Christmas Joy!

Yes - like many clergy - I got a bit worn out at Christmas. Here I am looking a little jaded with it all. I gave this sermon below at the Robert Gordon University Carol concert and also on Midnight Mass. (I wasn't attired as above). I wanted to share some thoughts on how the idea of Christmas has matured in my spiritual life.

It was one of those primary school carol concerts that I shall never forget. Trying to be clever I arranged a quiz involving two tables in front the whole school assembly. With eager volunteers at hand I invited the children to pull out objects from a black bag and place them on one table or another. Things that were from the Bible story would go on one table while objects of a festive nature would go on another. Now the fatal flaw in this bit of cleverness was to put the game under a stopwatch with a countdown. Children get very excited at this time of the year. And so as I help one child take out the church’s life-size plaster infant Jesus, hands fumbled and whoops- crash – the Christmas baby smashed on the floor. Its head came clean off leaving a metal spindle. I tried pathetically to reattach decapitated head with body but it was to no avail. The assembly went deathly quiet and one little child in the front row exclaimed ‘Oh-no Jesus is dead!’

Notwithstanding the comical part of that story there was something quite profound in that child’s statement. Its not that I believe that ‘Jesus is dead’ but that we all too easily sweep aside the challenging, cruel and hard parts of the Christmas story as recorded by the Gospels. Let me say more about this from a personal point of view. In my late teens our family had a major bereavement which threw my world upside down. When we hit our first Christmas it seemed a hollow unfamiliar event and I really wanted to have very little with it. Up to the year before, Christmas had seemed so very magical and my adopted father, who died months later, had always made a great fuss about it all.

That poignant Christmas I opened a little copy of the Gospel of Luke that was in our house and read the account for first time and here the I could see that this narrative held profound sadness as well as joy. Mary, for example, had to contain in herself the wonderful joy of being the mother of the Messiah with the whiff of scandal and the initial doubts of Joseph. Then there was the tyranny of Rome and its puppet kings which imposed a cruel census which meant for this couple a hard and treacherous journey. At the end of the journey there is no room in the Inn and the couple have to indignity of delivering a child in a cattle shed. If this was not bad enough the local despot, a well known historical megalomaniac, has every male baby and toddler in the vicinity slaughtered just because he feels threatened by a prophecy. The couple become asylum seekers and flee to a foreign country for four years.

It is as if the dark seeds of Good Friday are already germinating in the story Christmas. As a teenager my anger at the commercial Christmas made me feel bitter towards it. I fantasised about going into supermarkets and tearing down tinsel, knocking down trees and stamping on fairy lights. How could we tuck into a Christmas meal when so many around the globe were struggling to find even the most basics to prevent starvation?

Years later as a student for ministry in London I joined a team who provided food for the homeless in the West End. Every Friday a group would go out with baked potatoes, coffee and a blankets. There are certain hot spots where the homeless congregate and one of these is Savoy Hotel car park. One Friday near Christmas I got chatting to old man in his cardboard box and he told me how he found wallet stuffed with cash. “Well, finders keeper, I bet that made your Christmas” I said cheekily. He pulled back, hurt and indignant at what I had said. “I’m a standing member of the community if you don’t mind young man. I did my duty and took it to the police station. Well the constable at the desk asked for my address – I said ‘the Savoy’.”

Over the years I have found that dwelling on the idea of Christmas I have tuned into a aura of sadness when I scratched under the surface of the festivity. Not only from the Gospel story but much of what is happening in the world around me and beyond me. In many cases I have stumbled upon quite heroic stories. But in some of these amazing lives I have also found incredible hope and joy. It has often been those who have the least who have given the most and those who ought to be the least cheerful who contain an infectious joy. I feel sometimes as if I am handling one of those Russian dolls, Christmas opens up to Good Friday, but Good Friday opens up to Easter, and Easter opens up to Pentecost. All of this has melted much of self-righteousness.

In that school assembly the little girl said hauntingly and prophetically ‘Jesus is dead’ but Easter tells us He is Risen. This I believe the true peace at Christmas and I hope and pray this peace will strengthen your heart too in this season of Christ’s birth.