A hundred years ago my grandparents, and many like them, were having their first family Christmas. They had been married for just over a year and had a new baby (though I am not sure I like to think of the revered aunt Mary like that). Christmas 1918 was close to the end of the war, and for many young people, men mainly, it was about continuing to heal physical wounds and give thanks for being alive. For millions of people the four Christmases of 1914-1917 were a story of separation, worry, or bereavement. That is five whole years of ‘missing’ Christmases.
I risk sounding like my father, but it has to be said…all we are being asked to do this year is to be careful. Only mix with people in a carefully planned way and avoid huffing germs about. The latter point ought to be ‘a given’ anyway. Christmas has not been cancelled, nor anything close to it; secular Christmas has been pared back for safety’s sake, indeed, but the heart of Christmas, which is the arrival of God in incarnate form is no more cancelled in 2020 as it was in 1914, 15, 16 or 17. In fact, with a vaccine around the corner this is really more like 1918 than the others. We need to be careful with the patient, but we can see the light of hope.
It seems that the secularisation of Christmas is growing ever more complete. We hear of churches not opening in December to protect members of our congregations from the risk of being ill or having to self-isolate for Christmas. At face value that seems back to front and to be putting ourselves before the needs of others around us and before the corporate business of worshipping God.
That statement is untrue; the worry unfounded. Through the myriad digital media the Church is able to reach more people in more ways with more varied forms of worship than ever. By taking care we show love for one another and by remembering in our hearts who arrived on Christmas Day we protect our own spiritual health. I think Grandpa would have rejoiced in those principles when he and so many of his peers set about rebuilding lives and churches after the deluge of the Great War.
Previously I quoted a hymn from the Home and Foreign Missions section in Congregational Praise. More appropriately, Baptist Praise and Worship sets it in the Advent section (no 146). The second half of the first verse continues:
‘Let wrong, great Redeemer, be righted,
In knowing and doing your will;
And gather, one family united,
The whole world to your cross on the hill’.
H. Elvet Lewis (1860-1953)
A prayer
God, whose love came down at Christmas, teach us to grasp the nearness of your love, its unbreakable nature and to draw strength from it. Help us to rejoice in what we have and let go of what might have been but cannot be. May we be filled with child-like excitement, as always, as again we wait to hear the angels sing, for the sake of Jesus about whom they sing, and about whom we will, sooner or later, sing again.
Amen.