Monday, December 16, 2019
683 - Automatic Renewal
Spirituality Column #683
December 17, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Automatic Renewal
By Bob Walters
“Restore us to
yourself, Lord, that we may return; renew our days as of old.” – Lamentations
5:21
Traditionally
the prophet Jeremiah, who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., is
thought to be the author of Lamentations.
Perhaps the most spiritually tortured of the prophets, Jeremiah had a
lot to lament.
Jeremiah
saw the divine judgment on Jerusalem, among the lowest earthly moments in
Israel’s history. Whether Jeremiah
penned Lamentations or not – technically its writer is anonymous – the book,
says my NIV study Bible, “poignantly shares the overwhelming sense of loss that
accompanied the destruction of the city, temple, and ritual as well as the
exile of Judah’s inhabitants.”
Lamentations,
which follows Jeremiah in the Old Testament, is a deeply poetic and heavily
structured cry that complains not about God’s judgment but about Israel’s
disobedience. “Jerusalem has sinned
greatly and so has become unclean.” (Lam 1:8)
I bring
this up just before Christmas not as a lament that the sincere “Christmas
message” about hope and Jesus tends to get lost in the secular swirl of
commercial Yuletide largesse, but because I notice throughout history that God
keeps coming back for us. He does it
every year at Christmas. It’s like an
automatic renewal offer on a life insurance policy, and it extends over many
eras. We must return to Jesus.
I was surprised to learn just
recently, for example, that Christmas Day, December 25, formally became an
official United States federal holiday not until June 26, 1870, and then by
decree of President Ulysses S. Grant. Yes, it was right after the Civil War and it
provided a common point of celebration and reconciliation for severely torn and
previously regionally isolated national cultures. Before that Christmas was barely noticed,
gift-giving was basically unheard of, and in America, school was in session.
But notice this. Just then in history – 1870 – as science in
both Europe and America academically began to overtake theology, philosophy,
and the thinking arts, that is precisely when Christmas was installed here as a
national holiday. The scholarly world
was falling for Darwin and technology; and Christmas was put on the calendar.
Looking back you could almost see
it as a place-holder for America to re-find its Christian bearings. Christmas became popular at precisely the
point in history that science sought to nullify Christ. Jesus never goes away very far.
Christmas, a 4th-century
Roman creation, is not mentioned in the Bible.
In fact, no holidays, feasts, temples, or festivals are prescribed in
the New Testament. The Old Covenant of
Israel had all that stuff as a way to be in the presence of God, but the New
Covenant in Christ teaches that God’s love is in our hearts everywhere, all the
time.
“Old
Fashioned Christmas”? I’d say that
didn’t even exist much before the 1930s, or maybe the post-World War II
American cultural reset. It is
interesting to note the centuries-old development of celebratory Christmas
traditions – trees, gifts, wrapped
gifts, lights, Santa Clause, music, greeting cards, family gatherings,
community events, feasts, and charity services – that are really developments
of the last century or two.
Many of us
do not need Christmas to remember Christ.
But for many others, it provides an automatic renewal of a reminder that
Jesus is a very big deal. It’s up to us
to tell the story of God’s love, and I notice God is right there willing to
help us.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) loves Jesus but is a sucker for Christmas
traditions. BTW, here is a link to an
interesting article about the development of Christmas traditions: Christmas in 19th Century
America | History Today
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