Dec 20 2009
Pastor’s notes
Well, we’re into Christmas week now. I trust that you have done all your preparations for the celebration of the birth of the Christ Child.
I was reflecting this week on how Christmas has changed for me over the years. As a child – and in my pre-Christ following days – it was about the gifts and the festivities. We had Santa Claus and tinsel everywhere – a huge and real tree with piles of gifts stacked underneath. The festivities began as soon as the school term ended early in December. Because we lived out in the country, all the Christmas shopping was done when my parents came to fetch us from boarding school. My brother and I would go with my parents to the wholesalers to buy the gifts for all the children at the mine where we lived – I think that I most remember the smell of dust and cardboard. Sometime before Christmas, Santa would arrive on a truck or a bulldozer at the Recreation Club, and all the white kids would get the gifts which their parents had paid for. Most of the parents were in the pub and Santa smelled like sweat and stale beer.
On Christmas Day we were up early with Bing Crosby singing about a white Christmas while we sweltered in the African heat. After we had opened our gifts, it was off with Dad to the village where all the black miners and their families lived. There we would help to dish out scoops of lollies for the children, bags of tobacco for the men and sacks of flour for the women. Back home Mom was preparing Christmas dinner with turkey, ham and suet pudding.
On Boxing Day we all went down to the African village again where Dad was judge of the Tribal Dancing. After a whole day of foot stomping and ululating the cow was awarded to the first placed team, and a couple of goats and sheep to the various runners up. Hot and sunburned we would return home to eat watermelon and spray ourselves down with water from the hosepipe while the adults cooled themselves down with beer and gin & tonic.
From then, until I became a Christ Follower, Christmas was mostly about family get-togethers and the exchanging of gifts, but once I had decided to follow Jesus, Christmas took on a whole new meaning. The gifts and celebration was still there but the emphasis was different and going to church became a priority. Carol music which focused on the birth of Christ became the order of the day in the special season.
More recently, since being in the ministry, Christmas has been about service. The Advent season of preparation, Carol-singing at the Aged Care Homes, a special service of song and celebration on Christmas Eve and a packed out service on Christmas Day. Because it was hot and most of the congregation was standing, the service would start early and was short and celebratory. The little children would bring their gifts to church and the older ones couldn’t wait to get home to open theirs.
Our family, then helped with a Christmas Day lunch at the church for about a hundred people who would otherwise have been alone. We cooked, carved, served, entertained and washed up – finishing late in the afternoon and the workers would then sit down to eat left-overs before we stumbled home, pretty well exhausted. On Boxing Day, we would have our own family Christmas Celebration with gifts, turkey, ham and suet pudding.
At the heart of it all was the reminder of what it must have been like in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, on the night Christ was born (factually probably closer to April than December). Crowds bustling and meeting as they gathered in their ancestral towns for the census taking – greeting old mates and getting together as families. And there was a mother who had travelled in the late stage of her pregnancy to Bethlehem and who found no place to stay and had no time to chat with old friends. In the last stages of her labour a kindly innkeeper took pity on her and gave the family some space in the animal shelter. And there the Christ Child was born – the Lord of Heaven and Earth enters the world in a most human way in a most humble place to begin a process which will bring the whole world back into its forgotten place in the Presence of the Father. How amazing is that?
This is the time to celebrate and to be joyful, to throw all worries to the wind and to savour the amazing wonder of God’s great love for us. Hosanna in the highest and on earth, peace to all.
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