A rant about Christmas

Time for a rant about Christmas! I remember about 45 years ago taking part in a debate at school on the motion ‘that Christmas is over-commercialised.’ I can’t remember the details, but I think the motion was carried.

I still have concerns about the way we celebrate Christmas. Perhaps I’m a grumpy old curmudgeon, but it seems almost as if a collective insanity grips us at this time of year. The shops pile high their seasonal wares, cram their web-pages with alluring offers, run schmaltzy ads, calm us down and soften us up with seasonal music – and we’re off again, reaching for our plastic and spending money we can ill afford on things no-one really needs.

The advertisers know of our longing for the lost magic and wonder of childhood, and our feelings of love for others, and suggest that through ‘stuff’ we will rekindle the wonder and bring joy to those close to us.

And so we spend, despite the fact that we know perfectly well on our days of greatest clarity that ‘stuff’ alone doesn’t bring happiness, and will never create the ‘perfect Christmas.’ And despite our awareness that for the majority of old people and folk living alone, Christmas is the loneliest, most depressing time of year, since joy is found in love and in human contact.

So can I suggest that this year, we seek a simpler Christmas, focussed more on relationships, less on ‘things?’ 

I’m also aware of the disaster and death which has smitten the world this year as every year. If the world were a village, and we knew that the folk just down the road, in Syria Avenue, say, were facing torture and persecution, and that the folk over the fence in Egypt Crescent had been bereaved in a terrorist attack I hope that we would be standing with them in their pain, and that our celebrations would be muted.

But in fact though we nod in the direction of those who suffer at this time of year, too often the lights shine on, the music blares out, the partying continues. I imagine homeless people, standing numb and silent, watching through the windows at the festivities in the warm front room.

Yet none of us is an island. The whole universe exploded from a tiny speck of matter breathed on by God. We all united, we are all one. It is surely unseemly that a few of us should party, while the many suffer,

As Christians, we invite the whole world to celebrate Christmas – but a gentler, wiser, more wondrous Christmas as all of us, rich or poor, joyful or sorrowing turn to focus on the birth of Jesus Christ.

Supremely irrelevant to our fractured world, some would say. No! Because in Jesus God entered God’s universe to heal and transform it from the inside out, to restore the lost joy we glimpsed in our childhood, the joy we have been pursuing ever since.

We believe that it is when we welcome Jesus, the God-given Christmas gift that again we find (or are found by) that joy.

I believe Jesus heals our own inner dislocation. Jesus shows us that we are loved and lovely; that we have been deluded by our false expectations of ourselves, and by other people’s expectations of us; that we can abandon our frantic efforts to make ourselves worthy, esteemed and happy. Jesus Christ loves us. Jesus heals the brokenness within us and sets us free to discover and live out who we really are.

Where Jesus is welcomed, he heals our world’s divisions on grounds of race and gender, religion and politics and binds us together as God’s holy family.

Jesus was born to journey through death. And on the cross where he died, his arms stretched out wide enough to embrace all our personal pain (no darkness evades the reach of those fingers) and all the world’s brokenness, and in himself he redeemed and healed and made one what had been fractured in an infinity of broken pieces.

And now, as we trust God and seek to be agents of healing we experience true joy and freedom. Though pain still overshadows us at time, we believe that the ultimate fruit of Jesus’ death and resurrection will be a healed universe, at one, in peace.

This universe of healing is God’s gift in Jesus. It is quite simply the most wonderful gift in the world. We are changed from the inside out as we find the gift given in the manger of our hearts. I think if we understand that, our Christmas will be quieter, gentler, more loving more joyful.

And all of us who truly know this are God’s Christmas gift, ambassadors of the Healer in a broken world.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 19th November 2015)