Friends , year after year during Advent, many of us Christians lament about the secularization of Christmas. We complain how the culture has removed Jesus from his own birthday celebration. We hear here and then politicians promising to safeguard Christmas from the secular.
But, the reality is that the birth of Jesus was about as secular as it could be. It didn’t happen in a church or a temple. It happened in a barn. There wasn’t anything traditionally religious about it; no chanting, preaching, no religious icons or artifacts—just the stable straw and a few farm animals.
The closest human being besides his mother and father was an innkeeper, a businessman, trying to deal with more guests than he could accommodate—hungry guests who wanted food and wine and in the middle of it all, a moment of humanity and grace when he allows a late arriving couple, she very pregnant, to sleep out back in the barn. It is a very secular event.
I make the case that the message of Christmas is about change . It is not about charity not a war on secularism . It is not about feeling guilty for being comfortable. It is about ordering our lives differently.
Near the end of his life, the man the baby of Bethlehem became, was teaching in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Pharisees, guardians of religious purity, keepers of the tradition, asked him “ Teacher, what is the greatest commandment?” Jesus brings the neighbor into the equation—the one who needs you, not just the nice folk next door with whom you’ve been exchanging “good mornings” and “good evenings” for years, but the man lying in the ditch, the despised racial minority, the social and religious and moral outsider, the very one whose life style you find abhorrent.
The message of Christmas is about transformation—personal and corporate. It is about a new way of living in relationship with the world, in relationship with other people.
Dr. Willy L Mafuta, Ph.D, Th.D
Senior Pastor,
Hopewell United Methodist Church, Hopewell, NJ 08525