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Christmas: What's Real, What's Not, & How To Handle the Holiday
68 Plays2 years ago
In this Christmas Sermon Slice, Ridley Barron and Dan Sanchez share their personal experiences and reflections on navigating the holiday season within a Christian context. From exploring the meaning behind the star of Bethlehem to debunking common misconceptions about the Christmas story, our hosts invite listeners to consider the intent behind their holiday celebrations. They touch on the blending of Christian and pagan traditions, the concept of contextualization in Christianity, and even the portrayal of Santa Claus in Christian families. With a focus on keeping Christ at the center of Christmas, Ridley and Dan also discuss the significance of creating traditions that reflect the true spirit of the season. So, grab a cup of hot cocoa, cozy up by the fire, and join us for this insightful and thought-provoking Christmas episode.
Timestamps:
00:00 Ridley Baron discusses Christmas story misconceptions.
04:23 Lessons of selflessness and community in show.
08:18 Diversity of Christian practices and beliefs worldwide.
10:02 Christmas tree symbolized Christianity, spread from Germany.
14:30 Fascination with the truth of Jesus' arrival.
18:48 Debate over star's role in Bethlehem's glory.
21:02 Competition for religious social media posts explained.
23:10 Encouragement for pastors to embrace familiar stories.
27:16 Artistic honor and faith can draw people.
30:15 Displaying nativity scenes, honoring God, family, generosity.
33:46 Family Christmas tradition with candle lighting, readings, carols.
35:49 Podcast spreading gospel message, share and transform.
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Transcript
Introduction to Christmas Traditions
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the grove hill podcast i'm here with really barren to. Break down our sermon series and list last week's really you let off with talking about the christmas story because it's christmas time we was gonna talk about the christmas story it's always fun to me is somebody in a congregation to be like what angle are they gonna take
Misconceptions in the Christmas Story
00:00:19
Speaker
this year.
00:00:19
Speaker
You know because like you get to talk about this every year and i've heard people preach on the christmas songs and the history And you decided to go after the gifts of the the wise men the magi you started with frankincense But then I decided to take this podcast episode in kind of a different angle angle because you spend a good amount of time talking about some of the
00:00:41
Speaker
Talking about your hunger for truth, your hunger for what really was, because around Christmas, and as much as I love Christmas, gosh, I love this holiday, there is a lot of mystery here, to put it lightly. There's a lot of stories that circulate in traditions and ways we picture this story that we 100% know are inaccurate.
00:01:05
Speaker
or are still kind of ambiguous. So I thought we'd take an episode and kind of like take a look at some other misconceptions about Christmas because I thought it'd be fun.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yeah. And, and, you know, let's go ahead and put this disclaimer out here on this conversation immediately. If somebody's listening to this, they're going to go, but I always heard that so-and-so, you know, and that's the case. We hear so many explanations as to why we believe certain parts of the story or why we've adopted certain traditions into our observance of Christmas. And, you know, some of it's
00:01:40
Speaker
Some of it's grounded in some strong faith traditions that came out of the Reformation even in that period. Some of it is just completely cultural shift.
Personal Christmas Experiences and Traditions
00:01:50
Speaker
And we just have to, we have to filter through that kind of stuff and kind of get back to what really matters in this holiday. I'm like you, man. I'm all about holiday. Start singing this beginning to look like Christmas in October. And Christmas is a fun one. It's festive. I mean,
00:02:07
Speaker
I don't, I'm not a person who really likes winter. So as it's starting to get colder, it's starting to get darker, but then Christmas is coming out with all the lights and the food and the festivities festivities. It's very nostalgic for Americans. It's become, it's become a big, big part, uh, way to kind of end the year in like a celebration. Right. Yeah. That for a whole month is a celebration. Yeah. And for me, I think a lot of it goes back to my growing up. I had a very big, very strong, very connected family.
00:02:37
Speaker
And so Christmas always meant time with my cousins, time with my grandmother. And I'm not just talking about a two hour visit. I'm talking about we'd go spend three or four days down there hanging out, you know, playing with everybody's new toys and all those kinds of things, but there were connections that are made that still exist to this day. So it's a fond recollection of what Christmas is in the past look like.
