A quarterly magazine for the proclamation and defense of the Gospel
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A quarterly magazine for the proclamation and defense of the Gospel |
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Vol. 5, Issue 4 | Winter 2011 |
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Primum Mobile is a quarterly web magazine. This issue and all its contents are © Copyright 2004-2011 by the editors. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.
by Paul Lytle
There are a few really good places in the Houston area to see Christmas lights. One of them is very near my childhood home, and as I was growing up, it was a yearly trip down those winding streets to look at the lights. They weren’t, of course, as sophisticated as they might be now. There were no lights choreographed with music. In my early years, they were almost exclusively those large, colored lights, so there was very little creativity in the design of the display. What made one house better than another was generally number of strands alone.
The smaller lights allowed some subtly to be introduced, and some really neat ideas emerged. It was only later in my childhood when even the icicle lights came into fashion. We started using those when my grandfather saw them on a house near his home. He decided they were neat and made his own – getting strings of white lights and making the icicles with pipe cleaners. We did that too, only to start finding the premade icicle lights in the stores a year or two later.
(As a quick note – I was just at my grandfather’s house yesterday, and he was putting up those same pipe cleaner lights he made two decades ago. I’ve been through three sets of lights in the same amount of time.)
But since my childhood, I’ve not missed a year of light looking. It has always been a night I’ve looked forward to for months beforehand. I’ve planned routes to get to the best houses and see the themed streets. I’ve always had a bit of a childlike wonder at this simple tradition, and I’ve never grown tired of it.
The best time I’ve had at Christmas was when I was in college, and I had a part-time job delivering pizzas in that very same neighborhood I had grown up admiring every Christmas. The traffic made the job rather difficult in December, but I enjoyed it all the same. I got the tour a hundred times instead of once or twice.
One year, I went with some friends, and we were looking at one particularly nice house. The lights were all white, and they framed the house, the walk, and the trees. Besides those, red bows were hung on the trees and pillars.
One of my friends said he preferred the white lights, to which I wholeheartedly agreed. White lights always set a mood for me – one that was particular wintery and cold, and yet serene and inviting. My friends stated that it reminded him of the purity of Christ.
I hadn’t thought of my annual hobby in any theological way before that. It never dawned on me that I should. But I did then, and the old habit has stuck with me ever since.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to suggest that there is a particular theology of Christmas lights. Perhaps the tradition did start with some symbol of the Bethlehem star or of Christ being the light of the world. I tried a quick internet search and found conflicting theories of their origin. It hardly matters, since if there had been a theological meaning, that meaning is lost to the mainstream of even Christians today. And even if there is a theological meaning, lights fall well in the boundaries of Christian freedom. You do not sin in failing to put up lights. You do not sin if you do. At least assuming that you do or do not to honor God.
At the same time, there is nothing inherently wrong in seeking the meaning in this holiday that was meant to be there from the very beginning – a celebration of the incarnation. There are certain aspects of the season that can swell the heart with awe and wonder. There are other aspects that can make you cringe at the greed and commercialism of our culture. It’s not a bad habit to avoid the latter and embrace the former.
It was a small comment from my friend, but since then my mind has every year jumped to the majesty of our Creator, the innocence of the Lamb of God, and the hope of this event we are celebrating in Christmas. Most others who pass by will not see these things. The people who put up the lights probably aren’t thinking of them. And yet there is a yearning in so many during the Christmas season, a childlike wonder, an innocent hope, that transitions very well into a discussion of the Gospel.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). It was a wonderful gift from a friend that this truth comes to mind whenever I see Christmas lights. I pray that never changes, no matter what the next trend in lights may be.
