Believe it or not, there was a time in the 17th century when parliament cancelled Christmas! George Dunn outlines three areas where as a church, we have a responsibility to not cancel Christmas again.
After One Big Church service this morning, I’m feeling on safe ground. The reason why I say that is because, for me, Christmas starts on the 1st of November. We have the Christmas playlist going on in the car – yes, if you drive with me from the 1st of November, it’ll be Christmas music! The Starbucks Eggnog Latte appears (other coffee shops are available, but frankly they’re not as good enough!) And Channel 5 starts to do those cheesy Christmas films on a Saturday afternoon that you canjust sit in front of and enjoy.
So I want to spend a few minutes just reflecting for a few moments on Christmas. I want to take you back to the middle of the 17th century, to the year 1640. In the midst of a huge rivalry between the parliamentarians and the royalists of the day, in 1640 we had the establishment of what was called the Long Parliament. Now if you wonder how long the Long Parliament was, it was 20 years, lasting until 1660. And it was during this time we had the 2nd English Civil War and the end of the 1st Carilionera with the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Now the Long Parliament was dominated by a group of English Protestants known as the Puritans, and their mission was to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices. They maintained that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become much more Protestant. Now as part of their campaign, would you believe it, they were determined to put an end to Christmas.
This was partly because they disliked the extravagance of the Christmas celebrations of the time, which they said were ungodly, but also because they saw Christ mass as an unwelcome survival of the Roman Catholic faith, and they declared it a popish festival with no biblical justification. Can you believe it? That’s what they said. No biblical justification. And interestingly, they had the same ideas for Easter and a range of other festivals that the Church enjoyed. And in June 1947, the Long Parliament passed a law confirming the abolition of the feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, and specific penalties were to be imposed on anyone holding or attending a special Christmas church service. You would have been thrown in jail this morning for One Big Church as to what happened in 1647. Specific penalties were to be imposed, and the Lord Mayor of London was ordered to ensure that London stayed open for business. They had cancelled Christmas.
Now of course, despite the law, there were those who continued to celebrate it privately until in the end, with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the ushering in of the second Carilion era, Christmas was once again officially reestablished. Now just in the same way as those parliamentarians in the 17th century attempted to cancel Christmas overtly, covertly in today’s culture, we have strong attempts from a number of directions to cancel Christmas, or at least to cancel the true meaning of Christmas. And as a church, we have a responsibility to ensure that we hold strong and don’t allow Christmas to be cancelled.
First, let’s not cancel the history of Christmas. Now there are some who may believe that Christmas is some sort of Dickensian construct, or they may even refer back to the poem of Clement Clark Moore, a visit from St. Nicholas, or what we know as the night before Christmas. Others may hark back to St. Nicholas himself, who was a fourth-century Christian saint who was renowned for his gift-giving. And as Christians, we may point back to the origin of Christmas as being a manger in Bethlehem in which Jesus was placed as a newborn human baby, supernaturally conceived within the womb of Mary. I’m going to say it differently. To my mind, the history of Christmas goes back much further than that. In Ephesians 1, verses 3 a
