Christmas in July

Christmas in July


It's July, and someone passed a Facebook meme around that had a picture of Will Ferrell as Elf, who was letting us know how many Fridays until Christmas.

So here I am again, thinking about the season vs. The Season, and the year; 2015, versus Anno Domini, in which Christ was placed at the center of time.

Most say that Jesus was born in the Spring, but I've not remembered hearing Christmas in June, or other months as much as in July.  I suppose there's a reason Christmas comes back to mind in July.  It's like an Unbirthday in some sense; because every day is a day to think about the master and marker of time, but maybe it's almost like a half-birthday in that Someone's birthday is so important that it knocks the balance out of the axis so there has to be some response on the other side of the year to keep the cycle running for the next six months. 

At the time, the birth of Christ was not marked on the calendar.  Calendars were created and maintained by power structures and His didn't get going until after resurrection; or until after death, as some people say.  It was amazing to me how many teachers tried to explain miracles from the Bible but just skipped over the only one that matters: Jesus raising Himself from the dead.  Either the resurrection happened or it didn't, and most people who want to study are more comfortable talking about walking on the water or loaves and fishes- not because they are more unlikely but because they are less significant.

Easter used to do that; provide the foil for Christmas as the other part of the whole.  But Easter has left the public consciousness.  I remember in English class in high school, we were reading a short story and discussing it with our partners.  My partner was very bright, and cute, and very likable.  So when she said something about the story inferring birth, and Easter was the time of new birth, I went along with it, even when she said that was the time of Jesus' birth, wasn't it?  I'm nodding, because it makes so much sense, and the day is sunny and the story is about Spring, and her eyes are so welcoming, and I want to make connections between texts, and then I think- hello!  I know this.  Easter is about birth of course, and it's Spring, but it's a new birth.  It's not Christmas. 

Easter had to leave the public consciousness if people were going to forget about resurrection.  The preeminence of Christmas is of course, a pious smokescreen to get everyone to forget about the man God and to focus on the baby.  If we think about the baby, and join in with that sentimentality, it sure is a beautiful picture, and a fitting opening for the greatest story ever told.  But it also gets us off track if it's not seen as the beginning of something.

Micah 3:5-12  tells about the sun of righteousness that would rise with healing in his wings after the long night in between testaments.

We're created by Old and New Testaments whether we know it or not.  Western civilization is orphaned now, or thinks it is, having forgotten about its parents, but there they are.  Mom was Hebrew, so we're all Hebrews, and the Bible ended for Mom.  But since then, she's had to justify her beliefs up against our overbearing Dad who patriarched his way into world domination.  The story then started up again for our Greek Daddy, who interprets the Old only through the New and pretty much forgot he is married and can't have kids by himself.  Zeus did it, right?  We kids stayed way too Greek, but how many Hebrew words made it into English?

Prophecies can be fulfilled in lots of ways, depending on who's reading them and who's waiting for what, but those prophecies are easy to interpret as becoming history.



Here is a quote by Dr. J. Vernon McGee
Daily Radio Commentary on Micah 5:1,2

I personally think that this is a good time to look at the Christmas story.  Christmas, I think, needs to be stripped of all of its heathenism and the accretions of time have added the accessories of paganism to it, and probably we're prepared to look at the birth of Christ without bells and bunting, and tinsel and the tawdry, the crowds and the clamor and actually  a Christmas without a Santa Claus...   

He goes on to note that Matthew combines prophecies about Ramah, Nazareth, Egypt and Bethlehem into the biography of Jesus; seamlessly connecting the threads of expectation with reality.  They can't deny that there was a Jesus, but they can surely lean toward Christmas over Easter at the same time that others deny it and everybody forgets about it.