Why I've Moved From One Puny Pirouette to Bodacious Back Camel Spins at Christmas
Next year it's lights smothered on the fence out front; someone in 2010 hold me to that, OK?
Peggy and I, back in our early years in the OPC, would tip-toe around the holidays. She followed me in my petty-minded parade about this. I can remember when she made a banner with the text, Luke 1:35, pasted on. She and a relative sewed two or three stand-up figures out of burlap for a manger scene. We draped Christmas lights around the banner and down near the manger scene that was sitting on a TV-tray in the living room. Nothing else displayed the holy mark, the Christian watershed mark of the calendar, regarding the coming of the Lord. For me, it was all reformed simplicty and a well-meant piety to the 10th power, absent the gospel. Silk, no leather. All about finding meaning apart from matter.
What was going on? I had a warped view of the Bible and thus, a truncated view of the cosmic renewal work of Jesus Christ in His life, death and resurrection.
I needed to get saved, and that was about it.
Warped view? My Bible and theology started with the Fall of Adam, not creation. I had the AW Pink cart before the Calvin horse. Sin loomed larger than God's creation. Sin was a broken down relationship with God---me first and only me, the-individual-person me first. That was what Jesus came to fix, to renew.
Truncated view? I was well-versed in my personal experience of conversion, like Acts 9 Damascus Road matters, but somehow Colossians 1, 1 Corinthians 15, Ephesians 1:15-22, and 1 Timothy 4:1-5 were avoided like anchovies. Jesus came to fix humans; again, me first. No new creation, only new creatures--men and women, and boys and girls. Jesus could only handle so much at Calvary, you know.
God's creation is good. Read Nancy Pearcy on this, “It becomes unclean only when sinners use it to express their rebellion against God. The line between good and evil is not drawn between one part of the creation and another part, but runs through the human heart itself--in our disposition to use the creation for good or for evil.”
Her quote from Gordon Clark brings in Christmas cheer too: “When Adam fell, it was the result of a rebellious will, and not because he had a body.”
Celebrations, memorials, anniversaries, fanfare, pageantry---you name it, there's to be doxology within contextual decorum of all kinds that get our glad attention.
The Bible does not begin with the Fall of Man but with Creation.
A bunch of us are going caroling tonight, maybe with candy canes and chocolate kisses to boot.
G. Mark Sumpter
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