December Books, Day 6: Martin Luther's Christmas Book

With all their eating, drinking, and finery, God left them empty, and this comfort and treasure was hidden from them. Oh, what a dark night it was in Bethlehem that this light should not have been seen. Thus shows God that he has no regard for what the world is and has and does. And the world shows that it does not know or consider what God is and has and does.--Martin Luther

I know exactly when, where and why I bought this book. We were attending a Lutheran church (we were members for about three years), and I was still on an Albrecht Dürer kick from our previous year's picture studies (Ambleside Online's first year ever). We had a young Apprentice and a very young Ponytails, and they were fascinated by the Lutheran Advent traditions--the change in colours, the large Advent wreath, the organ music. I wished we had some books or something to help us feel more a part of our new "church home." And then one Sunday after church there was a books-for-sale table: family and holiday resources from a local Lutheran bookstore that I didn't know existed. I bought a book of Advent activities for young children, and also Martin Luther's Christmas Book, edited by Roland H. Bainton and published by Augsburg, mostly because of the Reformation-era woodcuts by Schongauer, Altdorfer, and Dürer.

Unlike most of the books on our Christmas shelf (and I would suspect other people's as well), this isn't a children's book. Not because it's nasty but because they'd probably find it boring, unless you read it to them in small doses. This is a book to meditate on; it's Luther's thoughts, maybe sermons, on the Nativity. Some of it is profound; some of it is a little offbeat.

"Even the most unquestioning person will scarcely take seriously his engaging fancy that God alternately turned on the star on and off to encourage or discipline the Wise Men. But one can smile or chuckle at his debonair embellishments without rejecting the essential message of the man. He was not himself primarily interested in miracles. 'The Gospel' he once said, 'is not so much a miracle as a marvel.'"--from the introduction by Roland H. Bainton

In any case, this book comes out now every year, and I look at it and think about what 16th-century Christians thought about Christmas and the Gospel.

You have got to feel the pinch of hunger in the midst of scarcity and experience what hunger and scarcity are, when you do not know where to turn, to yourself, or to anyone else but only to God, that the work may be God's alone and of none other. You must not only think and speak of lowliness, but come into it, sink into it, utterly helpless, that God alone may save you. Or at any rate, should it not happen, you should at least desire it and not shrink. For this reason we are Christians and have the Gospel, that we may fall into distress and lowliness and that God thereby may have his work in us.--Martin Luther