Parish Magazine Item for January 2024

 

From The Rectory

 

I’m rather addicted to Radio 4 and I’ve heard their Christmas advert many times over the last month. It ends with a quotation from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: the resolve of the reformed Ebeneezer Scrooge: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

 

We have tended to front-load Christmas. As soon as the Halloween merchandise is cleared out, we’re confronted with mince pies and Santa hats. But Advent is intended to be a time of waiting and anticipation. Maybe as you read this, Christmas already seems a rather dim memory, but it is traditionally celebrated for Twelve Days leading up to the Epiphany on 6^th January. Epiphany commemorates the visit of the wise men from the East to the infant Jesus, and hence his manifestation to the Gentile nations. The Epiphany season runs until the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (“Candlemas”) on 2^nd February. So, if you were so inclined, you could keep up your Christmas festivities – and your decorations – for forty days.

 

But what might it mean to try to keep Christmas all the year? Certainly we should say that Christ is not just for Christmas.

For Scrooge, keeping Christmas involves a great deal of chuckling and a new found generosity as he shares a bowl of smoking bishop (a kind of mulled wine which got its name from a mitre-like cup) with Bob Cratchit. In short, Scrooge becomes a good man. Although some people laughed at him, he little heeded it, because his own heart laughed. “It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”    

 

When the Shepherds meet the baby Jesus, they spread the news concerning what they had been told about the child and all who heard it were amazed. They returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:17-20)

 

If we seek to honour Christmas in our hearts, there is so much to treasure up and to ponder. The central mystery of Christmas is the incarnation: of God made flesh. This fact, which divides human history, tells us that God is for us and our world. He loves us enough to come to us and to share our condition. He was born for us that he might die for us. The Redeemer of the world has come. When we take a moment to reflect on the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, an inward chuckle seems part of the right response.

 

In the spirit of A Christmas Carol, we might pray that the past reality of Christmas would give us a present joy and a future hope, and that the whole future course of our lives might be reshaped by Christmas. Even more than Dickens, the Bible writers hold out the possibility that even the coldest old sinner can be transformed, if not simply by Christmas, then by Christ. Not every day can be the Christmas feast, but the good news of the Saviour who is Christ the Lord ought to make a difference to us every day.

 

So today and all the year: Merry Christmas! And God bless Us, Every One!

 

The Revd Marc Lloyd