XMAS STUPIDITY
Add yet another item to that interminable list of things that irritate me: People trying to be clever when they are, in fact, stupid. This is all the more annoying if they do it in public.

As I was driving home from my local grocery store, I passed by an evangelical church. There are two giveaways for evangelicals. The first is that it has a name longer than four words, such as “The Church of the Resurrected Christ,” “The First Church of the Holy Resurrection,” “The Second Church of Christ Resurrected,” or “The Holy Church of the Resurrection.” The use of a cardinal number is typical, although if you get to the “fourth,” you begin to wonder just how important the church might be.

The second giveaway is that the head honcho is called “Pastor,” a title that anyone can adopt or sign up for on the internet for around $20. I, myself, am an ordained Pastor in the Church of the Unified Christ. This means I can marry people, perform services of worship, and try to get an upgrade on a room at a Holiday Inn (“No, that’s Pastor, not Mister.”)

The Pastor had tried to be witty and clever by inventing one of those catchy slogans designed to draw people into the church – sort of like the old “Ch—ch: What’s missing? U R!” His ersatz-catchy and politically tendentious offering was “Xmas is just Christmas without Christ.”

Well, clearly here we have a guy who puts his faith in the good Lord when he would be better served putting it in a good dictionary – or even a not-so-good dictionary. If he had bothered to check, he would have found that the word “Xmas” is actually derived from “Christmas” by replacing the word “Christ” by the letter “X,” which in turn derives from the greek letter “chi,” the first letter in the word “Christos.” It seems that the pastor’s knowledge of all things Greek starts at gyros and finishes with feta.

Related to this is the error other folks make regarding the meaning of the symbol known as the Cross of Constantine.This is NOT, as a non-Greek-speaking pastor may try to say, a representation of the word “pax,” an inference based on the erroneous interpretation that the symbol shows the letters “P” and “X” joined together. In fact, they are the Greek letters chi and rho, the first two letters in the word “Christos.”

Pastors – or any individuals who claim to be spiritual leaders – have no excuse for making such errors. If your career is based on your preaching and teaching from some holy text, then you should know something about its contents and its origins. Considering that early versions of the New Testament gospels were written in Greek, not at least recognizing some of the Greek derivations of Christian symbolism shows a lack of analytical desire and a weakness of intellect.