Monday, December 4, 2017
577 - Go Ahead and Say It, Part 1
Spirituality Column #577
December 5, 2017
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Go Ahead and Say It,
Part 1
By Bob Walters
I noticed it about this time last year.
In the frenzied American air of
last December’s worldly, transactional, holiday shopping season there appeared a
startling and seemingly miraculous free gift.
It was a newly-found public ease among shoppers, shopkeepers, waiters, whomever,
of exchanging that most basic, sincere, traditional, and holy of seasonal
utterances.
“Merry Christmas.”
People I didn’t know randomly said
it to me. I smiled and said it right
back.
“Praise God,” I’d think to myself.
Since the 1970s, “Happy Holidays”
and “Season’s Greetings” – perfectly fine, fitting, and long-standing seasonal
euphemisms – have been at first overwriting and then undercutting the public
expression of a simple and heartfelt “Merry Christmas.” The ascendance of
cultural pluralism and political correctness these past decades – plus the
vigorous and parallel attempt in politics, academia, and mass media to either
ignore God altogether or at least secularly recalibrate and redefine God,
Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and all that Christianity means to humanity – conspired
to remove Christ from Christmas.
It doesn’t take a genius to see
what happened to change that in late 2016. Seismic American political events
shook virtually everything everybody thought they knew about who, exactly, the
American people were. The quake seemed less
about who won and lost at the top of the presidential election ticket and more
shock and awe at a revelation of the unimaginably possible: the freeing effect
of a precipitous citizen-led electoral break from the juggernaut of recent
American “intellectual” groupthink.
Why not rebel further and say
“Merry Christmas”?
The 2016 pre-election political polls
were unbelievably, calamitously wrong.
And I honestly pray – and wonder whether – recent, much-ballyhooed polls
about people and their fading Christianity are just as wrong. Is Jesus more in our hearts than polls
reveal? I sense – I hope – He is. He can
be. Saying “Merry Christmas” can’t hurt.
One thing I do know is that polls
have no effect on the truth of salvation in Jesus Christ. Another thing I know – because it is everywhere
in the Bible – is that few people will “get,” i.e., accept, the whole Jesus
thing even though John 3:16, in Jesus’ own words, says His grace and eternal
salvation are a gift to all of humanity: Republicans, Democrats, right, left …
you know, anybody who is a sinner. Name
and claim that.
“Merry Christmas” is the kindest
thing I can say to anybody. Jesus came
into this world to give, not to get; to save, not to condemn; to love, not to
exclude. And any one of us can help Jesus
share that gift with a simple yet profound nod, “Merry Christmas.”
A Catholic priest in Ireland last
week said not to say, not to use, nor even refer to the word “Christmas”
because – the priest said and the media enthusiastically reported – “Christmas”
has been co-opted by the worst, greediest, least Godly people in society.
But that is exactly who Jesus came
to save. So, I’m sayin’ it.
Merry Christmas!
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) predicts “Merry Christmas” next will
become a political more than religious football, but urges all not to fumble or
punt Jesus.
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