00:02:59
Speaker
I'm going to throw a general question out to you before we dive into any specifics around Christmas. There's so many details on Christmas, but we know for sure that Christmas is absolutely a mess of a ball, like a knot of all kinds of things.
Debating the Elements of Christmas
00:03:17
Speaker
Some of it really good around some very cool Christian traditions from way back.
00:03:21
Speaker
And then we have, of course, there's a mixture of some pagan things in there that have been Christianized from throughout the millennia here. And then there's some things within the last hundred years that are very much from just pure commercialism that have seeped into the holiday.
00:03:37
Speaker
With knowing that Christmas is a blend, are you a fan of like, we should celebrate Christmas and keep it as it is? Are you more in the middle of saying like, hey, let's get rid of some things, but keep the things that are specifically Christian. Have you ever doubted Christmas? Obviously we're doing Christmas as a church, so I'm like, you're probably not on the, let's sacrifice Christmas for Hanukkah or something. No, no, no, no. I feel like that it always comes back to the intent of your heart.
00:04:07
Speaker
There are some things that the culture has pushed into the Christmas holiday that I look at it and go, you know what? It has absolutely nothing to do with the real meaning of Christmas, but it's a sweet thing. It creates a great holiday. I mean, Lord knows the Grinch has nothing to do with Christmas.
00:04:23
Speaker
It's not founded in the story at all. But when you watch that show with your kids, doesn't it teach you some great lessons about selflessness and what it means to give to others and what connectivity among a community can look like? I mean, there's a whole thousand different ways you could take any number of these things.
00:04:39
Speaker
So I think, especially as a parent, as you're approaching the holidays, it's all about the intent. What are you trying to teach your kids? What are you trying to show them? And as long as the story of Jesus and his arrival on earth is at the core of most of what you do, these other fringe elements don't, they don't set me off a whole lot.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, I remember being challenged in my 20s through a family member who was like really like had heard from somebody like she didn't make this up herself but she'd gotten on from some preacher that Christmas was a pagan holiday and that we shouldn't celebrate it and that we should celebrate what Jesus celebrated which would have been Hanukkah.
00:05:17
Speaker
Since then, I've learned two different things. One, if I've actually been to Israel, my brother lives in Israel, and what I've learned from them is that their holidays don't look like the original
Cultural Adaptation of Christmas Traditions
00:05:28
Speaker
holidays either. Right. Right. Exactly. They change dramatically. They have a holiday that looks more like our Halloween called, I'm going to butcher the name, but it's kapiram, or puram, purim, something like that.
00:05:43
Speaker
They dress up. This is literally the story of Esther. They celebrate, and they all dress up in costumes. We dress up in Halloween because the main message in that story is God is hidden in behind the scenes, so he's hidden behind a mask. But that's not how they celebrated that a long time ago. That's a more newer thing. All holidays and all traditions, even in the Jewish culture in Israel itself, change and transform and have different things. So has Christmas. Lots of changes have been made.
00:06:12
Speaker
For sure. And, you know, with, with Jesus come into most of our churches on Christmas day, as we celebrated the Christmas season and go way to go, you guys are doing a great job. And that's probably questionable, but, but it's like so many other things. I think the, the essence of what we try to teach our families, that what we try to teach our children is that Christmas is the greatest story ever told because God's willingness to invade humanity with his son. Yeah.
00:06:42
Speaker
And there's so many different ways to go about that. And I'm like you, I've heard the stories about why we have green Christmas trees that had something to do with pagan connectivity. And you know, the whole reason that December 25th was chosen as a day was that it was already a pagan celebration and some Roman emperor who was a Christian or somebody, I don't remember if he was Roman, but some Christian along the way said, Hey, let's just take that holiday, steal it and make it our own.
00:07:05
Speaker
Which kind of brings me back. I was working at a missions organization and I had to learn. I took some college classes while I was there and they talked about different levels of contextualization. I think there's actually a name for it in missiology, but how far are you willing to bend Christianity to be part of the culture?
