Greetings to all of you. Happy Advent, and Happy Christmas when it arrives. It was great to meet some of you face to face for a communion service recently (by the time this is printed, it will be beyond recent), and disappointing of course that the second lockdown prevented more of this. Still, we can rejoice (although sadly not sing) about the fact that the lockdown restrictions have been eased for Christmas. This said, we must still take great care lest the good that may well be done by the vaccines as they work their way through the populous, might be undone by our easing off too quickly.
Advent is not Christmas. Advent is about the promise that Jesus will come. Christmas is about the arrival of the infant Jesus. Personally, I value the balance as we move from Advent, to Christmas, to Epiphany; from remembering that Jesus will return in the clouds (a little difficult to picture I grant you, but the point is that he brings healing, release for those who are oppressed, and justice); to remembering the infant Jesus born into our world – into poverty and homelessness no less; to us hearing of the increasing acknowledgement that Jesus is the Messiah (the visit from the wise men, and a teenage excursion during a Jerusalem pilgrimage where Jesus was found not around the Fruit Machines or playing Space Invaders but teaching the rabbis in the Temple. If I have lost you now, just allow yourself to be amused by engineering a early first century Fruit Machine in your head – but I digress. My point is that this was no ordinary child.
As Advent and Christmas approaches I am mindful that in a couple of weeks our focus will begin to shift on Christ coming to us – as a vulnerable child in a manger. Curiously, despite His being the Son of God, that child is as needy as any other for our care. There is a beautiful circle in this; first. we take Him into our arms – think of how we cradle a baby and support its head.
Later, He takes children into his arms, ‘Suffer the little children’, he says – even the ones that chomp crisps in front of the tele and make it impossible to hear, ‘That they might come unto me.’ Note here that it is the adults that are inhibiting intimacy, not the other way round. Jesus then says ‘Come follow me!’ when we are older, and embraces us as adults just as He did the sisters of Lazarus who were grieving, or Peter, when after denying Jesus he resserted his commitment to Him (you don’t have to read it, it just jumps from the page).
…All of which brings me back to a point of sorrow, and a point of promise that is underpinned by the theology of Advent and Christmas. First, whilst we might not be able to embrace each other, God embraces still embraces us. Second, there will come a time again where we will be able to embrace (and even if you are not a particularly huggy person you will know what I mean). Whist the unfolding impact of the coronavirus has wrought havoc on our lives, and notwithstanding the questions that surface about the presence and purpose of God in a world that has been ravaged by the virus (these can be addressed, but not here), the one thing that we can be thankful for is the increased sense of family and community that has grown in the face of such hardship.