Christmas: not the end but the beginning
Christmas Day, 25th December, 2003
The Rev'd Dr Craig D'Alton
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Ah! Christmas! We all know what it means, don't we? No, not presents. "Tis the season to be jolly". Well yes, ok, presents. But also holidays! And of course Christmas leads into New Year – more time off work, and a time for resolutions. A time for putting the past to bed, and moving on.
Ah yes, Christmas – and of course we all know that at Christmas everything that once was bad is made perfect. Family members who usually tear each others eyes out are absolute lambs over the turkey. Everyone has enough to eat throughout the whole world: poverty is abolished, and of course, there is peace on earth.
What? You don't believe me? But what about the story of the birth. "Away in a manger" and all that. Little Jesus meek and mild. And the crib scene. Everyone's so serene. Love has come again. There's the baby who never cries and never, for the whole twelve days, needs a nappy change. There's the father. (Ah, yes, well, um, maybe its not ALL perfect.) And then of course there's Mary. Like all new mothers who have just delivered a child in a stable she is radiant. Her manicure is perfect, her make-up nicely touched up. The hairdresser's dropped by, and she's even got a new blue frock to greet all the visitors. Like us all she's had a wonderful year, has just had the perfect, painless childbirth experience all you mums know to be so true, and now she looks forward to the constant joy (never a hint of difficulty) of raising her son to understand that he is the son of God.
Well, I don't know about you all, but I sometimes wonder whether we sanitise the Christmas story, just a little, in some of our pious re-tellings. I wonder too whether, in the perfect presentation of the perfect birth scene Christmas sometimes becomes an icon for playing games of pretend which paper over the realities of life. I'm reminded of that episode of a certain British sitcom where amid the destruction of a family Christmas – fights, floor covered in food, broken presents and lights still flashing on the fallen tree, the mother cries out in desperation "BUT IT'S CHRISTMAS!" So let us look, ever so briefly, at the real story just one more time.
Mary has had what can most delicately be described as one heck of a year. In March she was visited by an angel who told her that she would give birth to the Son of God. She then became pregnant, despite having never had sex, and was made a disgrace and a by-word in her village. Mary ran away for a time to visit Elizabeth, but then returned to face the music. Fortunately, her fiancee was of the forgiving sort. Where she might have been expecting a stoning, he agreed to go through with the marriage, taking the disgrace onto himself, and then embark upon a period of being "that couple"; you know, the ones who did it before marriage – and look at her!
After eight or so months of innuendo and snide remarks the heavily pregnant Mary climbs onto a Donkey to travel to Bethlehem for the census. When she gets there with Joseph there is no-where for the exhausted mother-to-be to sleep except a filthy stable, where she delivers her own baby without the aid of a midwife, no sanitation, and in a state of exhaustion which has no doubt brought on the birth.
Desperate to sleep she is then pestered by shepherds, kings and goodness knows who else. If I had been Mary my response after the birth event, let alone of the departure of the shepherds, would have been simple, and verging on the monosyllabic.
Thank God it's all over – so, I suspect, said Mary, and so say all of us. Thank God 2003 is almost at an end. Iraq has been pacified and Sadam has been captured. Even Libya has come back into line. No weapons of mass destruction, no Osama bin Laden, but you can't have everything. And in the Church? Child sex-abuse, gay bishops, crises over any manner of things – surely we can now pack them away for a brighter 2004? Ah yes. Thank God it's all over. Thank God 2003 is behind us. Thank God for 2004.
But of course for Mary, Christmas was not the end but the beginning – a child to raise, and that's NEVER easy. For us poor sods too, Christmas does not wipe away the past year. The change of year can encourage us to new resolutions but, let's face it, reality is still going to bite.
So this Christmas my prayer for us all it that we will look back on 2003 with prayer and thanksgiving, remembering the good things and the bad, and will look forward to the new year with realistic optimism. I pray that we will not abuse the Christmas story by turning it into a fairy-story to paper over reality, but will instead use it as a reflective tool, so that we as the Church may follow Mary's lead, and treasure these words in our hearts. For if Christ – God's very self – is born of Mary then he is also born of us. As we embark upon the next stage of our Christian journey and witness we are all invited to do what we can to bring Christ into the world; to make Jesus real, word made flesh, for those who seek peace.
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