00:07:26
Speaker
You know, are you going to dress up like their priests and be like the Jesus version of their system? You know, there's like all these different levels and decisions missionaries have to make. And I think it became pretty convinced that I'm like, you know,
00:07:37
Speaker
Get like you can bring christianity christianity is very flexible like christianity could look very different in india as long as it's all about jesus and following his commandments and his ways you can Take a culture and transform it but still leave the culture intact and there's different debates on whether that's the right way to do it And i'm like, well, it's certainly not like making it look like western christianity Like you don't have to do that We have a particular way of dressing and approaching it and all that kind of stuff But I like it like it look different
00:08:06
Speaker
So, I look at that, I look at that missiological context, and I'm like, just apply it to Christmas, and that's what Christians have been doing. There's a reason why there's some pagan practices in Christmas, is because we've Christianized it. And that's okay. I think you bring up a very worthy conversation, Dan, because when people go, well, how much does our Christmas holiday look like original Christianity? Well, the next question is, okay, who's Christianity are you talking about?
Origins and Symbols of Christmas
00:08:32
Speaker
I mean, obviously there are some key beliefs that are consistent all the way around the world because of the beliefs taught in the Bible. But if you go across the border in New Mexico, most of the churches there have never heard of a nursery. You try to do church without a nursery here in the United States and people will go, what are you thinking? Kids can't go in at that age into a church service. You go over to India, they don't even have a building. They're meeting outside under a tree somewhere.
00:08:55
Speaker
There's a lot of hills we can die on when we talk about Christianity, but to me, the ones that are important are the ones that are clearly expressed black and white in the scripture for us. That's the ones we have to fight to protect.
00:09:07
Speaker
It's funny you brought up the Christmas tree. I had heard also that that was a pagan one and then started hearing whispers of it actually being a Christian one. And so I actually looked it up and found a pretty convincing story. Again, it's hard to know because I might get to go back into the old Germanic writings in order to decipher, was it really a pine tree? The guy I listened to was talking about it like, well,
00:09:29
Speaker
They actually worship oak trees here and they gave an explanation why there was like probably an oak tree, not a pine tree and gave a convincing story. It's like, no, Christians have kind of talked about pine trees as a while as a Christian symbol because of its arrow pointing to God. Right. It's the shape of it. And there was a story about a saint who went into a Germanic tribe and cut down an oak tree and they all thought he was going to get struck down by the gods because they they worship these oak trees. And in its place, a pine tree or a spruce grew.
00:09:57
Speaker
Wow. And that was the miracle that really kicked off the tradition of the tree becoming a Christian symbol. And it kind of was this like symbol within Christianity, kind of floating around here and there. And then it became really, it became more popular in Germany. Of course, this is where it happened is Germanic tribes and their pagan religion like turned over.
00:10:19
Speaker
It didn't become a really popular thing until some of these German traditions went over to the UK and a prince at the time Like it was kind of like in vogue to like try these like foreign things So we put up a Christmas tree in his house sent out a parse card to everybody with his family with the Christmas tree in the background And then everybody had to do it because the prince had done it Yeah, that kicks off the fact that we all do Christmas trees. Now was this one Prince? That's pretty cool I've never heard that story
00:10:46
Speaker
But let's go back to the secondary character of Christmas who is Santa Claus. If you put 10 Christian, and I'm talking devout Christian families in a room together and ask them, how do you approach Santa Claus? You'll get everything from don't mention that because it has nothing to do with Christmas, to people who wholeheartedly embrace it, to those who go, well, we know it's not.
00:11:10
Speaker
legitimately related to Christmas, but there was a St. Nicholas who blessed people with gifts and you'll get all kinds of explanations. And I feel like we started getting into this. Theological gymnastics to try to justify what we're doing as part of our holiday, you know? Yeah, that's a hard one. I have my own fears about that.
00:11:30
Speaker
Yeah, I understand. Out of all the Christmas stuff, that's probably the most debated one across families. Right. You want to throw down where you stand on it? Yeah, we should probably put a disclaimer out here before we say this. If your children are listening, you might want to send them to another room. I went through growth myself as a parent with that particular topic. Early on, we adopted it.
00:11:55
Speaker
and with our kids, and just kind of was very careful to say, hey, Santa Claus is really fun, but Jesus is the reason for the season early on. And then as our kids got older, we turned the attention to the focus of, it's the spirit of what St. Nicholas did. His willingness to set aside himself and to bless others as unfortunate, who needed resources and things like that throughout the holidays. We never came out full circle and said, don't have anything to do with Santa.
