By SCOTT BLACK JOHNSTON Tomorrow night the church will be full.

Some will come out of habit—harboring nostalgia for this night. Some will act out of courtesy: "Yes, Grandma, I'll go with you." Some will be here because they enjoy the once-a-year music.

But these reasons alone do not explain why the pews will be full.

In recent years, preachers have become anxious cats. We worry over the increasing number of young people who, when surveyed about their beliefs, check "no faith whatsoever." We tell stories about churches that have closed their doors—developers turning sanctuaries into boutiques. We wonder if we are becoming "like Europe."

"Religion" derives from the Latin religare, to bind, but in New York City it seems to have lost its binding power. Almost 60% of the New Yorkers who live within three miles of my midtown church claim that they have no involvement in any faith. That's easily the highest percentage of people in any region in the country.

Yet on Christmas Eve, people will come.

Many will feel awkward. They will be unfamiliar with the motions—the standing, the sitting, the praying, the singing. Some will repress giggles. Others will dab at tears. A few will be tipsy. Some will walk out before it is over. Most will be eager to hold a candle. Nearly everyone will sing "Silent Night."

I used to resent the awkwardness of the night, the barnyard quality of it. It's a peculiar crowd and a disorderly service.

This may explain why some clergy choose this moment to chastise people for not being there the other 51 weeks of the year. I know a minister who used to remark, with a pained smile, that there were folks in attendance who think that the only flowers ever displayed in church are poinsettias.

Instead of wagging our fingers, what we really should do is marvel—at the fact that, in spite of our scandals, our hypocrisy and our ineptitude, people will still darken our doors on Christmas Eve.

Karl Barth, the 20th-century Swiss theologian who spent a dozen years as a pastor, said that the institution of the Church is grounded in a claim that seems to stand in grotesque contradiction to the facts. Still, whenever people arrived at his small church on Sunday mornings, Barth sensed an air of expectancy.

In a 1922 speech to a gathering of ministers in Schulpforta, Germany, Barth described people who come to worship as perpetual questioners who nonetheless anticipate that "something great, crucial, and even momentous is about to happen."

This is the core of religion, the thing that binds us together, the thing we haven't yet managed to quash—the expectation that something momentous is going to happen when we gather. That's why people, even the tipsy ones, will turn out tomorrow. They will come to see if angels are going to show up and proclaim (once again) that there is a God who loves us and that heaven's great desire for us is peace.

They will come, not simply out of nostalgia or courtesy or routine, but, as Barth put it, "to find out and thoroughly understand the answer to this one question . . . Is it true?"

Rev. Black Johnston is the senior pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City.

• HOUSES OF WORSHIPDECEMBER 24, 2010

Do Christians Overemphasize Christmas? Some theologians claim that Easter is more important. That's wrong. When we celebrate one, we celebrate the other.
By JOHN WILSON One of the hallowed Christmas traditions is the Anti-Christmas Rant. It takes many forms, and anyone reading this newspaper will be familiar with most of them. But unless you routinely hang out with people who argue about theology the way many Americans argue about politics or football, you may not have encountered one variant of the Rant that has been gaining momentum in recent years.

It goes like this: Christmas isn't simply bad for all the usual reasons—the grotesque materialism that its celebration encourages, the assault of sentimentality and kitsch that somehow seems to grow worse every year, and the smarmy wrapping of it all in the most inflated spiritual rhetoric.

On top of all that, says the Ranter, there is a grievous theological error. In placing so much emphasis on Christmas, Christians fail to grasp the meaning of their own story—in which Easter clearly should take pride of place.

This complaint isn't new, but it's been voiced more frequently of late. And not from the fringes, where members of tiny sects patiently explain that Christmas and Easter are pagan holidays that conscientious Christians must boycott. Well-respected voices are making the argument.

There's Terry Mattingly of getreligion.org, for one, and N.T. Wright, a former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England. And Rodney Clapp, who presides over Brazos Press, a major Christian publisher.



"I have the cure for the Christmas blues," Mr. Clapp wrote this month in his column for the Christian Century. "It is called Easter. On occasion it takes an outsider to remind us what is central to the Christian faith. So I turn to Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman for a salutary reminder. As Hoffman once wrote . . . 'Historians tell us that Christmas was not always the cultural fulcrum that balances Christian life. There was a time when Christians knew that the paschal mystery of death and resurrection was the center of Christian faith. It was Easter that really mattered, not Christmas.'"

"The climax of the four Gospels is not Christmas," Mr. Clapp added, "but the events we celebrate as Easter."

Where to start with what's wrong with this analysis? Let's begin with Rabbi Hoffman's contention that Christmas never "really mattered." Such hyperbole reveals the false dichotomy at the heart of this particular Anti-Christmas Rant: the idea that Christmas is more important than Easter, or vice versa, and we must choose between them. That's no more cogent than suggesting that Revelation is more important than Genesis.

Christmas brings us face-to-face with the mystery of the Incarnation—the preposterous claim that the creator of the universe sent his son (but how could he have a "son"?) to be born of a virgin (what?), both fully man and fully God: "Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness," as we read in Paul's letter to the Philippians.

This claim we call the Incarnation—and celebrate at Christmas—can't be separated from "the paschal mystery of death and resurrection." The babe in swaddling clothes comes with a mission to fulfill. And as we sing carols for his birth, we see him taken down from the cross, wrapped in "a clean linen cloth," and laid in the tomb of a friend. That's the cloth that is left behind in the empty tomb on Resurrection morning.

Easter is implicit in Christmas, and Christmas is implicit in Easter. When we celebrate the one, we celebrate the other, looking forward to the restoration of all things.

Mr. Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture, a bimonthly review.