Growing up, I was crestfallen about any Christmas that fell on Sunday. Christmas on Sunday meant going to church when I’d rather lollygag around the Christmas tree in my pajamas, playing with new toys. Christmas on Sunday was a drag.
If I still felt that way, I know what I’d be thinking this year. I’ve found the church for me!
Some churches across the country, especially megachurches, plan to shut their doors the last Sunday of the year – because it’s Christmas – yes, the same Christmas in which they urge us all to “keep Christ.” (It’s odd: The churches that most loudly shout to the culture about “keeping Christ in Christmas” are also the most likely to shut their doors once the great day arrives.) Of course they don’t think they’re compromising or catering to the self-focused or caving to consumerism. They think they’re being “family-friendly.” And they’re giving their seasonally frazzled musicians a break.
It’s only fair to acknowledge that some of the criticisms those churches get are caricatures. No, they aren’t led by Christmas-hating Scrooges and Grinches. They’ll celebrate Jesus’ birth, and with lots of big programs and services. They just won’t do it Sunday, Christmas Day. And yet the decision to skip a time of gathered worship on Dec. 25 still scandalizes.
Many churches – Orthodox, Catholic, Episcopal, others – hold services on Christmas Day no matter where it falls in the week. (It’s Christmas, after all.) For such Christians, it’s baffling that some evangelicals would regard Sunday worship, of all things, as an interruption in the festivities.
The scandal, from a classical Christian viewpoint, has less to do with the spirit of Christmas than with the spirit of Sunday.
Sunday, in Christian parlance, is “the Lord’s Day,” and the New Testament gives it a high profile. From earliest times, it was “on the first day of the week” – not the Jewish Sabbath – “when the disciples came together to break bread” (Acts 20:7).
Jesus’ first disciples were Jews. Nothing short of an epoch-making event could have effected their transition from Sabbath day to first day, and the New Testament points to just such an event: the rising of Jesus from the dead. All four Gospels testify that Jesus’ tomb was found empty after the Sabbath, “on the first day of the week.” And on the first day of the week, the resurrected Jesus appeared to His followers.
Gathered disciples, shared bread, the presence of the risen Jesus – the New Testament associates them all with the first day of the week.
Some of the associations were obvious even to early outsiders. Pliny, the second-century Roman governor of Bithynia, reported to his emperor that Christians were “in the habit of meeting on a fixed day before daylight and reciting responsively among themselves a hymn to Christ as a god.”
Many Christians treated their Sunday meetings as nonnegotiable, even under duress. “Without fear of any kind,” martyrs reportedly told their persecutors, “we have celebrated the Lord’s Supper, because it cannot be missed.”
Not all Christians feel so strongly about Christmas Day. But Sunday, as the day of formal worship, is something that all the main lines of Christian tradition – even in its East-West, Catholic-Protestant fragmentation – have regarded as sacrosanct.
In contrast, here’s a spokesperson for one church that closes its doors for a Sunday Christmas: “We believe that you worship every day of the week, not just on a weekend, and you don’t have to be in a church building to worship.”
Spoken like many a “spiritual but not religious” nonchurchgoer. It may be true as far as it goes, but who expected to hear a church offer it as a reason for suspending Sunday worship?
True, Christians don’t have to visit a church building to “worship” – some expressions of worship can be made anywhere by anyone – but they do have to get together with the church – somewhere – to be the church on the Lord’s Day, breaking bread, singing praises, praying for the world, praying for the peace from above and the salvation of our souls.
Can’t it all be done as easily at home or on a different day? Maybe even more easily. But it wouldn’t be the same.
Think of it this way. We could, if we wanted, celebrate national independence on some day other than the usual. We could even declare it “family time” and light a firecracker in the driveway. But that wouldn’t be the same as getting together with a bunch of Americans as Americans to hear Sousa and witness a sky full of pyrotechnics on the Fourth of July.
What happens Sunday is no small part of what defines the church. It may be inconvenient, and if Christians live where Sunday is a workday, as the early ones did, they may have to meet before dawn. Or if they live where faith in the Word made flesh brings threat of death, they may have to meet in secret, in microchurches, as no doubt many around the world will do on Sunday while some of their comfy American megabrethren take the day off.
A church that cancels Sunday worship for anything less than an extraordinary circumstance is denying, however unintentionally, its identity. However briefly, it has forgotten its calling.
Paul Buckley is the former director of worship and music at Grace Presbyterian Church in Ocala, Florida. He holds an M.Div. degree from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.