00:12:24
Speaker
We kind of changed our thinking on that just to kind of say, you know what? The reason that St. Nicholas became the central figure that he came as part of the holidays
Santa Claus in Christian Traditions
00:12:33
Speaker
is because he reflected Jesus very well. Yeah.
00:12:37
Speaker
It's fun to actually find his act. I think I've seen some videos. Of course, the Catholics are very prolific when actually writing about it because it's St. Nicholas. It's one of their saints. So they have some great writings on it. It's a great story to tell around Christmas, like finding a longer story to actually sit down and read it with the kids because it's a great story. And it's a true story. It's the best part about it, right?
00:13:00
Speaker
Maybe you should find a version for that for us to share with our families at our church. They might, might enjoy that. Sharing it with their kids. I'll find it. I'll put it in the show notes. After this, I'll go find a version that I've seen before. I think there's, there's YouTube videos that talk, tell it and there's ways you can read it. Yeah. Um, but it's a great story. I take the route with my kids actually grew up believing in Santa Claus. I think I was pretty old before I stopped believing. I was probably like eight and when I figured it out by myself, my mom's like, yeah. Yeah.
00:13:27
Speaker
With my kids, we decided not to just because, I don't know, we wanted to turn the focus to Jesus. I felt like that was the most more important thing. It's not that some families who do do this Santa thing aren't pointing to Jesus, but it's just this decision we made. We've baked birthday cakes for Jesus on Christmas when our kids were really little to try to make it like, this is why we're doing this. This is birthday time. Right.
00:13:52
Speaker
We did that with our kids with my youngest. We, we finally did the same thing. We did birthday party for Jesus thing. Happy birthday to Jesus, you know, as part of the celebration. I mean, so we did, we did some adaptive stuff along the way as we kind of were trying to, you know, parenting is as adaptive as it is, you know, you don't have all the interest when you start out, you're, you're garnering information from grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends and reading material along the way.
Retelling the Nativity Story
00:14:17
Speaker
And you take the good with the bad and you try to figure out what really
00:14:20
Speaker
honors God and all that. What are some inaccuracies floating around about Christmas that every time you see it, you're like, man, that wasn't true. I guess, like I said, Sunday, I'm kind of a stickler for the truth.
00:14:36
Speaker
You know, this whole idea that the wise men were there with the shepherds at the same time, the story becomes very condensed into, oh, this, you know, maybe two or three day period where Jesus is exalted and all that kind of stuff. But the whole thing to me is very fascinating that over a couple of years, this, this arrival of Jesus from the minute Jesus is announced to Mary and Joseph to the moment that he kind of disappears from history for a few years after he, you know, they returned to Nazareth.
00:15:04
Speaker
That whole story is really fascinating to me that God was orchestrating everything from the announcement to his parents all the way to the removal of Mary and Joseph and Jesus from Jerusalem to completely to Egypt in order to protect them. There's the stable out back. We see these pictures of stables and horses and sheep all gathered around. And the truth is that most of the families in Bethlehem
00:15:34
Speaker
had no, they didn't have that many sheep. They didn't have that many livestock. Most of them were lucky to have a sheep or a donkey, you know, just to get by. And then I guess probably my favorite one is the poor innkeeper that we give such grief to. There's no room in the inn and there really was never really any inn. Most likely it was probably just somebody's house that, that they wound up staying in. So.
00:15:56
Speaker
There's several things that kind of, I mean, they don't set me off or whatever. I know the story has been told over and over again, but I'd love for us to start getting it more right and more wrong when we tell these stories to our kids. I feel like I've seen Jesus born and everything. Under a house, to a cave, to a wooden barn, to a barn that looks like an American barn. It's like, which is it? Yeah. And one of the new ones that recently
00:16:21
Speaker
Again, I can't remember where I just saw this recently, but somebody started trying to tie it into Roman soldiers who actually came to, to observe Jesus's birth. And I'm like, don't know where you got that. Pretty sure they weren't involved. In fact, if anything, they were there to kill the babies. So not sure why you felt like that was important.
