It’s finally here – Christmas!
I don’t know about you but for me Christmas seems to have been coming for a long, long time this year. Since October various Christmas adverts have been being screened, at Halloween more aisles in the supermarkets were taken up with Christmas food, wrapping paper, cards and gifts than were taken up with Halloween gimmicks and costumes. In St. Andrews, where I go to University, we in-fact have an all-year-round Christmas shop, which all-year-round has a countdown to Christmas in the window!! I began to think about this phenomenon of celebrating Christmas earlier year by year, every year ultimately waiting longer and longer, and I was reminded of a newspaper article in November about Tesco. The article spoke about how Tesco were selling Christmas food which would expire before Christmas day. What reminded me of this article was the thought of how far our Christmas emotions expire before the day even comes!?
But what are ‘Christmas emotions’ you might ask? Well, there are a lot but I was reminded of , what for me is, the most important ‘Christmas emotion’ that has been lost, whilst watching a Christmas episode of Father Ted a few days ago. Fr. Dougal gets up on Christmas morning, opens the door on his advent calendar and finds a picture of a stable, the stable with all of the characters of the nativity in it. Dougal with great excitement turns to Ted and says
'Ah Ted would you look. A stable full of people – who’d have thought it?’If you’ve ever watched Father Ted you’ll know that often Dougal says things which most of us would take as sarcasm but the comedy is in the fact that Dougal is every time, without fail, being serious. We would take the words of Dougal I’ve just quoted as sarcasm because we are all so familiar with the Christmas story. But there is a problem with familiarity because when we become familiar with something or someone it’s far too easy to take them for granted. When we become familiar with something or someone they become predictable and the element of surprise is lost.
Some of my friends and I experienced something this time last year which showed us some of the problems of over-familiarity. In the college I study at in St. Andrews we have a small common room which come off a small corridor which itself comes off a quadrangle of very beautiful sixteenth century buildings. There are quite often a-lot of tourists mulling about the quadrangle but never do they venture down the corridors coming off it. One day last year however, some friends and I were eating lunch in the common room and a middle-aged lady came in very quietly and sat down. She looked somewhat distressed and so we asked if she was ok. She was confused. She had wandered into an open church to look around and she said that all of a sudden a couple of men dressed in some sort of frocks came in and the church had filled up. She said she had been a part of something called a ‘communion service,’ where something like bread and wine were talked about becoming body and blood. She was very confused and wanted to know what she had walked in on, what she had been a part of. What quite was wrong with this woman, whether she was in some way mentally disturbed or whether she simply really had never encountered a communion service I don’t know? So, we, a group of five or six theology students, all committed Christians, began to explain in the simplest of terms what the people around her believed was going on in that service – what the bread and wine-like substances were for. As we did this we were all struck how to someone who had never read the bible, or encountered Christianity, the communion service sounded like a kind of cannibalism about how none of us had the words to explain what was really going on. She left not really understanding what we had said let alone what she had experienced earlier that day. We were left with the reality that after so many years of going to communion the mystery of it and of the last supper was lost on us. Today I worry that to some extent we, similarly, have become over-familiar with the Christmas story, with the mystery of the fact that God became a man, took on flesh, lived and moved among us. We have lost the element of surprise and the utter un-intelligibility of it all.
In some way I want us to try and distance ourselves from the way we, after however many years, have come to understand the story. This morning I want us to try and identify with Mary.
Ultimately year by year we know Christmas is coming. This is enhanced by the reminders of the supposed immanency of the day’s coming on television, in town and in the shops, months before it is upon us. We must remind ourselves though that Mary too knew this event was coming, that Jesus was coming to her, months before he did. The Gospel reading this morning was the extended version of the reading, I asked for the extended version to be read because it is in these extra few verses that we hear of Mary’s reaction to the birth of Jesus. In the passage the news of Jesus’ birth and its importance had come to the shepherds in the fields by angels, these shepherds arrive at the stable and tell Mary what had happened to them. Amidst the hustle and bustle as the shepherds go off to tell more people of the news we find Mary in quiet reflection, we hear that
‘Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart’.These words, she pondered, were the words of ‘good news’ and ‘glad tidings’ the angel brought to the shepherds. The Good News was and is that to us ‘is born this day … a saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.’ The Good News was and is that all that had been promised, the one who would save Israel and all of us had come into the world and had become flesh – as John in his Gospel puts it ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us.’
The problem of our familiarity with the Christmas story is that we leave little room for pondering and treasuring of the news that God had become man as Mary did. Without the element of absolute and utter confusion on our part, without the inability to find the words to express how the Son of God was literally born to us through the person of Mary – without all of this
‘the Word made flesh is made word again,’to borrow a phrase from the poet and theologian Edwin Muir.
Ultimately the Christmas story has to become new to us again. Like Fr. Dougal we need to wonder about the picture of the stable full of people as if we have never encountered it nor understand it like the woman and communion I spoke about earlier. At the Crib service on Saturday afternoon I was moved, if I’m honest, when Nathan (David’s 3 year old grandson) of his own volition went up to the crib and knelt in front of it just looking at it. In some ways I was envious, that for me the crib scene wasn’t something new, surprising and amazing.
I racked my brains for days before writing this sermon trying to think of something typical of Christmas Day which would remind you, in the midst of your celebrations, of the bare facts of the Christmas story and the birthing of the God-man. All of a sudden it struck me, (thanks to an ethics lecture this past semester) that in only a few moments we will do something we do week in, week out, which speaks exactly of the Christmas message. I invite you when you come to this altar rail today to look with fresh eyes on the nativity scene but not only this but in the offering of bread and wine to see, to hear, to taste and to ingest the promise of redemption brought this day and God’s presence coming to us veiled in things of the everyday. That the Word made flesh might not be made word again, but that for each of us the word made flesh might be made flesh again.
