Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians
December 2015
Taking the Christmas out of Christ
For several years running now, about this season we hear self-styled opponents of “political correctness” whine about people they say are trying to “take Christ out of Christmas.” They see “Happy Holidays” not as an effort to be inclusive and try to spread holiday cheer to all, but rather a deliberate insult to Christians and Christ. This year the complaints went so far as to claim that Starbuck’s Coffee’s use of red holiday cups marked with the company logo rather than white snowflakes were part of an anti-Christian plot. Such a partisan and sectarian approach is far removed from the “common prayer” approach of Episcopalianism, which sees us in community with those of differing beliefs or no belief, sees our duty as to minister to all, and sees shared holiday fun, with or without the Christian trappings, as a sign of God’s love.
This all has brought to mind for me a time when self-styled “Bible believing” Christians of an earlier day outlawed Christmas altogether for two decades.
After the English Reformation, some Christians believed that the Church had not been reformed thoroughly enough, that it was not sufficiently “biblical,” and that it still was corrupted by what the early reformers called “the enormities of Rome.” They wanted to get rid of fancy vestments, bishops, organs, and even the regular celebration of the Eucharist itself. These Puritans focused their political activism in Parliament on eliminating corruption and privileges of the Royal Court and the nobility, including the bishops, whom they tended to call “certain popish persons.” When the Army raised by Parliament won the Civil War, the Puritan regime that came into power was narrow, fundamentalist, and harsh, somewhat like an English Taliban. They banned Prayer Book worship and bishops, and set into Law a whole range of austere measures aimed at purifying the country.
One of these measures banned the celebration of Christmas. Its very name—Christ’s Mass—was far too Roman for the Puritans’ tastes. The fact that is was marked by twelve days of mid-winter partying, singing, drinking, and, for the more religious, Eucharists, were equally distasteful. Special church services, mince pies, hanging holly, big parties were banned from 1644 to 1660.
Now in fairness to the Puritans, it must be said that they were rightly concerned at the excesses of some of the partying: then, as now, serious public drunkenness and debauchery were among the abuses attendant to the celebration of the season by some.
I feel the need here to be fair to the Puritans. One of my ancestors, Col. John Hutchinson of Nottingham Castle, was one of the “Parliament men” who signed the death warrant of King Charles I after Charles was tried and found guilty of war crimes and mass murder. Col. Hutchinson, concerned with the excesses of the Court of Charles I, had initially supported the Roundhead Army in opposing the “King’s men” or Cavaliers. But he was spared a traitor’s execution after the restoration of the monarchy because he equally opposed the excesses of the Puritan regime headed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and had prevented retaliatory war atrocities being perpetrated on Cavalier prisoners of war. The fact that his wife Lucy’s father was a royalist nobleman who helped in restoring the monarchy after the Commonwealth did not hurt either. Despite the fact that the Puritans “won the war but lost the peace” only to have the monarchy restored, the whole affair changed the nature of the British crown, and prevented in England the kind of traumatic revolution that happened in France in 1789. Many of the political ideas and slogans of the Roundhead puritans were taken up part and parcel by the American revolutionaries in 1776.
The Puritans, throwing away the baby Jesus with the bathwater of overdoing it in Christmas partying, banned the holiday outright. “Christmas is a pagan celebration,” they said, “and must be done away with by true Christians.”
Note the theology at work here—it is exclusionary, not inclusive: “true” Christians need to show their “trueness” (and, in so doing, point out who are “false” Christians and pagans). It is contemptuous of many of the simple pleasures shared by people regardless of belief or tradition, and seeks to parcel out good things only to those who are orthodox. 1 John says, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God … those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” But the puritans said, basically, “If you don’t know God in just the right way, you have no love in you. No parties for you!”
One of my favorite choral anthems at Christmas is John Rutter’s setting of “What Sweeter Music.” It is a modern adaptation of a poem that Cavalier poet Robert Herrick wrote just after the monarchy and Christmas celebrations were restored. Herrick, an Anglican priest who had lost his living during the Parliamentary interregnum, wrote the poem for a Christmas party of newly-restored King Charles II. In it he argues for the celebration of Christmas against the position taken by the Puritans, and he does so wholly on religious and theological grounds. He uses good incarnational theology: the sacredness of all of human life, love, and enjoyment in the wake of God becoming flesh. I love the poem, and have sung it with several different choirs over the years:
What Sweeter Music
What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!
Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.
Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.
We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.
Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.
What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
--Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
May we all during this season sing, eat, drink, and love each other well. Let us reconcile with each other and mend family and friend relationships that have gone bad. Let us celebrate with our whole being, since in Christ our whole being is being made one with God. Let’s not begrudge our neighbors who celebrate and love without recognizing the source of their joy and love, the source that our experience tells us is God made flesh in Jesus Christ. Happy holidays, one and all.
Grace and Peace,
--Fr. Tony+
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