00:16:40
Speaker
It's funny. One thing that I learned a long time ago that every time I see it now, I'm like, ha, that's funny, was a part of the Christmas story is Mary riding on a donkey. Yes. Which I found out Mary didn't ride on a donkey. And the reason why they know that is because donkey, like if you had a donkey, like you were pretty well off. That'd be like driving a Lexus today.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yes. But we know they weren't well off because when they went down to make a sacrifice, they offered some pigeons or some doves, right? Which was like literally the cheapest of cheap sacrifices. Yeah. All good Jews and Mary was a good Jew. Right. If she had, well, she would have offered something higher, like a ram or a sheep or a mole or something. She would have brought something more substantial. Yeah.
00:17:22
Speaker
But we put her on a donkey, so I guess we can't take this. Can't understand why, how Mary would have walked pregnant all the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem. It's a long walk. Something else that kind of makes me unsettled about the story as it's retold every year is I feel like Joseph gets a bum rap.
00:17:40
Speaker
because he, it's kind of like he's almost just along for the ride that he really doesn't play a role in the story. But to be truthful, we have to, if we're going to tell the story the right way, we have to acknowledge that Joseph was obedient. He didn't divorce Mary. I mean, the book's very clear. He, that was an option to divorce her. He, he decided to listen to the angel. He, he helped her make a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem as a pregnant woman, which was not an easy feat.
00:18:10
Speaker
Uh, he was there by her side. He got her into Egypt to protect the baby. I mean, there's a lot of things he did that were, we don't really talk about a whole lot, but for a man in that day and age who was not wealthy, he, he made great sacrifice to make sure that Joseph and Mary were taken care of. Absolutely. Is that the topic of next week's sermon? It's not, but maybe it should be. Maybe I should throw that in there. I think, I think that deserves a mention in there. So I think you're right. We probably don't talk about Joseph enough. Kudos to Joseph.
The Star of Bethlehem Debate
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah. What are some other inaccuracies that you've seen or things that make you roll your eyes? Wow. I don't know that it's necessarily an accuracy, but there's a whole lot of conversations about the stars. You and I were talking about that Sunday after church that there are people who believe it was indeed a star and there's lots of astronomical evidence that's kind of being presented to document that.
00:19:07
Speaker
the alignment of planets. I talked a little bit about Sunday about how I'm becoming very open to the idea that it just was the glory of God that shone over Bethlehem. Because as you listen to or read through the story, there's some very erratic behavior from this supposed star. So I think any one of those options is viable. Not a hill I'm prepared to die on at this point until somebody gives me some stronger evidence
00:19:33
Speaker
But I do think that it's a fascinating thing to, again, just to dig a little deeper and see what history, what writers in history tell us about those. I mean, Lord knows there were tons of people that day and age that were watching the stars all the time. So there's got to be some kind of good historical evidence out there that says, this is what we observed, you know, at that point. Yeah. Shepherds, shepherds, you know, being the lowliest of the lowly in that area.
00:20:00
Speaker
Sometimes I think we tried to make them a little bit more glamorous when they were, but shepherds were not, again, they were pretty much poverty-stricken guys. They worked one of the lowliest jobs there was in the culture at that time. And for them to be acknowledged and brought to the side of the manger at that first Christmas, it's kind of a
00:20:21
Speaker
It's kind of an acknowledgement from God to say, you know what? This new gospel is for everyone, even the lowliest of the low in culture. So yeah, lots of twists and turns to this story that I think are really, really fascinating. Can't think of anything really more as an error that I would just go, gosh, we got to fix that. But again, just keep digging in and keep reading new stuff coming out all the time about things they're finding out about that culture of that day.
00:20:48
Speaker
When you see memes and different people saying things on Facebook, do you feel like you have to look at everything like very questioningly, questioningly? Yes. How do you evaluate things? Is there passing by your feed?
00:21:02
Speaker
I do. I try and maybe I'm a little too cynical when I look at them, but I think there's this, it's like this competition, this unspoken competition on social media to come up with the next great warm, fuzzy feeling when we put these religious posts. And I think that gets ramped up at Christmas and at Easter because
00:21:22
Speaker
These are two very, very familiar stories, even for people who are no longer in the church. The world talks about these stories, even though they may not be faithful followers. So there's a lot of familiarity there. And I think even pastors feel this pressure to come up with a new twist or a new angle on it. So they want to be the one that makes this meme, this post and everybody goes, Oh, how wise, you know?
