Talking Books Christmas Message

I know, I know, it’s not even Advent until next Sunday. It’s one calendar month to Christmas Day. But this afternoon I am recording a short message for a local Talking Books service. I hope this will do.

Last December, our daughter sang in the choir at a school Christmas production based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, imaginatively called Scrooge.

My wife would claim that I have a certain affinity with Ebenezer Scrooge when it comes to the Christmas season. No, it isn’t that I want to take advantage of the poor like he did with Bob Cratchet, but it is that I can seem to do a rather convincing ‘Bah, humbug’ routine at this time of year.

What? A Christian minister doing ‘Bah, humbug’ at Christmas?

Yes, really. Because I get fed up and tired out by the rush, rush, rush in the lead-up to Christmas Day. We have so much to cram in. There are all the everyday responsibilities as well as the presents to buy, the Christmas letter to finish and the cards to send. My colleagues and I are having trouble finding a date in our busy schedules to go out for a Christmas meal together.

In my case, it’s complicated by the never-ending run of church services, equalled only in intensity by Easter. At this time of year, it’s carol services followed by Christingles followed by Midnight Mass followed by special Christmas Day services. All the time, I am meant to be the personification of jollity. For you, there may be other pressures. But on my first year as a minister over twenty years ago, I got past Christmas lunch and fell asleep on the bed.

Rush, rush, rush. Bah, humbug indeed.

But I guess it was like that for Mary and Joseph. Forced off to Bethlehem by the occupying Roman power. No room for them in the guest room at their relatives’ house there (sorry to disappoint you, but ‘no room at the inn’ is a dubious translation). The baby born in less than hygienic conditions. The first visitors, shepherds (who were regarded in those days rather like people might treat gypsies and travellers today). Yes, later come the beautiful gifts of the Magi, with their gold, frankincense and myrrh. But then comes the hurried evacuation to Egypt to avoid the blood lust of Herod, whom we know from other sources to have been a violently paranoid ruler.

I think they could be forgiven a bit of ‘Bah, humbug.’ Was it worth it? Really?

And maybe that’s what we’re tempted to think, not only in the run-up to Christmas, but at other times, too. Is it worth it when I suffer from a disability? Is it worth it when I am penalised by the bedroom tax and face financial meltdown? Is it worth it when I am bullied, or when people take advantage of me?

I mean, why not just say ‘Bah, humbug’ to it all?

Except what the Christmas story brings to us in the midst of all the darkness is a chink of light. The poetic description in the beginning of John’s Gospel about the coming of Jesus says, amongst other things, ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not come to terms with it.’

Jesus and indeed the whole Christian message is real about the existence of darkness in our lives, within us and surrounding us in the world. But there is also this note of hope. Light is shining in the darkness. That light is Jesus himself, entering our human frailty with all he comes to do.

A favourite singer of mine is a Canadian artist whose profile is somewhat obscure in this country (although he is fêted in his homeland). His name is Bruce Cockburn, and he put it like this in one of his songs:

‘Redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.’

Happy Christmas. You can put the humbugs away.