The trouble with Christmas in SA

BY BISHOP HUBERT BUCHER

Celebrating Christmas in South Africa has its problems. Christmas is at the beginning of the hottest time in the year. It falls into the long school holidays, and many families spend Christmas away from home, while somewhere on holidays.

Christmas is also the time when, traditionally, many people suspend their conscience and indulge in excessive feasting and drinking. Against this “tradition”, Jesus issues a sound warning: “Watch yourselves, or your hearts will be coarsened with debauchery and drunkenness” (Lk 21:34-36).

Likewise, St Paul appeals to us to live a life in holiness, in the sight of God our Father, when our Lord Jesus Christ comes with all his saints.

Paul wrote at a time when he and his early Christian converts were expecting the second coming of Christ on the clouds of heaven in glory to happen during their own lifetime.

St Paul’s letters often contain the expression “to live in Christ”. The fact is that the apostle himself practised this constant “living in Christ” to such a degree that in his Letter to the Galatians Paul could say: “I have been crucified with Christ; and I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in this body I live in faith; faith in the Son of God who loved me and who sacrificed himself for my sake” (2:20).

When St Paul admonished his converts to live, like himself, constantly “in Christ”, he meant it as being in continuous and total union with Christ.

What kind of people were these early converts of his? There were not many well-to-do people among them, and very few of them were socially respected because of the kind of life they had been living. Many of them had been thieves, liars, adulterers and perpetrators of all sorts of crimes before they converted.

However, called to conversion, and, as Christians, called to live their lives “in Christ”, they helped to conquer evil and to heal their society through their living exemplary lives in honesty and integrity.

The same can and will happen also here in South Africa.

If we too strive to constantly “live in Christ”, we will have the courage and strength to go against the bad currents and practices in our society, such as the deplorable debauchery and drunkenness in which many people in our country indulge at Christmas.

When you light the candles on the Advent wreath, and later on the Christmas tree, remember the apostle’s call to “live in Christ”. In this way you will become increasingly a light for others, both in your family and wherever else you go as a witness of Christ.

St Paul challenges us to use this Advent and Christmas to learn evermore to live in Christ, following the example of Jesus who lived his life in total obedience to his Father’s will.

Bishop Hubert Bucher is the retired bishop of Bethlehem in the Free State. This is the final of his three-part series of reflections on Advent.