Christmas Sentiment and Gospel Politics

December 4, 2009

Each year it strikes me with renewed force just how far our culture’s celebration of Christmas is from the events recorded in the Gospels upon which Christmas is based. While trees and lights and gift giving and receiving is wonderful (the most wonderful time of the year) this is not what Christmas is about. Nor is it about that warm Christmas feeling some of us long for. When you read the Biblical narratives about the coming of Jesus into our world you realize it is anything but sentimental.

What we must always keep in mind is that Christianity is about things that happened in history. These are concrete realities and while we must always work to read our place and time in fresh ways in light of these ancient stories, we must not make the mistake that so many Christians have made through the years, of lifting timeless spiritual principles out of the text as though they had no relation to people’s life in a particular time and a particular place.

Lennox asked me recently something he’s asked me a few times before: “When did you become political?” What he told me he meant was, when did I become interested in the systems that make up our lives? I take politics to be the set of ways we order our lives as human beings in community. I don’t remember what I told him, exactly, but what occurs to me now is that the Gospels politicized me. Really reading the Gospels again made me political. My contention is that you can’t read the narratives of Matthew, Mark and Luke, in particular, and not at least ponder the fact that Jesus message was in some special sense, political.

We’re going to see a bit of that this Sabbath morning when our text is Luke 3:1–6. Give it a read (or two or three) before worship and see for yourself that Jesus is stepping into a politically charged environment and from the very beginning, John’s words are a direct challenge to the existing order of things.

Grace and Peace,

Ryan

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