Christmases Long Long Ago

Christ is born! Glorify Him! I love this traditional Orthodox Christian greeting at Christmastime. 

In today's post, I'm sharing with you a sermon I gave on 20 December 2020 at my parish in Virginia Beach. I've transcribed the 15 minute sermon from a recording and I've edited it some for you here.  

To make it easier to read, I'll be posting it in two parts. I hope you enjoy these humble reflections on Christmas and that you'll join me for part two!

My First Christmas

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!

Everyone that knows that I’m a genealogist might be expecting that I’m going to talk about genealogy; after all, this morning’s Gospel passage came from Matthew 1:1-25 on the genealogy of Christ. Instead, I’m going to talk about Christmas because it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about and it’s right around the corner. It has me reflecting back on my earliest Christmas memories. Every year around this time of the year we all tend to get a bit nostalgic.

As a little kid, I LOVED nature! My first books were actually Audubon field guides. They weren’t normal kids’ books like Doctor Seuss but were books about nature: trees, mammals, birds, insects and spiders – I had and still have a dozen of them. When my family decided to become Christians when I was 5, I found it pretty exciting that we’d have a huge tree standing in the living room at Christmas.

We had been Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group that doesn’t celebrate any holidays (birthdays or Christmas) but now we were Baptists. So we could have Christmas! Our house had an overlook so from the second floor you could look down into the first. With that in mind, my dad managed to get the tallest red cedar tree that he could find. My dad was so proud of that tree!

This particular Christmas morning was so exciting for me! My first Christmas! But this day, my house was filled with more nature than just this tree…because unbeknownst to us, that tall, beautiful red cedar also had a praying mantis nest inside. And Christmas morning, nature-loving Sam woke up to a house with seemingly billions of itty-bitty praying mantises all over the house. For me it made for an amazing Christmas, but for my 12-year old sister, not so much.  

For my family, this Christmas was especially significant because for us it was the first time that we went from self-identifying Christians that didn’t celebrate Christmas to now identifying as newly converted Christians and celebrating it.

Today I want us to look at some of the history of Christmas: why we do celebrate Christmas, what are some of the hymns that we sing in the Orthodox Church, and what we as Orthodox Christians believe about Christ.

History of Christmas

As Christians in our modern society, we often get trapped – especially as Orthodox in America – in other peoples’ culture wars. Notice, I said *other* peoples’, not ours. For example, there are many Christians who say there’s an “assault on Christmas!” They’ll say, “we know there’s an assault on Christmas because they say ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’” (Ignoring that we actually do have a lot of holidays from December to January.) And then people will respond with either of these two voices: 

Protestants will say “Keep Christ in Christmas!” 

And then Roman Catholics will say, “Keep the mass in Christmas!”

We have these two sides and then sometimes we as Orthodox get stuck in the middle of it.

But the assault on Christmas that we may be seeing did not come from other religions, it didn’t come from atheists, it didn’t come from politicians. It came from within the Christian world. 

You see, in the 1600s, the Puritans in New England had outlawed Christmas. And even before that, Protestant reformers had shunned the holiday saying that it had pagan origins. These Protestant reformers used this myth or partial-truth as a way of justifying the Reformation.

And then you have later on in the secular world, our atheist or agnostic friends will say, “well you know, you shouldn’t even be celebrating Christmas because it’s a pagan holiday celebrating the sun!” as a way of discrediting the feast. But ironically, those atheists and agnostics are actually using Christian arguments against the celebration.

What’s the truth? The history of Christmas – just like any history – is complicated!

We don’t know exactly when Christians first celebrated Christmas, but we do know that there was a later pagan holiday in Rome celebrating the sun that started in the 270s – over 200 years after Christ. It didn’t exist before Jesus. And that was only in Rome, yet Orthodox Christians were celebrating the feast all over the Christian world - not only in Rome. From Egypt to Constantinople, from Jerusalem to Armenia, we celebrated Christmas. So we know it can’t just be because there were some people celebrating the sun-god as if somehow they’re who gave us Christmas.  

We also know that the way we celebrate Christmas evolved over time. There’s another holiday around the corner: Epiphany or Theophany, the day we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord. Originally, for several hundred years, the Orthodox Church celebrated the Baptism and the Nativity of Christ on the same day. But in the West, the Church of Rome celebrated Christmas separately. Eventually by the late 300s and into the 400s, the Orthodox Church started the celebrate these feasts on two different days. And you even see in the Church in Armenia that they still celebrate these feasts together in January.

Today, there are many people who identify as Christians but who refuse to celebrate Christmas because they think we stole it from Roman pagans. But this ignores WHY we celebrate Christmas – what we believe about Christ and why this matters for our salvation. 

Next time, we'll look at some scripture and the hymns for Christmas and see what they can teach us about what we believe about Christ and why we celebrate this feast.

*****

My two worlds – Orthodox Christian ministry and genealogy – rarely combine quite like they did during this sermon, so I knew I had to share it with all of y'all here. Genealogy in the Bible, history of a family celebration, and even some stories of my childhood all together! 

I hope you'll join me for part 2 as I finish the sermon...and maybe even the praying mantises will make another appearance! 

Your ancestors deserve the best researcher, the most passionate story-teller, and the dignity of being remembered. So let's encounter your ancestors through family history and remember the past made present today! 

*Photo by freestocks on Unsplash