Pastor's Blog

Last night with my immediate family, tonight with our Christmas Eve service, tomorrow with Melinda's family, Friday with mine, and Saturday with my mother-in-law's. It's not quite twelve days of Christmas, but it seems like it's getting closer all the time! It's a real treat to celebrate the birth of our Savior in so many different ways, with so many different people: worshiping, feasting, fellowshipping, giving, receiving, playing, sleeping. It may surprise some of you to know that many of our Protestant fathers took a rather dim view of Christmas. Consider the following passage from William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation . Herewith I shall end this year--except to recall one more incident, rather amusing than serious. On Christmas Day, the Governor called the peole out to work as usual; but most of the new company excused themselves, and said it went against their consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them, if they made it a matter of cons...

You don't have to be Irish to love this .

It is well known that the Bible does not give us the date of Jesus' birth. This fact has led a good number of well-meaning people to question whether his birth should even be celebrated at all. Some have even made the claim that the date of December 25 was deliberately settled upon as the day to commemorate his birth because it was already kept as a holy day by pagans in the Roman Empire. In settling upon December 25, the church (we are told) made an ill-advised attempt to christianize a pagan festival in the hope of helping the pagans convert to Christianity. Therefore, celebrating Christmas, is an implicit participation in paganism. So the story goes. But William Tighe sets the story straight in his article, "Calculating Christmas," which first appeared in 2003 in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity . Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one...