Falalalala and all that jazz




Matt at The Church of No People posted the other day about Christmas vegans. This got me thinking about an issue that has been gnawing on me since October-Christmas music.

Ok, so maybe you could say I am a little critical, or maybe you could just say radio stations start playing Christmas music way too early. A woman at work has had Christmas music on since Halloween. No lie. And, she doesn't even get the "Jesus thing." She may not even know that these carols are songs about Jesus and His birth. There is just this anesthesia effect that has happened in our culture. As a child you said grace, those words of thanks before a meal to some benevolent idea called God, so when you have a child, you teach him to say the same things. You were read bible stories like Noah's ark when you were young, so you read a child's story book bible to your son before he sleeps. You grew up singing Christmas carols, so you love them now. But you don't claim that God exists and you certainly don't want to consider changing how you live. You know just enough about God to be lulled into false assurance that God is too good a guy to let anything happen to you, like hell. Jesus is just a curse word.

Doesn't this bother anyone else? What are you willing to do about it?



Comments

WKen said…
That's part of my problem with the entire blending of the two Christmases (religious and secular). It does bother me, yes.

It also bothers me how many Christians pretend that it doesn't happen ... there are groups that think it's a big victory if they make stores have their cashiers saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy holidays."

On the flipside ... I listen to Christmas music all year. Not that much, mind you, but I think that "Joy to the World" is a great worship song, and have absolutely no fear of playing it in the middle of July.

At work, though? I restrained myself there.
December 27, 2008 at 8:10 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Carnival: Community

Image
Blog Carnival: Community Community is getting to be a buzzword that hardly seems recognizable.  It has become permanently connected with a metrosexual worship leader at the hip church which has an outreach into some impoverished place.  But is that community? Yesterday I wrote about Facebook's social networking site.  Did you know that there are more than 300 million active users and that 50% of their active users (returned to the site in the last 30 days) log on to Facebook in any given day and that the average user has 130 friends on the site? Is that community? Do we really have a community or do we talk so much about it and request friends by the busload because we desire it intensely? We were made for community.  Creator said it was not good for that first man to be alone.  Even Creator was not alone.  We need to walk with others.  We need our village.  We need them to not only walk with us a...
Read more

He's Calling

Image
I didn't sleep well last night. I kept waking up, wanting to write. Those nights are annoying, particularly when I am working 12 hours the next day so I have no business getting out of bed to write. But here is the thing that kept bugging me...what if God is calling us not to greatness, but to smallness? Yeah, weird thing to keep a person awake, huh? Our group that went to the Leadership Summit are praying for ways that we can put what we learned into practice. Look around your neighborhood-there is so much need. Look around your coworkers-enough need to depress you. Look around the world-so much need it can paralyze. And then I think about this thing with callings... What if it isn't about being called to a thing, but to be like Him? What if it doesn't matter where I am or what I do but how I do it? What if His only desire is for me to respond to this broken world as He does? Right where I am? Jesus stopped to love the kids, he held up important people to talk to a woman, ...
Read more

The Reason for the Season

Image
This post is participating in today's blog carnival on the word LOVE.  To read other posts, click here . As all my friends texted holiday wishes this Christmas, one stood out.  This one seemed to go against all the "Keep Christ in Christmas" and "Jesus is the reason for the season" bumper stickers.  This text said simply, U r the reason 4 the season. At first I thought she wrote it incorrectly, so I read it again looking for the typo.  But, there wasn't one. That's when it hit me: without me, there wouldn't be a need for Christmas. Ok, so that sounds somewhat egocentric, but hang in there with me.  God is this crazy amazing being made of love.  It is out of that crazy, amazing love that he chose to step into flesh, to show us that God does love us and that he didn't abandon us to the evil that surrounds us, to bring us back to this relationship.  God, the first and greatest lover, pursues us, rescues us.  O...
Read more