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‘The hairs on your head are numbered’. Looking in the mirror this morning I found myself mulling over Jesus’s words of comfort. Should they mean less to me now that the numbers involved are so much smaller? Answers on a postcard, I suppose – although doubtless the answer is ‘no’, so perhaps don’t bother. But how easy it is to find oneself derailed from a proper wonder at God’s goodness and fatherly care into something else.
It’s not just my problem, though. Observe the contents of a Lutheran sermon from 1605 on the same passage:
The origin style form and natural position of our hair
The correct care of the hair
Reminiscences, reminders, warnings and comfort derived from the hair
How to wear the hair in a good Christian fashion
I’ve heard of hairsplitting theology, but… 60 years after Martin Luther’s death, the church bearing his name bore little of the same spirit, pedantic and formalised as it had become. There was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a reaction against this. In the mid 17th century, a movement called pietism attempted to move German religion towards an emphasis on a living relationship with God rather than simply on doctrinal correctness.
A key figure in pietism was a pastor named Philip Jakob Spener (1635-1705) who found himself on a collision course with the faculty of the University of Wittenberg (where Luther made his ‘breakthrough’). Spener was eventually charged with 284 different doctrinal errors, a fact that requires little further comment.
Which in a roundabout way brings me to Christmas. No, really it does. Because I find in myself a tendency to indignation at what Christmas has come to represent. I suspect that I am not alone and if you do feel as I do about things then perhaps you’ll agree that there is a real danger that we could take Christ out of Christmas. And I do mean ‘we’.
Christmas should be a time of profound wonder at the lengths God was willing to go to in order to reach into our cesspool of sin and death and haul us out. It is a time that should provoke us simultaneously to great joy and great humility. I must beware then my own tendency to a Pharisaic approach to Christmas celebration amongst the unchurched.
If the celebration of the universe’s most profound mystery has become diverted by worship of Mammon and Bacchus, sorrow is an appropriate reaction, while self-righteous indignation is not. That we see people indulging in the very things Jesus came to save them from can either help us to remember what he has done for us, or it can be an excuse for forgetting. The irony of the latter is perhaps even richer than that of Luther’s successors at Wittenberg making upholding his theology of grace a reason to be graceless.
Jesus is God’s gift to the world. Christmas is a wonderful time to celebrate and delight in the freedom, the glory and the sheer enormity of God’s generosity to us. For that reason, my memory verse this Christmas is Paul’s ‘trustworthy saying’ that ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’. Whether observing the festive excess of others or my own temptation to self-righteousness, Christmas time reminds me that he came for people like us. And that is something worth celebrating.
Photo by wallyg
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