Christmas: a time for celebration
Christmas Day, 25th December, 2005
The Rev'd Dr Craig D'Alton
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Christmas is a time for parties. A time for getting together with family and friends. It's a time when people sometimes get nostalgic about a better time, when life was simpler or more fun, and then put a lot of time and effort into trying to recreate it. Christmas is a time for giving and receiving presents. It's a time for eating and drinking. It's a time for looking forward to the New Year with all its hopes and promises.
Christmas can be – and it should be – fun.
Yet sometimes it isn't. Because the stereotype of Christmas is all these good things, many feel under great pressure to conform to them, and feel that they have somehow failed if they don't. Yes, there are other sorts of Christmases; Christmases in which parties get out of hand, in which families and friends fight and argue. Christmases marred by remembrance of a disaster or a death at a previous Christmas. Or simply Christmases which are times of great loneliness, of poverty being felt even more than usual in a consumer-driven society; Christmases in which people feel excluded from society. Christmases people would rather forget.
And so there are lots of very good reasons for preachers (myself included) sometimes to preach Christmas sermons designed at least in part to make those who are content with the stereotype a little more reflective, and to allow those whose experiences of Christmas are of the second sort permission to be a little bit angry with the day. The problem is, that when one over-plays the reminder of the down-side of Christmas, one can lose sight of the fact that Christmas actually is about having a party. It's a birthday – God's birthday. It is a feast, worthy of celebration.
What's more, God approves of parties. One of Jesus' first acts in his ministry was to go to a wedding feast and, when it looked like the wine was running out, to turn water into more wine, better wine, so that the feast could continue. God approves of us enjoying ourselves. Yet so often pious Christians have a tendency towards wowserism. The church has gained a reputation for being "anti-everything", and that reputation is unfortunate. It is right that we should be concerned for those who have less than us – and even more right that we should do what we can to alleviate want and hurt. But it is not right that we should flagellate ourselves in pious anger, refusing to join in the feast. It is God who calls us to this birthday party – just as the angels called the shepherds and the star called the magi.
So this is perhaps an unusual Christmas sermon. In effect I'm telling you all to go and have a good time. But one thing I do ask is that we should all remember what it is we are celebrating; why it is we are having the party. It is because God, in his mercy, compassion and sheer generosity, sent his son into the world, to be born of an ordinary woman in an obscure dump of a village on the outskirts of the Roman empire; that the Word became Flesh. And the reason we celebrate that child's birth is because of who he was, what he did, who he became and who he is: Jesus Christ, the son of God, who died on the cross, and rose again that we might live. That's what we're celebrating, and that is why we're having a party.
I think it's a pretty good excuse.
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