Shortly before Christmas, a pastor Facebook friend posted a bit of a rant. Why do so few churches offer late night Christmas Eve services anymore, he asked. And why have most dropped Christmas Day services altogether? I understood where he was coming from. I remember as a child going bleary-eyed to our church’s 11:00 PM (and only) Christmas Eve service. The sanctuary was filled past capacity, with folding chairs in the aisles. (And then we lit individual hand candles—a fire marshal’s nightmare!)

Now it’s a different story. Most services are in the evening or even late afternoon, and often no Christmas morning service is offered. In this, churches are responding to the desires and schedules of their members. My ranting pastor friend understood this. Culture has changed and people are doing lots of other things on Christmas Eve. But in the past, worship was the highpoint of the day.

They planned their Christmas celebrations around the church service rather than seeing it as an inconvenience or interruption.

In other words, people’s priorities are screwed up. But in his view, this also reflects a misunderstanding of what Christmas is about.

At the risk of seeming overly pious or dogmatic I ask, what is it again we’re celebrating? Is it family, particularly our own families? Or is it the birth of Jesus who brought the message of the place of all people in God’s family? Before long, if not already, Christmas will be little more than a cultural celebration with but a little religious window dressing for the more nostalgic.

I appreciate his frustration and early in my ministry shared it to a degree. But not anymore. I don’t see people as the problem. Rather, I see nostalgia preventing the self-examination churches need to remake themselves for a different time. My Facebook pastor friend never explains why a late service is better than an early one. That’s the way it was and the way it should be.

Of course, worship attendance has been declining across the board for decades, and the church’s festivals have not been exempted. For most people, both Christmas and Easter are now largely secular, family-oriented events. They, along with Thanksgiving, make up the national trifecta of big sit-down meal family gatherings.

For the church, beating the dead-horses of Christmas and Easter past isn’t going to change that. The symbolic meaning of these days and others like them are too faded now. My Facebook friend asks the right question: What are we celebrating? The voices singing “Jesus is born!” “Jesus is raised! Alleluia!” have gotten less enthusiastic and more uncertain over the years, and the celebration more anemic.

While the church knew better in the past, today it’s assumed these days are commemorating an event. Many evangelical churches have jumped the shark by declaring Christmas to be “a birthday party for Jesus.” Yet modern Bible scholars agree that we have no idea when Jesus was born (the December date having been adopted by the church in the 4^th century), and that he was likely born in Nazareth, and almost certainly not Bethlehem. Further, only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, have birth stories at all, and they contradict each other more than agree. Mark, John, and Paul say almost nothing about it.

Similarly, Easter has lost much of its credibility as a datable event. For Paul, the source of the earliest writings in the New Testament, Jesus’ resurrection was demonstrated by visions he and others had some time after Jesus’ death. Mark, the earliest gospel, closes his work with an empty tomb but no appearance of Jesus. Such appearances are added, in different and often contradictory ways, by Matthew, Luke, and John.

Today, many scholars believe the historical “Easter experience” was a series of visions of the risen Jesus by his disciples sometime after his death (and the first may have been to women). To tell the Jesus’ story decades later, Mark created the empty tomb scene to bring his gospel to a dramatic and meaningful conclusion. His successors decided it would work even better to add the risen Jesus to the story, which they each do in unique and inconsistent ways.

Now most people, in or out of the church, may be largely unaware of these modern viewpoints. Nonetheless, to the average person the significance of Christmas, Easter, and the other “events” the church celebrates have all faded. But it’s the modern critical understanding of them that prevents the church from seriously re-energizing them in the old way. We know too much to do it with a straight face.

What’s to be done? This is where nostalgia gets in the way. It’s hard to forget those overflow holiday worship crowds. But they’re not coming back, no matter how the Christmas Eve schedule gets arranged, or whether on Easter you have multiple brass players, a hundred lilies, and a brunch and egg hunt (with a bunny!). In short, the church needs to give up on saving Christmas, Easter, and the whole culture-shaping milieu it created and presided over in the ancient and medieval Western world.

Lent is around the corner, and it provides a guide to what these days and seasons can be about. For Lent is not about what happened in the past but what is happening in our lives now. This was the focus of Jesus’ ministry but its one the church lost when it prioritized “saving souls.” By elevating Jesus’ life into heaven, it forgot that Jesus’ primary revelation was who we all are created to be here and now.

Christmas is a celebration of the incarnation of God in each of us, revealed in the life of Jesus. Lent and Easter present the dying and rising experience we all must undergo to set aside the false self of the ego and discover our true Self in God, enlivened by the Spirit of Pentecost. Learning how this new life happens and what it looks like ought to be the focus of the church’s life, in worship and everything else it does, even if it doesn’t get a folding-chair crowd.