http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXERZ_gaiN0

Thanks, Jim Bunrs

Glad all went so well. No credit necessary! (But movie royalties we need to discuss.)

I hope Steve T. lets us know how his celebration went.

Our son Mark sang in the choir at Duke chapel’s Lessons and Carols at 11 pm Christmas Eve, and the choir processed out to “O Come All Ye Faithful,” finishing by arriving outside in the cold air at 12:04 am with the stanza, “Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning”! Very cool.

My only regret is not having the foresight to get the proper credit cited in the bulletin. Maybe I can make this up if I get the movie deal!

Merry Christmas,
Mike C.

Thanks for this thoughtful comment. And thanks for taking Advent seriously in your preaching!

The additional laudable motivation you point out may in fact be at work, sort of like “Jesus is the reason for the season.” I generally tend to be a “both/and” rather than “either/or” person, so perhaps my sentence should say “not MERELY Jesus’ birthday”—but that has nearly no rhetorical or theological punch! More importantly, however, the similarity (human birthdays, Jesus’ “birthday”) is meager because the contrast between the two sorts of events is so profound. I do worry—seriously worry—that children, in particular, who sing “HB, Jesus” are going to grow up thinking that Christmas marks the birth of a great human being, a George Washington or MLK. These kinds of people may deserve honor, and their births should perhaps be celebrated, but Christmas is—or should be—something completely different for Christians.

In any event, I think we are agreed that the church needs to move people beyond the HB, Jesus—quickly. The verses of “Hark the Herald…” aren’t bad either, but it’s not as singable in my view and a little less theologically direct.

I remember this post from last year, and I certainly appreciate your intent to de-trivialize our Christmas celebrations. God knows we need it. Our church, in fact, used our Advent sermons this year to try to re-imagine Christmas through the Biblical stories of Christmas. Would that we would succeed in that endeavor!

I’d like to suggest, though, that perhaps another, laudable motivation is at work in the birthday phenomenon, the desire to reclaim Christmas as being about Jesus instead of retail recklessness. At our best we celebrate birthdays, I think, as a way of saying to someone “We celebrate that you have been born into our lives.” “We would be impoverished had you not been born.” When we celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ birthday we are celebrating and giving thanks for the life that culminated in the events of Good Friday and Easter. Were it not for those events, of course, we’d all forget his birthday, but because of those events, His birth is worth celebrating.

I might also quibble with the thesis of your first paragraph. I’d like to affirm what you affirm (Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation of the second person of the trinity) without denying what you deny (Christmas is Jesus birthday, setting aside the historical problem of celebrating it on Dec. 25…). Of course we are celebrating the incarnation of the divine Son, and I believe (along with Paul, I think) in the pre-existence of the second person of the trinity. But unless we believe in the pre-existence of Jesus of Nazareth, then it seems that his birth is still an event worth celebrating.

Finally, thanks for the suggestion of “O Come All Ye Faithful” as a better “happy birthday” song. That’s worth thinking about and possibly implementing in our church context.

You make a good point. I lay the blame here on the church,and especially on pastors, though perhaps not Lutheran pastors. Because the church has generally moved away from doctrinal preaching—or even just plain faithful theological/biblical preaching—people in the pews have lost the sense of what a cosmic, world-changing event the Incarnation was/is. Ditto the Death and Resurrection. Couple that with the decreasing difference between Christians and non-Christians in Western culture and the rampant civil religion is this country (God as protector and promoter of the USA), and you have a crisis.

I had hoped that the turn to narrative preaching would help. but because such preaching is often taken out of the grand narrative of the Bible and salvation, and is often deliberately anti-doctrinal/theological, it has not done what it should have/could have. Perhaps the recent reinvigoration of apocalyptic in NT theology, the broad recognition now that the Bible does not underwrite civil religion or empire, and the emergence of a missional approach to church and to biblical interpretation will change all that. Let’s hope.

In the meantime, perhaps the best thing to say to family and friends is something like, “If God has really become human in Jesus, maybe we need to think of something with a bit more substance than ‘Happy Birthday’ to honor him—like ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’—singing all the verses!” (Take a look!)

Thanks for this post. I understand your point, and I have attempted in the past couple of years to communicate this point to friends and family as I encounter this perspective on Jesus’ birth. The problem I have encountered is that some who celebrate Jesus’ birthday do not recognize as easily the theological and Biblical difficulties with the position. Celebrating Jesus’ ‘birthday’ works because he was a man whose birth we honor and celebrate, just as we do with your birthday or mine. That Jesus was ‘no ordinary human’ only makes celebrating HIS birthday more important.
The problem, I have discovered, seems to be deeper than just short-changing what Jesus’ birth is about; it is a problem of not fully grappling with the magnitude of what God has done in Christ and what it might mean to be “in Christ.” It seems to me that until this deeper issue is dealt with, the point about Christmas not being Jesus’ birthday will be taken as a debatable opinion, rather than the theological issue you (and I) see it as. I am not yet sure how to deal with this other than trying to show/describe/communicate in new ways what Scripture says about the nature of faith and God’s work in Christ to a Christian culture that has largely (not completely!) lost sight of this. Any thoughts? Have you encountered this as well?