Social Media Influence on Christmas Narratives
00:21:45
Speaker
So this past Sunday, I was talking specifically about them.
00:21:49
Speaker
a meme that I saw earlier last week where it said that 400 years of silence between the Old Testament and the New Testament is represented by one page in our Bible, but that 400 years of silence was broken by the sound of a baby crying in the manger. We sound sweet and I get what they're trying to say. And I went home and actually looked at the meme, like 10 other people posted it that afternoon and realized that it actually was originally stated by one of my favorite speakers.
00:22:17
Speaker
So I started thinking about that. And I was like, well, you know, that's not really true because God wasn't silent all the way up until Jesus's voice. He spoke to Zachariah. He spoke to Anna. He told them he spoke to Joseph and Mary through his angels to say, there's going to be a baby born. You're going to name him Jesus. So God was speaking all the way through that. And I believe that even when we talk about 400 years of silence, I think that means that God did not have a prophet who came
00:22:43
Speaker
To Israel to give any things, but I still think he was speaking to individuals all, all through that time. Yeah. And the big, and the big story is like the Maccabean, you know, revolt or not revolt, but like the thing with the candles, like the whole reason why they celebrate Hanukkah today. And they had enough oil and it was a miracle that the oil lasted long enough to go their whole celebration. Right. I was still paying attention to that. You know, God was still involved in all those things. He was doing stuff.
00:23:10
Speaker
I would, if there's any, not that I have any misconceptions that some pastors sitting around listening to what we're talking about right now, but if there's any pastors, maybe even young pastors who are out there, my encouragement to you is don't try to improve the greatest story ever told. You can't.
00:23:27
Speaker
And it, I get it. It's hard every year to come back to this story and to the story of Easter and to tell it to people who've heard it hundreds of times and try to get their eyes to see it fresh, afresh every time. That's a hard task. It's Christmas in Easter. I had a seminary professor who used to tell me this Christmas and Easter are what people call us pass through sermons.
00:23:50
Speaker
because what you get is a lot of people who are there on Sunday morning because they're here for the weekend to visit their family in the holidays and they might not be at church any other reason. So you got one shot to tell them a very familiar story and to capture their attention. And I think that's where we get it misconstrued that it's our ability to capture their attention rather than it's the Holy Spirit's ability to capture their attention.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah. There's a phenomenon because of social media and I'm in the marketing world. This is what I do. Right. But everybody wants to be a quote unquote thought leader. Everybody wants to influence everybody else's thinking and that happens and plays out in the Christian world too. It does. And the number one rule of thought leadership is that you have to say something that's bifurcating, which is a fancy way of saying you have to be divisive or have a new take on things, a hot take.
00:24:40
Speaker
You know, you have to say something spicy that has a different new way of looking at everything. Right. Yep. Which sometimes is needed. Right. And then, but most of the time is literally, I, I, I'm a marketer talking to marketer most of the times. So we all kind of get the game of, Oh, that's just, that's been said before, but now you're seeing, okay, I see what you're doing there. So we all kind of like not at each other, but most people, I don't think understand like when you're seeing spicy takes, generally it's not a new take.
00:25:09
Speaker
And then you have to realize that the incentive for that is so strong and the reaction to it usually on social so strong that's the reason why we're seeing it just why everything on social media has a divisive angle to it or like a new take like that meme that got shared around it was like I haven't heard I've never thought about it that way before it's a it's a different take.
00:25:28
Speaker
It's kind of funny that we started out this conversation talking about Christmas and how culture has imposed itself into or onto the Christmas story.
Cultural and Religious Interactions
00:25:38
Speaker
And here you are now talking about how, as a church, we've allowed the culture to impose this idea of bifurcation in topics and things like that into the church. And we've accepted that. We've adapted to that. So to me, they kind of reflect each other. Do we act like we're
00:25:54
Speaker
where Puritans and just avoid social media altogether. Some have chosen that route, but I think rather it's wise to use the tools we have, just using for God's glory with discipline.
00:26:08
Speaker
You could say that the culture was influenced by us though. I'm like, if you go back to the Reformation, you're like, ah, who started this? I'm like, Martin Luther. Yeah, yeah. You're right. Good point. Was it us or was it the culture? I don't know. It's certainly gotten to an unhealthy point now.
