How to Christmas with Dr. Perry Downs

How to Christmas. If I asked you to tell me about how you do Christmas I bet you’d start telling me about family traditions, decorations, schedules for opening presents, typical attendance at Church services, and stuff like that. Right? Now you want to tell me about the lights you’ve put up in the midst of the pandemic and who can’t travel to see whom, and we are so far afield we can’t see the baby through the pine needles. But before I send you on a guilt trip which is just too easy to do, I want to ask a more thoughtful question. How should we do Christmas if we want it to have anything to do with the founder.

In my not-so-humble opinion, anything we do regularly can get distorted by the familiarity which loves to breed contempt. Christmas comes around every year whether we like it or not. But why? Why is this something worth celebrating, or is it?

When I was a new Christian I went through a stage which I jokingly refer to as my Jehovah's Witness stage, questioning every tradition which is not explicitly commanded in the Bible. Just because something is a tradition doesn’t make it good or right. If you’ve ever been willing to talk to a Jehovah's Witness knocking on your door they will explain why birthdays and holidays aren’t worthy of celebrating. They may have a point. So why has the church determined for two thousand years they are wrong and put the holy in holy day for the birth of Jesus?

And, and we like “and” here, what can we do the put the holy into our Christmas? How can we learn more about the One we are celebrating? How can we teach our children and grandchildren in such a way they don’t fall prey to the consumerist secularists, cynical communists, or grasping pagans in the midst of their winter festivals and chilly solstices?

To answer this question we have asked back one of our favorite guests at Church Hurts And, Dr. Perry Downs, a former professor of Christian at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, the alma mater of your host. He’s real, practical, foster parent to over 30 blessed children, and just real enough to be worth listening to.

Welcome back Dr. Perry Downs to Church Hurts And.

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