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Tuesday Morning Epistles Welcome to Tuesday Morning—it’s the last Tuesday before Christmas, 2010.
Christmas shopping is just
about finished at our house. Gifts and cards have been sent
to our loved ones. We plan to enjoy Christmas at home in
Christmas parties are nearly over, and errands are becoming fewer and fewer as we approach Christmas Day. We will keep busy, but not too busy to rule out listening to the songs of Christmas; to watch our favorite Christmas programs on television; to read the dozens of email greetings that will arrive at our computer; and to open cards that are already in the mail. We will attend the Christmas Eve service at our church, where the choirs and musicians will sing and play during both of the Candle-light Services. Christmas Day will be highlighted by a Christmas Dinner at home. This will be a bright and blessed Christmas.
Each year I dig through files
and folders for Christmas quotes and stories to use in my
Advent epistles. There are so many good ones. I like to read
Swindoll and Barclay and Lucado and Dickens and a few other
gifted writers during Advent. I also enjoy reading the birth
narratives in Matthew and Luke. And Isaiah! What beautiful
word pictures of how the Messiah would arrive in Judea at a
very special town we know as
The theme I have chosen for this last Tuesday Morning before Christmas is not original. It was used by Henry Van Dyke in an essay he wrote with the same title—“Keeping Christmas.” The essay was printed in a monthly periodical, Saturday Evening, exactly one hundred years ago this month. Van Dyke chose to highlight the “collective or common” aspect of Christmas over the “individual” message of Christmas. I have chosen to address the “individual” side of Christmas. My essay is attached below. Read it and begin celebrating! Merry Christmas, one and all.
Tom Barnard Your Senior Encourager
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Keeping Christmas Tom Barnard
hundred years ago this month Saturday Magazine published an essay by Henry Van Dyke that was entitled “Keeping Christmas.” It was an immediate hit. It has been quoted in periodicals and recited from pulpits and in classrooms around the world every year since then. The term, “Keeping Christmas,” was a popular expression that meant Remembering Christmas.
The first paragraph of the essay reads as follows:
It is a good thing to observe Christmas day. The mere marking of times and seasons, when men agree to stop work and make merry together, is a wise and wholesome custom. It helps one to feel the supremacy of the common life over the individual life. It reminds a man to set his own little watch, now and then, by the great clock of humanity which runs on sun time.
The
essay was beautiful to read and apply. It had a
“politically-correct” point-of-view, even before society adopted
the phrase. It was a socially-sensitive description of what
Christmas is in a morally-neutral society. God is not mentioned
by name, but Van Dyke’s “management of the universe” suggests
there is a higher authority than humankind. “
Today,
of course, there are concerted efforts in
Christmas is not about the “common life,” but the “uncommon life”—individuals choosing to surrender their personal ambitions and needs to the Christ of Bethlehem. Rather than bowing to Van Dyke, I prefer bowing to another minister—Peter Marshall. Here is a Christmas Prayer he voiced many years ago.
We thank Thee, O God, for the return of the wondrous spell of this Christmas season that brings its own sweet joy into our jaded and troubled hearts.
Forbid it, Lord that we should celebrate without understanding what we celebrate, or, like our counterparts so long ago, fail to see the star or to hear the song of glorious promise.
As our hearts yield to the spirit of Christmas, may we discover that it is Thy Holy Spirit who comes—not a sentiment, but a power—to remind us of the only way by which there may be peace on the earth and good will among men.
May we not spend Christmas, but keep it, that we may be kept in its hope, through Him who emptied Himself in coming to us, that we might be filled with peace and joy in returning to God. Amen.
May Advent be the season in which we turn our hearts and concerns over to the One who came to our world to offer salvation to young and old alike. Not collectively, but individually. Celebrate that! |