The date isn't important, the meaning is

Faith Today - Published Saturday December 26th, 2009

Well, today is the second day of the season of Christmas, turtledove day if you know the song, or Boxing Day for those of us who live in countries that maintain a little British Empire in us.

Boxing Day is one of those bits of culture and religiosity that has totally gone by the wayside. Most people don't even know what it means.

In Victorian England it was the tradition to take leftover food and durable goods and distribute them to the poor on the day after Christmas, or St. Stephen's Day. These donations were boxed up and delivered; thus the name.

There are a lot of things that are just "traditions" being carried forward.

If you think about the church and the way we do things, the way we schedule things, and our calendar, many of the days and dates are just set because of convenience.

Boxing Day, for example, made me think about Christmas. There is, I suppose, a 1/365 chance that Jesus was born on December 25; but it is unlikely. The story doesn't fit with the cultural norms; for example, shepherds and sheep wouldn't be out on the hills in December in Palestine back then.

The Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on January 6, for example. Was that Jesus birthday? Again, you are probably looking at a 1/365 chance that it was.

Am I saying Jesus was not real? No. Am I saying the church is lying? No.

It is a very modern and very North American thing that we have confused details for the truly important intent behind stories.

Here is the thing, there was this guy named Jesus, who happened to be born into a poor and humble family. The original word for Jesus' father's occupation was tekton, which meant he was probably a stone mason, but perhaps he was a carpenter... he was a tradesperson who worked with his hands in a backwater town.

We know from historical Roman records that there was someone who got the people all riled up, and that later, his followers were blamed for some fires in Rome.

But unless you are an emperor, your birth date was not really all that important back then.

So why the 25th of December?

Well, some people claim it is because that is nine months after Jesus was conceived (again, this is just a guess -- I am not even 'exactly' sure when my own daughters were conceived) but it was also the date of a very important Roman Festival which corresponded with the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.

The Romans had a feast in honour of the "Sun" to remind it to come back out and warm things up; since it was getting darker and darker.

This sounds extremely sensible to me, by the way.

And when Christianity became the official Roman religion of state, some 300 years after Jesus taught it to his followers, the idea of the sun bringing light to darkness was shifted, ever so slightly, to the son bringing light to darkness and, voila, Christmas.

The church just took something that everyone already understood and gave it a Christian meaning. It was not contrary to what they already wanted to say, and it was convenient.

Just like having a long weekend in May is convenient to celebrate the birthday of our monarch in the British Empire, whether or not it is their birthday in reality.

Does it make the story any less powerful because it also happens to fit perfectly with the understanding of the Roman winter solstice?

Or does it become even more appropriate when you realize that what we are trying to celebrate is not just one man, Jesus, but the way of life and faith that Jesus brought us to understand -- one that every culture had pieces of already?

There are people out there who think that those of us who have faith are ignorant of science, and history, and psychology and the real things of the world.

Quite the opposite is true. We just know that there is something with deeper meaning than a calendar, and that truth has nothing to do with accuracy, it is about the bigger picture.