Open for Christmas

You may have heard about this controversy - a number of large churches will not be opening on Christmas Sunday.

We certainly don’t have to worry about that in mine. I’ve agreed to do the music at the Midnight Mass, and I can’t really extract myself from the 8 PM Christmas Eve Mass either - our leader does not want to do it without me.

In the Time article a number of these churches will not be opening for reasons that sound…well… logistical and financial. The article notes, “Leaders at Willow Creek Community Church, a congregation in the affluent Chicago suburbs where about 15,000 people worship each weekend, said that attendance wasn't great…Across the country, hundreds of congregations… have decided that it's not worth it to marshal the resources to hold services on Christmas Sunday.”

The Didache, a catechism written around the same time as the New Testament, provides one of the earliest indications that church communities had begun, in the very age of the apostles themselves, to gather for liturgy and communion every Sunday, as a matter of obligation.

I’m as big a fan of Christmas morning as anyone. But I’m glad my family will start Christmas with the baby Jesus - at midnight Christmas morning, singing the ancient hymns of praise - the Great Gloria, the Kyrie - for a saviour who has given me every Sunday I shall ever have.