I love Christmas decorations, especially the more imaginative ones. There are some very festive ones installed along the Frimley road. They are bright, multicoloured, and the flash merrily. Very Christmassy. And the clever thing is that you have to be driving at a certain speed to get them to come on. If you go fast enough, the decoration flashes at you, and you are rewarded with the number 30. It’s lovely.
The number is always 30, though. I wonder if you can get a different number if you go faster?
Or do you think I might have misunderstood the point?
Thousands of outraged fans are flooding Facebook, Myspace and other sites with vitriol: Alexandra Burke seems a lovely girl and sings well, but how can she understand a song like Hallelujah. It sounds vaguely spiritual, and religious, liturgical even. How appropriate to release it for the Christmas market.
Except that it is mournful, wistful, a song about a doomed love affair. The bible references are to King David being tempted into adultery with Bathsheba, and Samson having his hair cut by Delilah (OK, she did not do the actual cutting). After this service, I hope that you will stay for some refreshments, but you may still have time to go home and download the Jeff Buckley version as a protest before the polls close this evening.
Unless you prefer one of Leonard Cohen’s original versions.
And all of this might seem entirely irrelevant to you.
But how hard do we find it sometimes to engage with the real meaning of Christmas?
It is familiar territory to bemoan the increasing commercialism, the tawdry offerings of the entertainment industry, the stress that families face when forced to spend time together for the holiday. Even church does not seem to be as good as we remember it from our younger days.
But pause to savour this story that we have been telling, our story of how God loves us and what he has done about it.
From the sin of the first humans recorded in Genesis, through the faith of Abraham and the other patriarchs, through the sins of Samson and David alluded to by Cohen in his song, through the promises made by the prophets of a coming deliverer, through the story of Jesus born as one of us.
Let’s not miss the point of all this. O come, all ye people full of faith: each of us is being personally invited to seek out Jesus and make our personal response to him. The journey you are engaged on may seem as long and tortuous as the journey of any shepherd or wise person from the east, but this is the time to band together with fellow travellers to seek him.
The St Michael’s are a rum lot, but we are purposefully seeking to encounter God together, in Camberley, in 2008 and into 2009, and we are open for all to join us.
May the Lord bless you this Christmas time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment