BY GENE EDWARD VEITH
Friday, December 21, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Contrary to legend, Martin Luther did not invent the Christmas tree, though the custom of decorating evergreens for the holidays did come into England and America from the Lutherans. Nor did Luther write "Away in a Manger," though he did write five other carols about the Christ child just as lovely.
Luther gained his reputation as a Christmas trailblazer because he really did help shape the way Western culture thought about the holiday. It was not so much trees and songs but Luther's Nativity sermons that contributed to the imagery and emotions now associated with Christmas.
Luther preached up to 200 sermons a year at the parish church in Wittenberg over his 30-year career. Some 2,300 have been collected. He would preach on a Christmas text from Advent through Epiphany, more than a month each year. His most famous Nativity sermons, though, are those he himself published in his Christmas Postils (1522). Designed to serve as preaching models for other parish pastors, they found their way to pulpits throughout northern Europe and were excerpted in countless devotional manuals.
The sermons were essentially meditations on the biblical Christmas story. As arguably the major theologian with the greatest literary gifts, Luther presented the Holy Family with vivid imagery and poignant characterization.
Ironically, for someone accused of dismantling medieval piety, Luther writes some of the most affectionate accounts of the Virgin Mary. He writes about her, though, not as the Queen of Heaven but as a poor, socially despised peasant girl, "no more esteemed than a maid among us who does her appointed chores." When it came time to have her baby, Mary, driven out of the inn, had to go to the stables.
"Who showed the poor girl what to do? She had never had a baby before. I am amazed that the little one did not freeze. Do not make of Mary a stone. It must have gone straight to her heart that she was so abandoned. She was flesh and blood, and must have felt miserable--and Joseph too--that she was left in this way, all alone, with no one to help, in a strange land in the middle of winter. Her eyes were moist even though she was happy, and aware that the Baby was God's Son and the Savior of the world. She was not stone. For the higher people are in the favor of God, the more tender are they."
Luther stressed the humanness, even the ordinariness, of the Holy Family to impress upon his congregation of ordinary human beings the magnitude of the Incarnation, that God became one of them. "What can be sweeter than the Babe, what more lovely than the mother! Look at the Child, knowing nothing. Yet all that is belongs to him, that your conscience should not fear but take comfort in him. . . . Watch him springing in the lap of the maiden. Laugh with him. Look upon this Lord of Peace and your spirit will be at peace."
Are you afraid of God? he asks. "He places before you a Babe with whom you may take refuge. You cannot fear him, for nothing is more appealing to man than a babe. . . . To me there is no greater consolation given to mankind than this, that Christ became man, a child, a babe, playing in the lap and at the breasts of his most gracious mother."
In his Christmas sermons, Luther spiritualized the ordinary. He turned the season into a pretext for benevolence. (Would you have helped the Baby Jesus at Bethlehem? he asks. "Why don't you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbor.") By highlighting the shepherds, the Baby's swaddling clothes, the hardships and the transfigurations that suddenly break into ordinary life, Luther brings theology down to earth in a way that is, to this day, associated with Christmastime.
Social historians credit Luther with idealizing what is condescendingly referred to as "the bourgeois family." Reacting against the medieval notion that Christian perfection requires celibacy, Luther taught that God Himself is hidden in marriage, taking care of children and ordinary family life.
Luther's portraits of the Holy Family have a way of reminding us that, especially at Christmas, every family is holy.
Mr. Veith, an editor of World Magazine, is author of "The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals."
