Christmas

 

Reflection for Christmas Day, 2023.  Written by Philip Harvey for the pew notes of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, Melbourne. 

Words are spare and essential from the people in the Christmas stories, if they speak at all. They are too busy about giving birth. Or else they are terrified, when they aren’t watching, sorting things outside their regular experience. They follow signs and ask directions. But really they live in response, absorbed in wonder. Words might get in the way. No one is asking for their opinion. 

Their attention is being drawn to the Word. This unlikely assortment congregate around a newborn child, like a scene off a Christmas card. Their example of adoration may be adopted by anyone, as congregations through time meet again in proximity to the stories and the all too human person generating this wondrous activity. Because this is always simply a beginning. We have the rest of the year in which to hear what this person will come to say to us, the Word speaking words that keep revealing our lives. The Word is abounding in gifts. 

Nowadays words can be cheap about Christmas. Everyone has to have an opinion, usually being all too ready to share those opinions with others: ‘December, it’s the most stressful month’; ‘I’d have it every second year but my family says, no way!’; ‘It’s just a rip off of some pagan holiday’; ‘What’s to be joyful about with the world in this state?’; ‘I can’t wait till it’s all over.’ The clichés do their annual round, as people settle for grumpiness over gratitude, consumption over consideration. 

Yet all these passing words too congregate around the surprise reminder, made steadfast in places like churches, of the Word coming amongst us. Far from sliding from view, the Christmas stories and Christmas itself are sung and preached and celebrated and emulated everywhere, as though they were a regular experience. Love is placed at the centre of everything. The Word that can explain the truth about ourselves, changeable and desirous as we are, comes into being. 

Like the little congregations in those stories, we arrive to be here now, to try and understand the nature of this inexplicable event, ever an abiding mystery, to attend as they did to something more than just the same old same old. Waiting in silence, we listen to what the Word will tell us next, in word and deed.