O Come Emmanuel
A common refrain that I hear constantly in Christmas conversations is how it resembles anything Christian. I don’t mean that nonsense of how trees and Nativities are some sort of subterfuge for keeping alive some ancient pagan saturnalia. Christians around the fourth century AD had actually set December 25 as a day of observing the Advent of the Christ, which was intended to be a rival celebration to the paganism. Still, many Christians in the twenty-first struggle finding anything Christian in the modern Christmas holiday.
This detachment from the Christ in Christmas is evident in the way popular expresses itself in music. Sometime ago I received a gift of a Christmas compilation music CD, and I was greatly appreciative of the present. One of the songs on the CD was about the sending to Santa Claus a long list of “Things I Want,” which included a “solid gold Harley with machine guns on the front.” The whole tune is very comical, and certainly a parody of the kind of crass materialism associate with the season these days.
On another Christmas compilation music CD gift, a musical group sang a story about Santa getting in an argument with his wife, driving to a bar, getting drunk, and wallowing in his own urine while shouting obscenities, before committing some unspeakable act. I suppose there is a shock value to this song, and it is no mystery that there is a dark night of the soul behind many holiday smiles.
So why do Christians persist in trying to capture the “reason for the season”? Why reboot with some Advent conspiracy?
There is a twelfth century hymn which goes:
O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear….
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!
Emmanuel means “God with us.” The Advent reminds us that God entered into the drama of history to bring people out of darkness. The Israelites were in a covenant relationship with Yahweh, but they failed to keep their covenant, and the result of this broken relationship was exile away from their promise land. Yahweh still extended mercy to His people, and He worked to redeem them from their sin. This very plan of redemption culminates with the coming of Jesus Christ. It is through Christ that God would fulfill the very purpose of the covenant He established with the descendants of Abraham, which was they would be blessed and a blessing to all the nations.
The reality of the situation is that we are all in exile far away from the promise land of what God intended for all people living in this creation. We are in the darkness, but a great light has come. People are in the darkness, they might try to fill the God shaped vacuumed with stuff on a Christmas list, or they might be in a place where everything has imploded into disarray. Things are bad, but they never have to be that way. Christ has come to save the lost.
~ WGN.
This detachment from the Christ in Christmas is evident in the way popular expresses itself in music. Sometime ago I received a gift of a Christmas compilation music CD, and I was greatly appreciative of the present. One of the songs on the CD was about the sending to Santa Claus a long list of “Things I Want,” which included a “solid gold Harley with machine guns on the front.” The whole tune is very comical, and certainly a parody of the kind of crass materialism associate with the season these days.
On another Christmas compilation music CD gift, a musical group sang a story about Santa getting in an argument with his wife, driving to a bar, getting drunk, and wallowing in his own urine while shouting obscenities, before committing some unspeakable act. I suppose there is a shock value to this song, and it is no mystery that there is a dark night of the soul behind many holiday smiles.
So why do Christians persist in trying to capture the “reason for the season”? Why reboot with some Advent conspiracy?
There is a twelfth century hymn which goes:
O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear….
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel!
Emmanuel means “God with us.” The Advent reminds us that God entered into the drama of history to bring people out of darkness. The Israelites were in a covenant relationship with Yahweh, but they failed to keep their covenant, and the result of this broken relationship was exile away from their promise land. Yahweh still extended mercy to His people, and He worked to redeem them from their sin. This very plan of redemption culminates with the coming of Jesus Christ. It is through Christ that God would fulfill the very purpose of the covenant He established with the descendants of Abraham, which was they would be blessed and a blessing to all the nations.
The reality of the situation is that we are all in exile far away from the promise land of what God intended for all people living in this creation. We are in the darkness, but a great light has come. People are in the darkness, they might try to fill the God shaped vacuumed with stuff on a Christmas list, or they might be in a place where everything has imploded into disarray. Things are bad, but they never have to be that way. Christ has come to save the lost.
~ WGN.
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