Reflecting on the Christmas season during the age of COVID-19
Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, joins 'Bill Hemmer Reports' with his reflection
Americans love Christmas. Even in the middle of a global pandemic, political turmoil and economic uncertainty, our collective devotion to the holiday hasn’t budged. A recent LifeWay study found that 93% of American adults plan to celebrate Christmas this year. This number has stayed the same for the last decade.
The persistence of Christmas seems surprising, given other trends in our culture. Many people in our country have walked away from Christianity and organized religion altogether. The fastest-growing religious group among young people today is the "Nones."
And yet, LifeWay found that even the religiously unaffiliated celebrate Christmas in overwhelming numbers – 88%. And even more surprisingly, 10% of the "Nones" plan to spend more time in spiritual reflection during this particular holiday season.
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Why are people willing to give up organized religion but not quite able to let go of Christmas, even after a crazy year like 2020? Why do people continue to look for deeper meaning in the holiday?
People are hungry for hope. People want a solution to their problems. Every year the calendar comes to an end and, still, our troubles persist. New Year’s is all about optimism and possibilities; but Christmas calls for reflection. As we look back at a grim year, I think we’re even more aware of just how out of control our world appears to be.
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If you traveled back to the first Christmas more than 2,000 years ago, you would discover that there was a consensus pick for who could deliver the lasting peace and prosperity the populace craved. No, his name wasn’t Jesus, but Octavian. You probably know him by his title, "Caesar Augustus."
Octavian’s subjects and admirers believed the solution to global wars and famines, to budget deficits and plagues, would come from the bottom up. Humanity could rise up and fix society and the world. The Roman civic cult celebrated that their caesars could become gods. Octavian’s modest nickname was "Savior of the World." If men could become gods, then perhaps Pax Romana could last forever. Octavian and the Romans thought they could bring "empire without end," as Virgil says in the "Aeneid."
The Romans sought a bottom-up, man-made way of solving the world’s problems through turning people into gods. Christmas dissents radically from this sort of self-manufactured redemption.
Here we are now two millennia later in quite a mess, yet still stubbornly celebrating this one birth.
What Christians celebrate in Christmas is how the solution to humanity’s problems came from heaven down when the Son of God became man. On that first Christmas night the lasting solution to the problems that plague us was being born in a no-account, dusty village called Bethlehem.
It’s hard to overstate the contrast. On the first Christmas, there was a man in Rome in the prime of his life and at the height of his powers. Yet in an animal feeding trough half a continent away lay a baby boy, born of a Jewish teenage virgin, who was God in the flesh.
The only people who noticed him were some smelly shepherds nearby. They didn’t hear about his birth in a headline from the mainstream Roman media – in fact, they didn’t hear about it from any other human being at all. An angel came from Heaven to announce it to them:
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"Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (Luke 2:10-11).
Here we are now two millennia later in quite a mess, yet still stubbornly celebrating this one birth. The pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people. The economic downturn has threatened our paychecks and retirement funds. Political divisions remain at a fever pitch.
And Christmas announces the unrelenting truth that the doctors, the economists and the politicians cannot ultimately save us anymore than they could 2,000 years ago. Rescuing ourselves has never worked, but Christmas offers the hope that there IS another way.
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Most people probably cannot articulate why they’re drawn to Christmas, but there’s a profound truth underneath it all.
Christmas contains both bad news and good news. The bad news is that we cannot save ourselves. The good news is that God has entered into our world in the flesh to save us. That gift of hope, the birth of Jesus, brings good news of great joy for all people: " ... for unto you is born a Savior who is Christ the Lord."