Trivialization of Christmas

You hear a lot about how we've made Christmas trivial: how we've lost its true meaning and commercialization has stolen a most sacred holiday. And that's certainly true. It is just very easy to miss the important with so much that is trivial pressing from all sides.

But if we who are called Jesus' followers attempt to place all the blame on the world around us, without accepting our own fault in the matter, we are kidding ourselves.

So much of what we say about Christmas seems to lessen the importance of the incarnation...God becoming man. We speak of brotherly love and peace on earth, which are undeniably good things. But Christmas is about something much more revolutionary. If God truly has become man, as we say we believe, then everything else is secondary.

There is certainly no problem with emphasizing the many good things we associate with Christmas. But there is only one true meaning of Christmas. It is that "The Word became flesh and lived among us." We do the world a disservice if we let than message be choked out--even by good things.