00:26:26
Speaker
Yeah. I think most, especially, uh, evangelical people would be shocked to realize how many songs that are in their hymnals these days, or even in just our courses. How many of those have been impacted by secular musicians or even German bar songs? Yeah. That's what I've heard. Martin Luther wrote several, several of his hymns just using the tunes for German bar songs. I mean, so the influence of the culture isn't always necessarily evil.
Art and Beauty in Christian Worship
00:26:51
Speaker
I think it's got more to do with what you do with it.
00:26:54
Speaker
Absolutely. It's about bringing it back to what actually matters and bringing your heart back to the situation. And it's interesting to think about like hymns is more holy, but actually they're just old school bar. That's what used to be bar songs. Have you ever heard of like Christians? Like Christians were the ones that invented beer to get people off gin because water was so unsafe for drinking. I haven't heard that one.
00:27:15
Speaker
Well, if we go back to the real essence of the conversation, who is the greatest artist, the greatest musician, the greatest creator of all time, it's God himself. And so what I think that we're getting way off the topic here, but I think this is important to hear. I think one of the greatest travesties in the world today is that we have letting the secular culture take over artistic forms. Yes.
00:27:40
Speaker
Christians could bring great honor to God if we would bring back the great arts, the great artists, the guys who wrote the great novels, the people who did the great portraits, the music that honored God, Bach and Beethoven and people like that. They were all Christians who were honoring God with their gifts. And I think if we got back to that, people would probably be drawn back to the Creator who created all these things.
00:28:06
Speaker
I've noticed there's a subtle undertone in evangelicalism that puts beauty and that kind of craftsmanship into a feminine corner. I've even Bethlehem Seminary, this John Piper's school, I had a friend who was a faculty there, and they had a whole class dedicated to beauty. But the faculty would often call it beauty school.
00:28:30
Speaker
Oh gosh. Giving it that kind of label like, oh, he went to beauty school. And I'm like, you realize you're feminizing something that's not inherently feminine, right? Yeah. But there are some parts of the church that really take beauty seriously. I say most churches actually have more of a pragmatic approach
00:28:54
Speaker
And I see it even in our church, and I'd even like that part about it sometimes, that we're meeting in a skating rink, and it's not about how beautiful the building is, and there's something beautiful about that, about how it's about the community. But at the same time, there is something fascinating that I really do believe points to God when you walk into it like the Catholics are really into this, because they have a good theology of beauty. But they build beautiful cathedrals, and you walk in, you're like, wow.
00:29:20
Speaker
This is cool. And man, again, it just so much that it comes back to this realization. And this is where we've lost a lot of this connectivity to God is this realization that God creates all of us with intentionality. He put the passions inside of you that he put in you for a reason. The abilities.
00:29:38
Speaker
Some people can look at a sunset and think, man, that's a portrait waiting to happen. The next person can look at it and go, hey, there's a few more hours left in the day to plant hay. Well, both are honoring God by what you do. Both are honoring him with the gifts you've been given. One's no less important than the other. The key is recognizing God's fingerprints in it.
Family Traditions Honoring Jesus
00:30:00
Speaker
So bringing it back to our original conversation around Christmas.
00:30:05
Speaker
What are some ways or maybe even traditions that you have in your household that keeps Jesus front and center as the reason for the season? We're one of those that displays the nativity scene all over the house. There's like three or four or five different varieties, which hopefully the beauty of those create conversation pieces.
00:30:26
Speaker
Uh, with our kids growing up, we always, every Christmas Eve would read Luke chapter two, the familiar passage from one to 20 of the Christmas story and talk about that.
00:30:36
Speaker
we, I think even just the idea of honoring God through the presence of family and the importance of family, that we literally block time and travel a great distance to be together because we want to honor what God has gifted us and blessed us with in family. So those are some things there. And then one of the things that we did a few years ago that we started doing, again, just an attempt to break ourselves of materialism and those kinds of things as a family, we, we,
00:31:03
Speaker
We got real creative and decided we would take the passions of the person we were buying the gift for and do something for somebody else. So like, for instance, my wife is a water snob. She, she won't just drink any bottle of water. She has to have good tasting water. She puts it me, I'll drink out of water hose, you know, but I know how much she loves water. So the first Christmas we did this. Uh, I think I took a couple hundred dollars and donated it to organizations that build wells and other countries.
