Christmas and Easter Christians

It’s just about that time of year again.  The faithful worshipers who show up at church every Sunday morning will once again be joined by “C & E Christians:” those who come to Christmas Eve and Easter services, but are notably absent the other 50 weeks of the year.  They make an easy target for clergy and for regular attenders.  These are the people who keep the church’s ministry and outreach going throughout the year, who deal with all the messy and complicated parts of church life: from Bible studies to community service to paying the electric bill to making sure the grass is mowed and the snow is shoveled.  I can almost hear the voices now: “Where are all these people the rest of the year?  Why do they think they can just show up a couple times a year and assume that the church will be here for them?  We could really use some more help to keep this church going.  If faith really mattered to them, they’d be here every week.”  And so on.

To some extent, these complaints are warranted.  Yes, a healthy and meaningful faith in God leads us to deeper commitment and involvement in his work in the world.  It is eager to learn more, to worship more, to serve more.  And yes, the church is an institution (among other things) that requires the participation and contribution of people to keep it going.  Even more importantly, however, is the message that is rarely spoken but underlies the cynical jokes made at the expense of the C & E Christians: we miss them.  We enjoy having them with us.  The life of the congregation is meaningful and exciting for us, and we want them to share it with us.  (Somehow, however, we tend to overlook the times and ways that people have been hurt, angered, or ignored in the life of the church.)

As true as all this is, however, sharing pews with twice-a-year worshipers is a testimony and a reminder for the regulars.  Sometimes we may get lost in the trees and fail to notice the forest that we’re in.  We become so accustomed to the ins and outs of our faith and of congregational life that we fail to remember the most important parts of all.  We gather to worship a God who took on flesh to share our humanity with us, and to redeem that humanity through his death and resurrection.

Christmas is meaningless without Easter, and Easter is irrelevant without Christmas.

Christmas is a celebration of God appearing in human form.  In the person of Jesus, divine and human are joined together.  In the defining words from the council of Chalcedon in 451, we worship Jesus Christ “at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man… recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”  It is a divine mystery that theology can point to but never fully explain: how Jesus is both fully and completely God while at the same time being fully and completely human.  Perhaps uniquely among all religions (with the possible exception of the Hindu god Vishnu), the God of Christianity fully and completely shares our human experience.  We worship a God who knows personally the joys and struggles of what it means to be human.

Easter is a celebration of the redemption of humanity through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.  One traditional way to understand redemption is that Jesus reconnects sinful humanity with its loving God; theologians have composed several “theories of atonement” to explain exactly how this happens.  I find meaning in the metaphor of a bridge: Jesus is the “bridge” that spans the gap created by our sin between humanity and God.  He reconciles the relationship between God and us that was broken by our sin.  But a bridge is only helpful if it is firmly anchored on both sides of the gorge.  A bridge that takes you only halfway across is no bridge at all.  If Jesus was only God and not human, or if Jesus was only human and not God, he would leave us stranded halfway across the span to reconcile God and humanity, and would not have accomplished the redemption we find in him.

The Christmas and Easter Christians may be on to something.  By adding their presence and their voices to these two special worship events each year, they help us to recognize their importance.  Without Christmas, the incarnation that it celebrates, Easter would be an action by God that never touches human existence.  And without Easter, Christmas would celebrate the creation of a “bridge” with no purpose.

So if you are a “Christmas and Easter” Christian, welcome.  I look forward to the testimony you will share, simply by being with us, about the importance of who Christ is and what he has done.  If you are a “regular” church-goer, make room in the pew and in your heart for those whom you only see twice a year.  They have something valuable to offer to us.