I have a birthday coming up later in this month. Over the years I have had discussions with people who feel very strongly that we’re not to celebrate birthdays or holidays. Much of this is based on a passage in Galatians:
NLT.Gal.4.8 Before you Gentiles knew God, you were slaves to so-called gods that do not even exist. 9 So now that you know God (or should I say, now that God knows you), why do you want to go back again and become slaves once more to the weak and useless spiritual principles of this world? 10 You are trying to earn favor with God by observing certain days or months or seasons or years. 11 I fear for you. Perhaps all my hard work with you was for nothing.
Three things are evident here:
- Paul sees the keeping of special days — and it’s the Old Covenant feast days he has partly in view — as going back or reverting to a series of rituals they had been freed from.
- The Galatians — and it should come as no surprise that the above passage is from his letter to the church in Galatia in view of the situation there — were doing this to try to please God. They were adding to what Christ’s death and resurrection had made no longer necessary. They were wanting the structure of religion with its dos and don’ts.
- Others of Paul’s converts may have come from pagan religions which each had their own feast days. Old habits die hard. Imagine if you had a family tradition that had been practiced for generations that was suddenly stripped away. These pagan feasts day were incompatible with Christian faith and could not be retained in a Christ-following life.
That doesn’t mean we today abandon an awareness of the feasts recorded in the Hebrew Bible altogether. We’ll come back to that. But clearly, Paul is not speaking of wishing someone a happy birthday. In celebrating my birthday over the years, I trust that my family had these aims:
- I’m not being venerated. Their purpose isn’t sacred. Their actions are not sacramental. Some people argue that we can’t separate life into the sacred and the secular, but some things we do are merely perfunctory, like getting dressed, brushing our teeth, checking the mail, etc. A birthday serves no spiritual purpose.
- Recognizing and celebrating the encouragement that someone’s life brings you is scriptural. Over and over we are told to encourage one another, to build one another up. A sincere expression of thanks and appreciation — personal, not what the greeting card writer came up with — should really be an everyday occurrence, not a yearly thing; but we we do need prompting to do this. Go to a greeting card store and you’ll find the majority of the serious birthday cards express thanks and appreciation for the recipient.
- We are reminded of the passing of time. Our lives are “but a breath;” we are “here today and gone tomorrow.” We live sometimes in the “myth of continuity;” believing that things will always be as they are, but in fact, age will eventually catch up with us, it will happen quickly or when we are not looking. It’s good to be reminded of the fragility of life. That may seem to make a birthday bittersweet, but as you get older, it really is.
- It’s not wrong to buy people things. We are to be good stewards of the resources that God gave us. Going to a dollar store (or for my UK readers, a poundshop) to buy something that will be broken a week later is not wise stewardship. (Perhaps the earth’s resources should never have been used to manufacture the item in the first place.) But there are things people both need and desire, and having an excuse at least provides a context to nudge someone to acquire something that might be beneficial to their hobbies and interests, but that they might hesitate to purchase for themselves.
- Children need to identify and celebrate friendships. If you can do a birthday party without excluding anyone, and at the same time not incurring great expense, it’s nice for kids to gather their friends around them. You can also do a party where instead of gifts, people make a contribution to a charity of the child’s choice. (Try Compassion International, Partners International, Christian Blind Mission, etc.)
- The date will be remembered after the person is gone. We’ve talked here before about “stones of remembrance,” and there is value in “calendar notations of remembrance.”
Some of the same people also do not believe in celebrating Christmas or Easter. While this needs to be the subject of a different discussion, my short answer would be that our family does not celebrate Christmas or Easter, we recognize and stand in awe of incarnation and atonement.
I’m going to more or less repeat the sentence but… we’re celebrating the gift and miracle of incarnation; we’re remembering the costly sacrifice and meaning of atonement.
I don’t like birthdays. The thought of another year passing scares me, but only because I realize that there are things I have wanted to accomplish that have not happened, and in fact may not happen. But I don’t want to over-spiritualize this and make it seem that I am being pious or devout by asking my family to skip this year’s birthday observance. We should never let tastes and preferences appear to be deeply spiritual principles.
Let’s pause for a minute and look at secular holidays.
I believe that the modern church is far too wedded to the civic calendar. It intrudes into many of our worship services and other events when we are in fact citizens of heaven, not of earth. But I’m not sure that the way to express that is to refuse to stand for the national anthem or refuse to sing it; to totally ignore Mother’s Day or Father’s Day; or in the case of some people who are extremists on this, to refuse to recognize the beginning of new calendar on New Year’s Day, or even jettisoning Christmas and Easter themselves.
Ironically, while looking for a link to include that would, at the very least, let you see a graphic about being citizens of two worlds, I found this article from last year titled Long Live the King. (I’m posting this on the day of his coronation!)
Before we get back to birthdays, I need to say a word to Christians in the 2020s about the Jewish feast days themselves. While attending a Passover Seder recently, I was reminded that we are woefully ignorant of the Jewish calendar. If you want to take Paul’s words (above) to the Galatians as the last word on this subject, remember that there was a specific context in that letter. Yes, we’re now under The New Covenant, but those holy days and feasts have major prophetic significance for the Christ-follower. We may not observe them in the same sense as our Jewish friends observe them, but we can’t take the posture that they no longer matter at all.
Okay. Back to my birthday. (I hope you’re all thinking about the gift you’re going to give me!) (That wasn’t serious.)
Including birthdays and anniversaries in the “special days” category Paul is referring to here is to miss the intention of the passage, and really amounts to poor Biblical interpretation (hermeneutics).
When your turn rolls around, I do, with all sincerity and with all intention, wish you a Happy Birthday!
Taking a second look a the way the civic calendar (or political cycle; or greeting-card-industry cycle) controls much of our special programs in the church is a different matter, especially where nationalism is proving problematic, especially at a time when we already have so many distractions.
Christianity 201 