the holiday of stuff
The angel said to them. ‘Look: I’ve got good news for you, news which will make everybody very happy.’ — Luke 2:10
One of the mistaken teachings I received from the church in my childhood was that we must not make Christmas about the stuff. Jesus is the “reason for the season” meant there was nothing else that should be celebrated.
But that makes Christmas an either/or kind of season, and the news from the angel meant nothing of the sort. Christians are both/and kinds of people. We celebrate Jesus, and all the stuff he brought with him for our joy.
Doug Wilson makes this point brilliantly, and with a smile on his face. Be encouraged as you read to make this the holiday of stuff.
“We are marking our days during Advent, building up to one of the great Christian holidays. This is a potent holiday, one that secularists appear to understand better than we sometimes do.
They want to stamp out any vestige of the historic Christian faith in this “winter celebration,” and their secularist jihad is not irrational. They know how powerful this story is. This being the case, let us make a point of telling the story in the right way, and very loudly.
In the first place, do not fall for the lie that the spirit of Christmas is an ethereal kind of thing. This is the celebration of the Incarnation, when the eternal Logos of God took on a material body, which he still has. Do not, therefore, join in the general lamentations about “materialism.” This is a celebration of God taking on a material body. It is therefore a holiday that should focus on stuff.
By stuff, I mean ribbons, decorations, fudge, wreaths, cider, presents, feasting, toasts, shopping with joy, putting up a tree, sending cards, learning a Christmas piece on the piano, and more fudge.
Of course, we all know how to sin with stuff — we were living in a pretty earthy state of sin before the Messiah came. But he did not come to whisk us out of this world in order that we might go celebrate some kind of Gnostic holiday up in Heaven. We are to honor King Jesus with our stuff. So do not drink too much, do not run up your credit cards, and don't try to buy friends with presents.
BUT God's answer to sin begins with the Incarnation. We do not escape from sin by denying, or trying to deny, his method for saving us. Our salvation lies in receiving, resting, accepting, and imitating. And how do we imitate? One thing we must do is use stuff, and we can only do that by faith.”
PRAYER: Father and gracious God, we pray that the thicker we find the world, the more clearly we might be able to see you through it. We pray that you would enable us to see your splendor in absolutely everything you have given, and that we would also see something of that gracious splendor in the gifts we are picking out for others. Help us to imitate you, we pray, in Jesus' name, and amen.
