I think I can go ahead and jump right into this blog without giving you the rundown on how I feel about Christmas carols. If you’ve been attending Crossroads for any amount of time, you probably think I either don’t know any or am a not-so-distant relative of The Grinch.
It’s not that I don’t like the way they sound or anything like that. I’m just bothered by the fact the songs we sing would be dictated by a month or a day on the calendar. If there’s something about the worship songs that we normally do that makes them unsuitable for the season we celebrate the birth and incarnation of Jesus — or his death and resurrection, for that matter — then the songs we normally do are unsuitable for any season. And if I thought they (the songs we normally do) were unsuitable for any season, we wouldn’t be singing them. Right? Right. End soap box.
Having said that, on the way to a Christmas party this week, I was checking my Plus One (oh, yes, you read that right) Christmas CD to make sure it didn’t skip and caught myself in tears over the second and third verses of “Oh, Holy Night.” Theologically, it has been rocking my world this week.
Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love, and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother,
and in His name all oppression shall cease.
Are you kidding me with this? How did this nugget of social justice slip in, seemingly unnoticed by our largely materialistic, capitalist, Americanized form of birth o’Jesus celebrating. How do we just sing this time after time without it shaking our baby-in-a-manger Christmas worship? (I wasn’t gonna go there, but Christmas worship kinda reeks of idolatry. Moving on… that was for free.)
I’m so surprised at how a Christmas song, my serious bone of contention with the tail end of the month of December, could remind me to not throw the baby out with the bathwater during this season. Literally. The baby became a man, who while he lived, radically opposed the evil, darkness and oppression of the world. And in his death, he did more than just oppose it.
He’s not a baby in a manger any more!
