A few weeks ago a someone asked me if we were going to have services at our church on Christmas Day, since this year it is a Sunday. I know, this sounds like one of those paradoxical statements that only church people — and Yogi Berra — can occasionally come up with. But I knew what she meant.

Christmas only rarely falls on a Sunday. The last time was 1994. Many Protestants, as a persistent residue of the anti-Christmas ideology of our Puritan forebears, do not normally have worship services on Christmas Day. Christmas morning has become a time for ritualized family gift-giving and feasting. So she was asking me if I was really expecting people to change their normal practices and come to church, of all places, just because Christmas happens this year on a Sunday?

"I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that question," I said.

Christians worship on Sunday. We have done so since the earliest days of the Church. Sunday worship is sacred to us. We don’t cancel Sunday worship for blizzards, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods, football games, Springsteen concerts, Independence Day parades, or anything else. Why in God’s name would we dream of canceling Sunday worship on what is arguably the second most important Christian holiday of the year? If anything, should we not be making a particular point of worshiping God on the day we celebrate Jesus’ birth?

The other day, I saw a news report that many mega-churches have decided not to gather for worship on Christmas because it falls on a Sunday.* I took the opportunity to indulge in a few moments of self-righteous gloating about how this perfectly reveals what, in my humble opinion, many mega-churches are really about: a complete rejection of authentic Christianity in favor of whatever is marketable and convenient to the secular society in which we live; a lite, quasi-religious pit-stop with no function more transcendent than helping people cope with and even thrive in the rat-race.

But then I heard that there are some Presbyterian churches in our area that have decided to cancel worship on Sunday, December 25, as well. Mega-churches are one thing; I don’t expect much biblical, spiritual, or liturgical literacy from most of them. But Presbyterians ought to know better. As a Presbyterian minister I find this profoundly embarrassing; even shameful.

The thing about it is, though, even those of us whose churches will be holding services on Christmas Day expect attendance to be very low. This greatly depresses me because of what it says about the ephemerality and shallowness of our own faith... and the pervasive influence in our hearts of other cultural values.

This is nothing new. Western culture has been riven by competition between the spiritual and economic meanings of this time of year for hundreds of years. It’s just that things seem so out of balance now. Preachers used to decry the "commercialization" of Christmas; but today it is like we are annoyed that anyone should insist that "Christmas" has any authentic religious content at all. When the self-appointed right-wing language police now insist that we wish each other "Merry CHRISTMAS," instead of the more generic and inclusive, "Happy Holidays," is it Christian faith they are defending? Or is their point really to justify with religious language an essentially secular and wildly materialistic holiday?

I wonder how many of the same individuals who insist that everyone use "Christmas" language are also closing their churches on Christmas because something as trivial as worship should not interfere with what is really important: their own present-opening time. As if buying and receiving gifts are somehow themselves spiritual acts so holy that they should not be sidelined, even for an hour, by something as unproductive and unprofitable as gathering for prayer and hearing the Biblical story.

And anyone familiar with the Biblical story can only realize how useless it is, when taken in its own integrity, as a prop or basis for a consumption-driven festival. At its heart, the celebration of the Lord’s Nativity is on every level a profound criticism and rejection of the world’s economic values, political powers, and social orders. The heroes are mainly some poor, homeless, working people being jerked around by heartless powerful figures like Caesar and Herod. The good news is that, by God’s power it is the marginalized ones who triumph in the end.

In order to use Christian narratives and symbols as a pretext for economic activity, they have to be punctured and their actual meanings drained away. Then other, alien meanings have to be pumped into them. So, somehow, from "God’s gift of his Son," and the gifts of the wise men to the Christ-child, we derive the disgraceful spectacle of people trampling each other to take advantage of sales at Wal-Mart on Black Friday. When we hear "Silent Night" coming over the PA system at the mall, we are conditioned to know it is time to max out our credit cards.

The fact is that our society, and even many Christians, do not really treat Christmas as a religious holiday at all, anymore. Or rather, more ominously, it is a holiday... but of a religion far more important to us than Christianity: it is the High Holy Feast of Consumerism. It is the official barometer of the economy’s health. It is, as the mega-church spokespeople explained, a "family day." God has no business intruding here.

We may sanctimoniously distribute sappy images of Santa kneeling hatless before the baby Jesus, as if to pretend that the commercial side serves and points to the spiritual side. But when we are compelled by the calendar to decide with whom we want to spend quality time on the morning of December 25, it is Santa who is welcomed. For the baby Jesus we have no room.

The hours between 6 am and noon on Sunday, December 25, 2005, are claimed by two rival faiths: Christianity and secular consumerism. It will become glaringly and absurdly obvious which religion truly guides us. You can’t be in two places at once. For at least one hour that morning, you will have to choose.

And for those of you who attend churches that will be closed that day, this is your opportunity to find a real one.

*http://nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Closed-on-Christmas.html.