Keeping Up with the Church Year
One of the great benefits of using the lectionary, especially for major days during the church year, is that it helps us keep these various days in context. It’s easy for Christmas to be simply the holiday of giving, the one that allows us to sing all that good music and have some parties. Keeping track of the Christmas season lets us see some of the things that follow: the opposition, the danger, the hardship, and eventually death and resurrection.
It’s easy to separate things. People who attend church on Christmas as Easter miss what comes before, after, and between. There is no Christmas without an emptying (Phil. 2:5-11). There is no Easter without Good Friday.
Christmas is not simply a celebration of giving; it’s a celebration of sacrifice and also of receiving-receiving God’s gracious gift. Easter is not just a celebration of new life. It’s a celebration of the sacrificial death that preceded it and the way that “…by means of death he can do away with the one who has the power of death, namely the devil” (Heb. 2:14).