Christmas starts with Christ…

My brother spotted this poster on a bus stop today – I thought it deserved a closer look:

It is the latest poster from the organisation ChurchAds.net, and has been distributed on bus shelters country-wide. Their website offers a list of locations as of the 20th December 2010 – I didn’t bother to count every single one but I can estimate that there are around 1000 locations. ‘Good stuff’, I hear you say… Hmmmm, I wonder.

I think that contemporary posters are a fantastic medium for reaching out to the general public with the Good News of Christ, especially as ChurchAds claim that, ‘Research…shows that only 12 per cent of adults know the facts of the Christmas story in any detail.’ If this is the case, perhaps I should rethink what I said about the Christmas story being a distraction in Christmas Reflections – evidently hardly anyone is aware of what the story is about anyway!

ChurchAds.net provides the following commentary on the campaign:

So if we Christians really want to keep Christmas focused on Christ, we must constantly re-tell the story of his birth in ways which engage positively with the public’s interest.

In the 21st century, proud parents-to-be proudly announce the coming birth by showing friends and family the scan of the baby. Our new Baby Scan Jesus poster uses this convention to place the birth of Christ in an ultra-contemporary context.

It is highly impactful. It has a sense of immediacy. It creates anticipation. And theologically it speaks of both the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ.

There is no doubt that it will capture people’s attention, generate headlines and create countless conversations about the true meaning of Christmas.

I am in no doubt that the intentions of ChurchAds are entirely honourable, and based in scriptural truth. There is no question on my mind regarding the urgent need to spread the truth that Christians have found to the rest of the world. What I must question, however, is whether or not this poster is really sending out the right signals.

I am in danger of treading on dangerous ground here. The poster has received approval from a whole host of church leaders, who are much wiser and better theologians than I. Yet even with such great support, I’m not satisfied.

A few years ago, I watched a modern dramatisation of the Nativity, filmed live in Liverpool. Feel free to watch it for yourself here. This was an excellent idea – as far as I can recall it stuck very well to the Biblical truth, adapting the story to fit a more contemporary environment. It was also very well recieved, driving home themes such as the poverty of Jesus at His birth, the faith of Mary and the severity of Herod’s orders, forcing the young family to become refugees.

So, is this poster is just next in the line of contemporary Christian media, keeping the true Christmas story bobbing along and ensuring that it remains important to people today? For me, there is a distinct difference between the Liverpool Nativity and Baby Scan Jesus. The Liverpool Nativity never claimed to be a remake of the Nativity story, rewriting it and making the original redundant, it was simply a modern adaptation, a ‘this is what it would be like if it happened today’ initiative. The ultrasound baby makes no such claim – it is as if ChurchAds want people to believe that they have actually managed to secure a genuine ultrasound image of Jesus from 2000 years ago. It also goes to no length to distinguish the foetus of Jesus from that of any other baby, apart from, and I nearly couldn’t believe my eyes, a tiny halo floating above his head.

I thought we were past the stage of depicting people with halos to show them as holy. I mean, really?! Was that the best they could come up with? It totally de-constructs the whole message, trivialising it down to the ground. The poster is practically a cartoon.

If the church really wants to get Christ back into Xmas (which literally ‘crosses Christ out’) then how about they start at the cross? I am pretty sure that that is a more powerful message – the Son of God giving up His life to save us, rather than a mocked-up photograph of a baby. The ‘Baby Stig’ from the Top Gear Three Wise Men Christmas Special carried more meaning for the majority of British people.

Let’s put Christ back in to Christmas without making Him into a joke.

Christmas is not about a baby with a halo. Christmas is about the whole fullness of God’s glory on earth.

Christmas Reflections

This year, Christmas hasn’t really been all that. Perhaps it’s because of my age or perhaps it’s because of my focus, but for some reason it just didn’t feel like Christmas.

Maybe this is a good thing – the commercial nature of the day has totally disappeared for me so I can focus on the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas.

I wonder how many times this year I have heard that phrase… This ‘true meaning’ of Christmas does seem to be quite heavily publicised, and often to great effect.

Usually, in order to illustrate this meaning, the presents, food and other superficial aspects of the day are shown to be unimportant compared to the Christmas Story from 2000 years ago. This great story, undoubtedly one of the most compelling ever told, is exactly why Christmas is celebrated some 20 centuries down the track.

The baby in the manger, the shepherds, the angels, the wise men bearing gifts, Bethlehem… We are all so familiar with these things – either from Nativity plays at school or from dramatisations on television or the big screen.  My thought this year, though, is…

What if this great story is actually a distraction from the true significance of Christmas?

It is without question that the events in Bethlehem in the land of Judah are the key to unlocking this significance. However I feel that we find ourselves today in a position where certain aspects of the story are not recognised for the immense weight that they carry…

We often talk about the shepherds on the hillside nearby, tending their sheep, but how often do we really think about what they experienced that night? There is no other place in the whole of scripture where the sky is literally filled with angels, singing and praising God (except for perhaps in Revelation). It is unimaginable, the entire sky brimming with beings dressed in perfect white, declaring the might and power of God. The birth of this child is something that God wants to shout about! He wants everyone to know about it, it is the most important event in the whole of history! Taking time to think about that fact drives it home…this isn’t any old story about a baby’s birth with a few complications and strange events lumped on top, this is the greatest and the greatest happening of all time. Of all time.

Perhaps the next question is, ‘Why?’ ‘Why is this birth the most important event of all time?’ I heard recently the statement that the true meaning of Christmas is actually Easter. To some extent, this rings true – the birth of Jesus points to His death and resurrection 30 years later – but it is not entirely satisfactory. There is something more about Jesus’ birth that isn’t encountered at the cross.

A.W. Tozer once said, ‘Instead of God degrading Himself when He became man, He, by the act of Incarnation, elevated mankind to Himself.’ The Incarnation of Christ is the point in time where God took mankind in its broken and degenerate state and made it something new.

Christmas is the time where God met man, face to face, for the first time since Adam in Eden (Moses was unable to see the face of God and only saw His back, from a cleft in a rock). Paul explains:

‘For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.’ – 2 Corinthians 4:6, NIV.

‘The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.’ – Colossians 1:15, NIV.

‘For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him…’ – Colossians 1:19, NIV.

‘God’s glory, displayed in the face of Christ.’ Christ is, ‘the image of…God.’ Surely, surely, this is what Christmas is about. The Bethlehem story is important, but beyond that we see the glory of the Almighty One ‘to human view displayed’ in Christ, the Lord. This is why a vast host of angels sang that night, worshipping over and over again the only One who is worthy of our praise.

For me, Christmas has changed. This year has shown that. But I am determined that that change is in the right direction. I can’t claim to be moving away from the commercialisation because it was never a problem for me in the first place. But I do want to be moving away from reading the wonderful story of Bethlehem and the birth of Christ as a nice, interesting tale which just sets the scene for Easter to take place, with some shepherds and gold, incense and myrrh. When I read or hear that story, I want to be overawed by the host of angels, I want to be moved by the heart of Mary, but more than anything I want to remember all the glory of the Most High God was on earth, in Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ, the Saving One.