Last year I ordered Sufjan Stevens’ 5-cd box set of Christmas music, “Songs for Christmas,” and received it in the mail. (You can buy it at this link–there are also two free downloads in case you want to “try” it out). Incidentally, Sufjan’s Christmas carols are about the only Christmas music I can listen to anymore. Which makes me think that I need to start a contest to find out what people think is the worst Christmas carol out there, since there are a lot that make me want to wrap my scarf just a bit too tight around my ears and nose.

Anyway, Sufjan, being the creative guy he is, included a songbook with a few short stories and other things in it. And in one essay, about how he learned to love Christmas (and Christmas music) after hating it, said something that really caught my attention. I should have noticed it before, because it was hiding in plain sight. But it was one of those moments where Jesus’ many-angled beauty stood out in a new light.

Sufjan, writing of his attempt to reexamine Christmas songs, says he was “dumb struck” by the badness of some carols and the goodness of others.

“I admit, I was dumb struck, offended by the patronizing tone of ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town,’ or completely awed by the social consciousness inscribed in the last verse to ‘O Holy Night.‘”

When I read that, I wondered what he was talking about. I have rarely paid much attention to the words in Christmas carols, even when singing them. They’re often so much emotional furniture growing up that the words become part of some Christmasy mush, mixed up with shopping, excitement, snow, financial and/or emotional crisis, family memories, etc.

So I went back and read the verse Sufjan spoke of. Here it is:

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His Gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His Name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy Name!

Those third and fourth lines took my breath away. Christ the King, who came as a child and died on a cross, he came to free us from slavery to sin. And in his name the abolition movement went forward, freeing man from fellow man. And Christ is the only way to racial reconciliation, for the message of repentance he brings goes out to all colors, creeds, groups and genders.

I had been struck by this when reading Paul’s word to Ephesus in Ephesians 2, where he tells them that Jews and Greeks are both “brought near” to God through Jesus, and can also then be brought near to one another.

As Paul says in Colossians 3:11:

“Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”

And this is just one part of what Christmas is really about.