Sinful Celebration

Let us celebrate, O people! Let us go up in spirit! Let us raise our minds on high! These are not simply exclamations of enthusiastic piety and emotional devotion for the few strange people who like that sort of thing. They are exhortations and commands which are essential to the spiritual life of all human beings who must hear and obey as if their life depended upon it. Because, in a real sense, it does.

We are created to celebrate the gifts of God, and God Himself. This is our reason for being. It is the substance of our lives. All human sin, including the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, is a failure to celebrate properly who God is and what He does for the sake of those who are made in His image and likeness.

The sinful celebration, which ultimately is no celebration at all but simply sin, is one which excludes God and attempts to rejoice in something other than Him and His presence and action in the world. In other words, it is the celebration of God’s gifts without reference to God the Giver. And its inevitable result, necessarily and organically, is dissatisfaction, distress, depression, and finally death itself.

The Christmas season is a time of celebration, a season of gladness and joy. But many people, including many who consider themselves Christians, are devoid of the joyful spirit of celebration. They find the season irritating and unfulfilling, disappointing and depressing, even admitting at times that they are glad when it is over! The obvious reason for this is that they are celebrating wrongly.

Part 1 of an excerpt from “Let Us Celebrate, O People”, p. 76-79 in Thomas Hopko, The Winter Pascha