00:31:33
Speaker
So it wasn't anything for us. It was something for somebody else based on the passions of the person we were blessing. And it was just a sweet moment. We, you know, teaching our kids that Christmas doesn't have to be about what we get, but it's more about what we've been given and what we can give back to others. What were some of the ways you did that for your kids? Oh gosh. Um, now you're testing my memory, Lisa, Lisa's the gifter in the family. Most of the time trying to think what we did.
00:32:04
Speaker
Oh, well, one of the things like our daughter came home from one of those Christmas, uh, Christian concerts where they have the compassion kids display. And so one Christmas we adopted a couple of compassion kids cause she always kept going to those kids that make my heartbreak and that kind of stuff. So we adopted compassion kids and, and supported them all the way through age 17. Uh, did that in her honor. Really, really cool story about that someday when we got more time, I can tell you about that, but it was a kind of eye opening experience for them.
00:32:33
Speaker
A couple of our daughters really have a love and a passion for art and things like that. So we bought them things to help them do art to give to other people. So those were some cool ideas. Lisa could probably tell you great, greater detail. She's got the memory.
00:32:48
Speaker
We'll have to have her on the next episode. One thing we've started doing recently, and this is like, this is more Amy than me. She's the one who's been trying to get this is getting our own, um, advent candles. Um, because I don't know. I feel like we've lost a little bit, like.
00:33:08
Speaker
When there was the break from the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church had lots of holidays. Shoot, they have a reason for celebrating every day that you can literally look it up for different saints for every day and all that kind of stuff. But I'm like coming back to some of them like Lent or in this case like Advent. There's a lot of really beautiful things in there. I actually found one
00:33:26
Speaker
reading that I found really impactful. We joined some friends last Christmas for their Christmas. We got to spend Christmas with their family, which is really special, intimate time. And we got to see how they celebrated and then we're like stole, we're going to steal like most of their traditions. And my God, those are
00:33:42
Speaker
Those are Sanchez family traditions now we're gonna be doing this some of it was just like fun like they do fondue on Christmas yeah on Christmas Eve things like that but another thing they did was just lighting the candles and actually having a reading yeah that everybody got to share and I found a similar reading from the Moravians it's wonderful for families because there's places for children to read adults to read
00:34:03
Speaker
and it all finishes off with like a small Christmas carol song connected to the reading. My kids love it. We light the candle and then we go through the reading and then we sing the song together and we do it. It's an extended version on Christmas Eve, but this is one thing that we started doing. It's weekly on Sundays. Maybe you should collect those and bring them back to next week's and let's talk about some of those things. Maybe give some ideas for some of our people to do something different for the holidays.
00:34:32
Speaker
There you go. Let's try it. Let's bring Lisa on. We'll bring Amy on. We'll have some, a couple's podcast and talk about some of the readings. I'm holding them now on my hand. I'll link to them in the show notes. If you want to take an advanced peek at them, because it's really, they're literally like one page and then you just print off a copy for everybody. So everybody knows where they're at in the reading. Uh, but it kind of, I don't know, it creates one of those traditions that are meaningful and reconnects back to like what we're actually talking about here.
Reaffirming the True Meaning of Christmas
00:35:00
Speaker
So to wrap things up, Christmas, it's a wonderful holiday. It's a mixed bag of all kinds of things from the red that came from Coca-Cola's advertising campaigns long ago to Santa Claus and whether we should talk about him as a mystical creature or just a man who was a great man from the past. Regardless, we know that Christmas is really about Christ or really about focusing on what he did. Yes.
00:35:28
Speaker
And that's the thing to reflect on. So any way we can create habits or traditions to make that more of a focus for ourselves and for our family can't be a bad thing. Absolutely. It kind of goes back to Philippians 4-8. Whatever's noble, whatever's true, whatever's right, think on these things. If you can redirect your families thinking that direction in regards to Christmas, I say you've won.
00:35:49
Speaker
So thanks for listening to the Grove Hill podcast. We try to impact the life of every person with the whole gospel by any means possible, including this podcast. If it's blessed you, send it to somebody else, send it to your husband, send it to your wife. Let's make Christ the focus of this Christmas and be transformed in the process. Amen.