I've been reading about Christmas again. I have friends who write the most profound things - getting back into the hearts and minds of the people in the first Christmas story. Some have suggested that we need to remove all the glossy stuff - tinsel and gifts. Others are already feeling disappointed because Christmas does not feel the same as it used to. For my children (now really adults) living in NZ seems to have taken the shine off it all. For them Christmas in Africa was better - warmer (in spirit) and more connected (to friends and family).
For me, Christmas tears me in two. My niece is about to have her first child - sometime after Christmas, making me almost a great uncle and my sister an almost Grandmother. How often have I not looked at available flights - really wanting to be in South Africa with them at this time. Family is at the heart of it all. My family - immediate family - are feeling the usual disconnection here. Sheilagh's family is in three countries, and all our families have to face the challenge and struggle of trying to bring in justice and mercy into our respective worlds. We all have to resist selfishness, and decisions made out of fear and craving for our own security. We all have to embrace the spirit of Christmas - the giving of ourselves to others with the given risk that we lose ourselves in the giving.
At Christmas so many suffer. My friend and colleague had to bury his fiancé on Monday - his Christmas is overwhelmed by surrender of her to the Lord, and the ongoing surrender of his life and the lives of his children to God's grace and mercy. Christ's death and surrender on the cross is the only way though the making sense of such loss. There is a life beyond the grave which he earned for us - we were bought with a price.
In all of this we have no home again - just tenants under the pressure from a landlord . We have finally found the house we would love to buy and wait to see whether some new door will open. Foxes have holes and birds have nests... (Matt 8:19-20).
Why does Christmas make me jittery? Is it my inability each year to grasp the depths of this truth - this incarnational mystery of the God-person? Is it the fact of being foreigners on a distant island that is a chilling reminder that the God-person of Bethlehem became a refugee in Africa, with a lunatic king trying to perform an infant genocide?
Is it the world's manifest indifference towards the truth of this event that nags away in my heart? - if only I could get people to worship the Christ child gain.
Perhaps it is my my own loss - that tearing of those parts within that only those who have died a death ever understand. Mack, in "The Shack" by William P Young speaks of The Great Sadness. As I read this book I am faced with the gnawing suspicion that I have my Shack to visit too.
If you are still reading this you probably have scratched your head in bewilderment - wondering if I have lost the plot entirely. "Keep it simple, preacher man" I hear them say. It's just pre-Christmas jitters. If you don't get them, then don't fuss too much.
The impact of the Advent of Jesus Christ is another matter altogether. Have you felt the power of that impact? It's no steamroller - not a tsunami - perhaps impact is not the right word at all. Perhaps a warm flood....
