When I was 12, I quit the church.

Rather, I felt like they had quit me, so I responded in kind.  I was in 6th grade, the stereotypical nerdy, chubby kid with too many words and not enough social skills.  I would go to school every day and listen to the taunts and jeers of my classmates, then go to church on Sunday mornings and hear the exact same things.  I was the class joke.  It made me hate church.  It made me disinterested with God.  By the time I was ready to transition into youth group, I was nearing the breaking point.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when a boy threw my Bible out of the second story window into the bushes below for no reason other than to laugh at me.

Snap.

I went home and tearfully begged my parents to not go to church anymore.  My reasoning was that the church was supposed to be a loving place, and if that was true, I should be treated differently than I was at school.  People should accept and love me there.  But, that was not the case.  And that is not always the case in many churches across our country.  A place that stands for truth, love, and grace can often become a place of lies, hatred, and gossip.  I see it all the time as a youth pastor.  People who are difficult to love get pushed to the side in favor of those who don’t take much effort to minister to, or old friends that we are comfortable with.  That’s wrong.  It’s sin.

Reese Roper, who was/is the lead singer of one of my favorite bands, Five Iron Frenzy, helped start a church in Denver, Colorado for people who felt left out and abused.  What did they name it?  Scum of the Earth.  I love that name.  Sure, many churches wouldn’t want a name like that, but their mission is right in the name!  They are there to reach those considered the scum of the earth.  The difficult.  The addict.  The dropout.  The “special”.  The outcast.  The orphan.  The very people that Jesus told us that he came for, the very people that God commanded his people over and over again to help in the Old Testament.  What we forget sometime is that we are all scum of the earth.  Because of our sin, Scripture tells us that are God’s enemies, the targets of His wrath, and separated from Him by our own wrongdoing.  We are not holy….we are filthy rags, unrighteous….scum.

I was talking with an older gentleman who works with our youth yesterday.  He’s become a mentor of sorts to me, and I was talking to him about my past, and he was shocked.  He told me he’d always assumed that I had grown up in church, that I was a good little church boy that had never had any doubts or problems, but that now he saw differently.  I was reminded in that conversation of why I do what I do, why I gravitate toward the broken and abused, and why when they walk through the door of our youth ministry I want so desperately for there to be no judgment for them.  Because they are broken, just like you and me, just like all of us.  And they need the same redemption that I was offered, that I have experienced in life, the same salvation that all people are freely given.

So, as scum of the earth, I reach out to fellow scum of the earth, knowing that we all have some kind of hurt, some kind of story to tell, and redemption waiting in the wings for each and every one.

(I originally posted this blog last year around Christmastime, and actually the year before that,  but I thought it was still pretty relevant, so I decided to share it again.  I hope it makes you think.  Merry Christmas!)

I’m probably going to make some folks mad with this post.

I realize this early on, and I take full responsibility for it. But, part of doing what I do is calling it like I see it, even when the truth isn’t sexy (thank you, Derek Webb). By now, if you’re like me, most of your Christmas shopping is done, presents are wrapped underneath the tree, and you’re just ready for the whole thing to be over with. Well, except for that last part. Part of why I feel the way about what I want to write about today is the fundamental shift that has occurred in my life over the last few years regarding Christmas, and what it really means. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of our Savior, my Savior, Jesus Christ. It is about how God came to earth in the flesh to ransom the souls of men by breaking the power of sin. Over the last few years, the full gravity of this has come to bear on me, and I have wrestled with it, trying to justify selfishness over the message of the tiny baby in a manger. Guess what? I lost.

Yesterday, as I was leaving the house to go to church, I noticed a sign in my neighbors yard which simply says “We say Merry CHRISTmas.” I shook my head at it and continued on, but later I learned the origin of those signs. Our local high school is selling them to fund their Project Graduation. This bothers me on so many levels. Not just because the name of Christ is being used as a commodity to pay for inflatable games and pizza, but because it also fans the flames of those who loudly declare “CHRISTmas” instead of “Xmas” or “Happy Holidays”. This is wrong, and I want to explain why.

A few years ago, I first noticed the hubbub in the news because some national chain stores had stopped using “Merry Christmas” in their advertising and were instead using “Happy Holidays”. The opponents of this used, “It takes Christ out of Christmas!”, as their main argument. That’s an understandable argument. But, to assume that Christ has been taken out of Christmas just because one department store or another chooses to say “Happy Holidays” or “Xmas” is a huge leap into false logic. In fact, a better argument might be that these corporations, and us to a larger extent, have taken Christ out of Christmas by the way we’ve turned the celebration of the birth of  the Christchild into a consumeristic bloodbath to get the best deals on the most stuff so we can all fake happiness a few more days. If anyone, ANYONE, is to blame for taking Christ out of Christmas, it’s anyone who chases stuff more than Jesus during this time of year. People lined up at our local Walmart at 11:00 p.m. the night before Black Friday……when is the last time you saw someone line up outside the doors of the church on Saturday night because they couldn’t wait to worship?

It bothers me so much that some people want to hold the name of Jesus high during the holidays, screaming “It’s CHRISTmas!”, but the rest of the year everything else seems to be more important. I think the best way Christmas is declared is by a life that is thankful for Jesus year round, not just one month, or one day. Let me break it down even further….

The symbol that I used at the top of this post is called a labarum, or the Chi-Rho. It is a symbol that is used in churches, and represents Christ. Chi is the pronunciation for the Greek letter “X”. The “X” in Xmas is from the Greek letter Chi, which is the first letter of Χριστός, Christ in Greek. So, the first letter of Christ, when used in Xmas, is actually correct! Now, we can argue that there is some kind of agenda against Christmas, but the agenda isn’t with the church! It’s outside, in the consumer-driven holiday that we’ve allowed ourselves to create! I don’t understand why we think that corporations like Target, Walmart, Best Buy, or whoever, have to say “Christmas” when the rest of the year they don’t exhibit qualities of being a so-called “Christian” business. We can’t expect non-believers to act like believers. That only comes from a renewed mind and a regenerated heart.

As for the signs, we’ve turned Christ into a nothing more than a material thing. A name that’s bought and sold. And in doing so, we continue the feed the consumerist monster, only this time we give him the Messiah to snack on. In the long run, does it really matter, what we say? We can say Christmas/Xmas/Merry/Happy/whatever, but do our lives reflect that the child in the manger has changed anything about us? Do we only celebrate CHRIST in this month, or is he capital letters in our life all the time? I want to leave you with this except from an article on the secularization of Christmas, and the wisdom of C. S. Lewis:

In the early 20th century, Christian writers such as C. S. Lewis had already noted a distinct split between the religious and secular observance of Christmas. In Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus, Lewis gives a satire of the observance of two simultaneous holidays in “Niatirb” (Britain backwards) from the supposed view of the Greek historian and traveller. One, “Exmas”, is observed by a flurry of compulsory commercial activity and expensive indulgence in alcoholic beverages. The other, “Crissmas,” is observed in Niatirb’s temples. Lewis’s narrator asks a priest why they kept Crissmas on the same day as Exmas. He receives the reply:

“It is not lawful, O Stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left.” And when I asked him why they endured the Rush, he replied, “It is, O Stranger, a racket… “[64]

Merry Christmas everyone….let it be in our hearts as it is in our words.