Keeping Christmas

Posted by DJL on Dec 11, 2020 in Worship | 6 comments

Knowing that this Christmas would be so very different than Christmases past, and knowing that so many pastoral leaders are not only having to make difficult decisions to keep their people and communities safe but then also explain and sometimes defend those decisions, and knowing that all of us are already pressed at this time of the year, even without a global pandemic… Know all of this, Ben Ciesik and Mary Pechauer (co-lead pastors at Bethlehem Lutheran Church of the Twin Cities) and I decided to publish some resources to help us keep Christmas amid the coronavirus in ways that are joyful, faithful, and safe.

The site we created – KeepingChristmas.org (I still can’t believe that name was available! 🙂 ) – is up and has three areas that may be of help. In the first, we’ve posted a letter I drafted connecting our decisions about not worshipping in-person on Christmas Eve to our faith and, in particular, to the consistent Christian ethos of being willing to make sacrifices out of love for our neighbors. We’re also hoping that it helps our folks to know that they are not making these sacrifices alone but are joined by many other Christian communities. (I’ll post that letter below, and you can sign on to the statement at the site if you’d like.)

In the second, you’ll find a description of an invitation to a Christmas Eve candle-lighting and singing of Silent Night at 6:30pm (CDT) to allow our folks to have a sense of participating in something larger and together, even if at a distance. A good idea in general, and then it got really fun. 🙂 An employee at Minnesota Public Radio attends Bethlehem, and when Ben and Mary asked whether MPR might be interested in broadcasting Silent Night to facilitate this event, they not only signed on but shared this idea with other National Public Radio stations and this will now be broadcast around the country. (You can check your local station to see whether they are participating, and invite them to if they’re not.)

In the third section, we’re collecting various resources we’ve developed. I’m sure that many of you, like we have at Mount Olivet, have tried out various ways of connecting at a distance and have learned a lot of things that you will continue beyond the pandemic. One of those for us will be our Digital Advent Calendar, with short and fun videos that offer insight into various dimensions, both sacred and secular, of our Advent and Christmas celebrations.

Hopefully this will help. We’ll get through this, and we’ll get through it better as we support each other. Thanks for all you are doing!

Keeping Christmas Amid the Coronavirus

A year ago at this time, it would have been inconceivable that we would not be gathering with our congregations on December 24th to hear the Christmas story, sing “Silent Night,” and celebrate God’s promise in the birth of Jesus to be Emmanuel, “God with us.” A year later, that thought is still difficult to imagine. The only thing more inconceivable, however, is gathering together inside – in some of our congregations by the hundreds, and at others by the thousands – for a worship service that by its very nature endangers those in attendance and risks spreading the virus that has already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 US citizens and more than a million and a half of God’s children worldwide.

The congregations listed below have committed to keeping Christmas differently this year, celebrating the advent of God’s love enfleshed in the Christ child via digital means, through small socially-distanced gatherings across the season, and by encouraging and equipping our members to celebrate Christ’s nativity in their homes both joyfully and safely. Some of the congregations who are making this commitment have not worshiped in-person together on Sundays since the pandemic first struck our communities in March. Others have had limited in-person worship but recognize that Christmas celebrations present a distinct challenge. All of us are committed to obeying Christ’s command to “love your neighbor” (Lk. 10:27) in and through our worship practices, which means that we will not be gathering for in-person worship on Christmas Eve.

This decision, while difficult, is consistent with the decisions of countless Christian communities across the millennia to put the welfare of others above our own wants, desires, and rights. In fact, the willingness of Christians to prioritize the needs of others during previous pandemics contributed significantly to the growth of the Christian movement in the ancient world. In both the Antonine Plague of the second century and the Plague of Cyprian in the third, Christians became renowned for the extreme lengths to which they would go to care for the sick, not only among their own ranks, but also those of other faiths.*

In 1527, as the Bubonic Plague entered Wittenberg, the German Reformer Martin Luther not only urged his congregation to care for the sick, but also criticized those who disdained precautions in order “to prove how independent they are.” In contrast to behavior he described as “tempting God,” Luther vowed, “I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence.”**

So while our celebrations of Christmas will be different than we had imagined or hoped for this year, we believe they are in keeping with the Christian Church’s insistence to put the needs of others before our own. More importantly, we believe the decision not to gather inside our sanctuaries this Christmas Eve out of regard for the health and safety of our neighbors is in keeping with spirit of the One whose birth we celebrate, the One who declared that he “came not to be served, but to serve” (Mt. 20:28) and instructed his disciples to “love one another, just as I have loved you” (Jn. 13:34). If we can do that, then the strange silence of this night will be holy indeed.

*Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 83-84.

**Luther, Martin.  “Whether One May Flee From A Deadly Plague,” in Luther’s Works, Vol. 43: Devotional Writings II,ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 43 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), p. 131-132. You can find the complete text of that treatise here.