I love Christmas so much.  I love the Christmas cups at coffeeshops.  I love gingerbread everything and anything (wine?).  I love spending time with my family.  I love the snow (though I don’t get much of it anymore).  And of course, I love processing what it meant and what it means for Jesus to be born.  He truly is Immanuel, God amongst us.

With all my Christmas love, I was shocked to hear a few years ago about a war on Christmas.  I was still celebrating and I heard no gunfire so I was quite amazed to hear about this war.  Many people I know started to tell me how they couldn’t believe that some companies no longer actively advertised about Christmas, and instead advertised about the holidays in general.  I’ll never forget one time when I left one of my friends a voicemail, I received a call back from him a little angry because I said “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” at the end of my message.  To him, I became one of those..

I guess I just don’t get it.  I don’t get why many Christians in the United States that I meet think there is a war or that they are persecuted for being a Christian.

I love early Christianity.  I am not one of those pie in the sky dreamers who thinks that there were no problems in the early church.  Just look at Paul’s letters and John’s Revelation and you realize that from the start, there were problems in the church.  But one of the things I love about early church history is that even though it went through intense persecution, the church continued to grow.  People were dying for their faith, yet the church continued to grow.

That is part of the reason I recoil when people in the United States say the church is persecuted.  I will never forget when I talked to some representatives of a well known Christian ministry and they told me that Christians are the biggest targets of prejudice in the United States.  Maybe I have been lucky, but I have been pretty open about my faith and have worked at a church the past four years in San Francisco.  Rarely, has anyone even been rude to me about my beliefs and/or the way I live my life.  Most people are really nice about it and lots of people want me to tell them more.  Some people make jokes but I could really care less.

I hope as American Christians, we look at our past and realize what persecution is really about.  I hope we look at other people in society and understand persecution a little bit clearer (persecution is all around us).  I hope we look globally and see what many of our Christian brothers and sisters are going through and begin to pray for the persecuted church.

And this year I hope that if Christians really believe there is a war (or even if they don’t) on Christmas, instead of fighting back with words, we live the message of Christmas.  I pray that we live as if Immanuel is actually amongst us.  I pray that we see his proclamation about the kingdom of God being in our midst not as some nice words to study but an invitation to join Christ in his kingdom work.  Instead of forcing the words “Christmas” on anything, lets live the Christmas story.

And when I say the Christmas story, I am not referring to the movie :)

 

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