This week's article in The Oconee Leader:
I’m pretty sure slavery doesn’t come to mind when we think about Christmas, but the world Jesus walked into 2,000 years ago was a world enslaved not just to a foreign empire but to that kingdom’s values of greed and self-promotion. One of the reasons that Jesus’ life of humility, poverty and self-sacrifice drew in so many people was because of the contrast between Jesus’ kingdom and the Roman kingdom.
I’m wondering what it would look like to enter into the story of Christmas, the story of a God who breaks into our world to free people from slavery to the values of a world in rebellion. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t look like $475 billion dollars, which is the amount of money that the National Retail Federation estimates will be spent in November and December on Christmas in the United States. Just to put this in perspective, one million seconds comes out to around 11 days. A billion seconds is somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 years. 475 billion seconds? About 15,200 years – or just two years shorter than Georgia’s winning streak over Tech in football.
$475 billion. That averages out to $923.36 per person that will be spent on Christmas. We might not live in the shadow of the Roman Empire but it’s hard to ignore the reality that there is another empire of consumerism and materialism that threatens our faithfulness to Jesus.
That’s what worries me about Christmas in Oconee County. To the degree that Christmas for followers of Jesus looks like Christmas for everyone else, we have to wonder whose kingdom we belong to? Could it be that our hunger for Christmas to be different – more meaningful and less hectic – begins with something as simple as rejecting cultural trends towards overspending and over-consumption?
The truth is that many of us don’t have that much money available to spend on Christmas for everyone around us and so we’ll spend months trying to get out of debt, only to find that the presents we bought in the name of Jesus have only furthered an addiction and slavery to consumerism and materialism in both ourselves and our children. And so our spending on Christmas this year will move us further and further away from Jesus next year as we give into a culture that tells us what to buy, wear, and spend with no regard to making much of Christ.
So we’re asking you to be part of Advent Conspiracy (www.adventconspiracy.org), a movement of people and churches around the world that invites people to recover the scandalous hope of Christmas by worshiping Jesus through giving less expensive, relational gifts for the purpose of giving the money saved towards meeting real needs in the world around us. We’re not looking to get rid of Christmas; we’re looking to save it from being hijacked by our self-driven agendas.
At the end of the day, Advent Conspiracy isn’t ultimately about money. It’s about creating an opportunity to upend the false hopes of how we do Christmas by giving gifts that give people more than just what our money can buy them. By using our time, creativity and talents, we’re not only relieving ourselves of the stress of stretching our budget to fit our Christmas list, we’re entering into the story of Christ who with simple and humble means battled the evils of greed and selfishness in his own culture.
Advent Conspiracy – Worship More. Spend Less. Give More. Love All.
Pastor Adair, every time I read one of your newspaper articles I really get a happy sense that one of the ways God has gifted you so greatly is in the ability to communicate the Gospel and the Scriptures in a way that is understandable, and at times funny, and realistic, and also in a way that helps a lot to renew the thinking not only of Christians who read your stuff, but also the unchurched people around town who may dislike 'Christianity' (and the church and 'religion') because it has been so poorly represented to them. So thanks a lot for this ministry, I think it really does honor God.
Posted by: mark mcandrew | December 04, 2007 at 09:43 PM