Stick With The Carols

STICK WITH THE CAROLS
by Rev. Jim Harnish

Dave Barry noted that “the school dropped religion altogether and started singing about the weather…nonmemorable songs such as ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Frosty The Snowman,’ and — this is a real song — ‘Suzy Snowflake,’ all of which is pretty funny because we live in Miami. A visitor from another planet would assume that the children belonged to the Church of Meteorology.”

We stick with the carols because the carols stick with us. Year after year, the words come back from some deep place in our memory…at least through my generation. The culture around us helped us learn to sing them.

That’s not the case today. Kids aren’t learning the carols in school. Outside the church, the next generation does not have a memory of singing the story of the birth of Christ.

The Biblical irony, of course, is that it was never supposed to be the culture’s responsibility to tell the Christmas story. The New Testament Christians always assumed that it was the church’s responsibility to take the story to a secular, unbelieving world; a world where the gospel has to compete with belief in The Church of Meteorology; just the kind of world in which we live today.

This is to encourage you to sing the carols, play them on your CD, hum them in the shower, teach them to your children. Listen to the words and let them soak into your soul.

Sticking with the carols,
Jim Harnish
(a U.M. Pastor in Florida)