A little while ago Helen wrote a piece here that reflected on the shelf of old bibles in her home. She wrote touchingly about people who are history for her but memories for me. One of the people featured was my dear Aunt Edith.
When I started preaching over forty years ago, and in the days when notes were written by hand, I used to put mine safely in a loose leaf binder that Aunt Edith bought in Tianjin when she was a missionary in China in the 1920s and 1930s. That folder is a poor old thing now but I keep it for old time’s sake.
Aunt Edith was a quite extraordinary woman. My first memories are of her giving us children a £5 note each for Christmas when other maiden aunts produced /= 10. (And there, I had to improvise the shilling symbol as my modern keyboard has not heard of it.) Apart from the generosity she showed us in later life, in her earlier days she had given herself wholeheartedly to her calling to spreading the Gospel as a small cog in the London Missionary Society. Her pioneering spirit and bravery never left her.
We have bridged a hundred years in two thoughts from father and daughter. Today’s hymn, ‘Of the Father’s love begotten’ takes us back another hundred years to the early 1800s when it was translated by John Mason Neale and Henry Williams Baker; unbelievably almost, the words were written first by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius who lived another fifteen hundred years before his interpreters and yet he refers to ‘seers of old time’.
The theme of the love of God, that on Sunday morning will cause us to marvel as again we get up on Christmas Day, is the same love that brave people sought to spread around the world in past times, and still we wish we could spread more effectively.
I frequently urge the need to look forwards and not backwards, to be reflective of the world around is in our preaching and praying; but the core message is timeless. Prudentius called God the Alpha and Omega in his hymn; God was Alpha and Omega for Aunt Edith, is for me and will be all the generations of family that follow – all that from a bible fly leaf that says, simply, ‘to mother with love from Edith’.
A very happy Christmas and may you and yours echo the same words:
‘O you heights of heaven, adore him;
Angel hosts, his praises sing;
All dominions, bow before him,
And extol our God and King;
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing,
Evermore and evermore!’
(StF 181)
A Prayer
Creator God we thank you for all that we are and can be; we rejoice in your love that supports us, protects us and drives us. May that love which has never changed be new and fresh for us this Christmas as we come together with memories to make memories, for Jesus’s and for love’s sake. Amen.