. . . that is, if you're counting the tribes of Israel or the number of Apostles or the Days of Christmas.
Twelve, however, is too many when we're talking about the number of Christmas Eve services a church is offering.
Yes, I said twelve Christmas Eve services. From the Thursday before Christmas through Christmas Eve proper, a church in the Pittsburgh area will be hosting twelve services for one's celebration of Christmas Eve.
And nothing on Christmas Day.
While I can appreciate the wanting to allow people the maximum experience of the celebration of the birth of Jesus, we have to draw the line in the sand (or snow, for the sake of the season) and come to know that what we're doing is not proper in the sense of the season. We're making the worship of Christ at Christmas to become commercial.
We're not asking people to sacrifice their time for God anymore. We're asking God to sacrifice Himself (once again) for the sake of our human pride and arrogance.
Truly, the consumer culture has become the "golden calf" of the Twenty-first Century. To host twelve Christmas Eve Services and nothing on Christmas Day is a complete backwards understanding of what this day is about. (When I was in Wexford, a neighboring non-demoninational church hosted a number of Christmas Eve services, and nothing on Christmas Day - and that REALLY confused me that year, because Christmas fell on a Sunday!)
This whole time of preparation - Advent, in the Christian calendar - is to allow for us to enter into the Christmas celebration with joy and solemnity. We lose something when a Christian church fits its Christmas service schedule to be as convenient as possible. And while I believe that we need to be aware of the lives that people live outside of the church setting, there is something amiss when we simply make something convenient for the sake of convenience, and do not challenge those followers of Christ to sacrifice a little for the worship of God. (The discussion and reasons I hate having a 4:00 PM Christmas Eve Mass in the Catholic Church is another topic for another day.) Christianity, when made convenient, is not Christianity, but a watered-down version of the Gospel: Making things pretty and fluffy and easy for the sake of the people, not making the people great messengers of the Gospel.
What have we done to the massage of Christmas? We've taken it and allowed it to become about the warm fuzzies and trappings of this time of year. We have abandoned the fact that Christmas is the celebration of the Incarnation of our God, the fact that eternity entered into time, and that this little baby born in a manger was born to die for the sins of all humanity. We take the suffering aspect of Christ's life away this time of year. (Think about how people tend to skip over the fourth verse of "We Three Kings" [dealing with the gift of myrrh], or leaving out the following refrain from "What Child Is This": Nails, spear shall pierce Him through, / The cross be borne for me, for you. / Hail, hail the Word made flesh, / The Babe, the Son of Mary.) We have "domesticated Jesus" (using a quote from Father Robert Barron), and have made Jesus into a feel-good teddy bear, not the Son of God.
What have we done to the message of the Gospel when make the life of a Christian as easy as possible by giving them a church of convenience? We don't allow people to realize that Christianity - or any life of faith, for that matter - is NOT about convenience, but, ultimately, about sacrifice. The fact that we are weak through our humanity should not lead us to bow to those weaknesses because it becomes more of a convenience for people, but, rather, we should be finding ways in which to overcome the softness and conveniences that our day and age have to offer, and challenge ourselves to become more like Christ in our suffering.
Our God did not become one like us so that we can have a life of convenience. Jesus Christ came to Earth so that we can know of the depths of the love of God - even to the point of death. The Passion and Death of Jesus was not done for our convenience, but for our salvation. The Incarnation was not an event in history that happened for the convenience of all creation, but so that we can understand that we are called to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.
It's not out of convenience that we choose Christ. It's out of an encounter with Him that we choose to follow our Savior.
I'm not faulting this church in wanting to serve their people, or to want as many people to gather to celebrate the wondrous event of the Nativity of Christ. I think that twelve services over five days is a little much, and it does feed in to the culture of consumerism and convenience that our society is diving into.
Jesus came to call us to rise above the culture. We need to be able to do so, even if some people call it "inconvenient." The Cross - nor the Crib - is ever convenient in life . . . but they are necessary for our salvation.
Enjoy the journey . . .
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