After Christmas, What?

Three years ago, during my last blogmas challenge, I wrote a post about Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christmas Sermon on Peace.  The post includes a link to the audio of that sermon, and it’s worth a listen.  I closed that blog post by referencing another sermon that Dr. King gave, and it is that sermon that I want to focus more on today.

On December 28, 1952, Martin Luther King, Jr gave a sermon at Ebenzer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia that he entitled, After Christmas, What?  And like all preachers do, it appears he recycled this sermon as he gave another sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on December 27, 1959 with this title. 

The King Institute has documented Dr. King’s notes from a torn, handwritten sermon outline, and put them online for us to see the points that Dr. King touched on in this sermon.  In this sermon, he asked what the point of Christmas is if we walk away from it with no discernable difference in our lives and he strove to challenge us to ask ourselves if the world around us would be able to recognize that our lives were transformed by our meeting with Christ.

“For the past few days, we have made our symbolic journeys and pilgrimages to Bethlehem. We have symbolically knelt before the infant Jesus at his manger. There we have beheld him in all of his grandeur and glory…… Now ….. we leave Bethlehem and make our way back to our various homes the question poses itself, What did we gain? What is the value of our meeting with Christ? What is Christmas going to do for us in terms of changed attitudes and better social conditions? Will Christmas mean just another item in our social calendar or will it mean a new life and new attitudes resulting from our encounter with Christ.” – Martin Luther King Jr in sermon delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on December 28, 1952

I love how he phrases “we have symbolically knelt before the infant Jesus at his manager”.  Certainly, for many people, nativities and reenactments of Jesus sleeping in a manger are an integral part of Christmas.  But it’s important to ask ourselves as we go through this holiday season and see these displays of God’s arrival to earth in human form, if they have become nothing more than holiday traditions that are empty of true appreciation for what they are meant to represent.

“See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” – Colossians 2:8

As with all things, we need to stay mindful that we aren’t getting too caught up on human traditions as Colossians 2 puts it, and put the focus back on Christ himself.  And it is impossible to have a meeting with Christ and not be changed by it.

So as Dr. King asked one Sunday morning 72 years ago, After Christmas, What?  How will we live going forward after meeting with Christ and singing songs of praise about his arrival to earth?