may more fully experience the theology these beloved hymns of the faith offer us in this special season. We hope that you will use these meditations to allow God to be born in you this Christmas. The wait is over. Merry Christmas! Stay tuned for the first devotional meditation on the morning of December 26.