Tendring Topics…….on Line
Happy Christmas!
I hope that everyone (anyone!) who reads this blog will have a very Happy Christmas and that their New Year will be one of peace and hope. It will not be a very happy one for many people – for the bereaved and lonely for instance (and the kindness and sympathy of friends and relatives may only make that bereavement and loneliness seem even harder to bear!), those rendered homeless or jobless by the recession, and those who know that for any other reason, this Christmas will be a pale shadow of Christmases past.
Those who wish to denigrate the Christian message often point out that the birth of Jesus, if it occurred at all, almost certainly didn’t take place ‘in the bleak midwinter’ and that our Christmas festival is simply an adaptation of much more ancient pagan festivals, Yule for instance in northern Europe and Saturnalia within the Roman Empire.
I have always felt that that supports, rather than impedes, the Christian message. No one knows exactly when in the year Jesus Christ was born. What could be more appropriate though, than to celebrate the advent of the Light of the World just a few days after the shortest day and longest night………when pagans were celebrating the very first indications that the world’s plunge into darkness had halted? The sun was once again returning to restore life and light to all creation. C.S.Lewis, author of the Narnia books, and great Christian scholar, always maintained that God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ was the fulfilment of the pagan religions of Europe as well as that of the people of Israel.
The Nativity story, even if not all historical fact, surely tells us a great deal about the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He was born to a working-class girl whose home was in one of the few places in the Holy Land that don’t even get a mention in the Old Testament. By many of his contemporaries his parentage would have been considered dubious. At the time of his birth his parents were temporarily homeless, taking shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’, with a manger having to serve as a cradle for the baby.
The first people to be told of his birth were neither wealthy and powerful nor wise and pious. They were neither princes nor priests, neither prophets nor scholars, but farm labourers looking after sheep on a hillside. The first people to bring him gifts were not even his own compatriots but Gentiles who would have been considered to be among the ‘heathen’ by his fellow-countrymen.
Finally, very shortly after his birth, his parents had to flee with him for their lives, to become asylum seekers in a heathen foreign land. Christ’s Nativity and its aftermath is a theme that resonates throughout the history of mankind, today no less than at any time in the past! If part of it is mythical it surely is a magnificent myth, unequalled I believe, in any other culture.
One of the late Sir John Betjeman’s lesser-known poems is Advent 1955. It discusses the way in which we celebrate Christmas, comparing greetings and presents given with those received, and possibly mentally pricing both.
It concludes with the following lines:
The time draws near the birth of Christ,
A present that can not be priced,
Given two thousand years ago.
And if God had not given so,
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the Manger.
The God revealed to us through Christ’s nativity, life, death and resurrection is not ‘a distant stranger’. He is to be seen in the loving mother, the baby in the cot, the workman at his lathe, tending his sheep or, nowadays, bending over his lap-top, the suffering victim on the cross and in the modern ‘interrogation cell’…….and in the risen Christ triumphant over evil and over death.
Iraq – Before and After
It may seem inappropriate, even sacrilegious, to consider those under scrutiny in connection with the Public Enquiry into the War in Iraq at the same time as our celebration of Christ’s incarnation. However our God is one, ‘to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid’ and one of the titles of the Risen Christ is ‘Prince of Peace’.
Possibly to pre-empt the questioning to which he will undoubtedly be subjected at the Public Enquiry in the New Year, Tony Blair who, as Prime Minister, led us into that war, has been talking to national tv about his motivation. This, it appears, was not the threat posed to Britain by Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as we may have imagined, but the need for ‘regime change’. Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and, even had he known that there were no WMDs, our Prime Minister would have found some other justification for invasion!
That, I must say, is very frank. Just think. There was no need for that ‘dodgy dossier’ that was said to establish, beyond a shadow of doubt, the existence of these terrible weapons. There was no need for the ‘leaked intelligence’ that gave rise to scare headlines about ‘our boys in Cyprus’ being in danger from them. All Mr Blair had to do was to persuade the rest of us that getting rid of Saddam would amply justify the certain loss of scores of British and American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi ones, not to mention the laying waste of Iraq’s cities and destruction of its infrastructure.
Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, but was not the only such ruler in the Middle East. In some ways his government was an enlightened one. There was a substantial and influential Christian minority that worshipped regularly and in safety. Where are they and their churches now that Iraq has been ‘freed’? Where are they in the lands of our Middle Eastern allies? Women in Iraq under Saddam enjoyed a freedom and the ability to develop their potential that their counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries would (and often do!) die for.
Whatever Mr Blair may have known and kept to himself, he won that vote for war in the House of Commons for no other reason than that he had persuaded sufficient of its members that Saddam Hussein did possess terrible weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. Without having done that he would have, and should have, lost the vote.
I believe moreover that Messrs Blair and Bush were fairly confident that there were no such weapons. Had they not been, they would surely never have allowed that relatively leisurely build-up of troops, weapons and war supplies just over the Iraq border in Kuwait. Saddam would only have had to wait until the build-up reached a critical point, and then destroyed the lot with his WMDs!
I am more than ever proud of the fact that my sons, grandsons, wives and girlfriends were all part of the million strong march that protested in vain against the war through the streets of London. I only wish that I had been physically capable of joining them!
The Christmas Crib
Happy Christmas!
I hope that everyone (anyone!) who reads this blog will have a very Happy Christmas and that their New Year will be one of peace and hope. It will not be a very happy one for many people – for the bereaved and lonely for instance (and the kindness and sympathy of friends and relatives may only make that bereavement and loneliness seem even harder to bear!), those rendered homeless or jobless by the recession, and those who know that for any other reason, this Christmas will be a pale shadow of Christmases past.
Those who wish to denigrate the Christian message often point out that the birth of Jesus, if it occurred at all, almost certainly didn’t take place ‘in the bleak midwinter’ and that our Christmas festival is simply an adaptation of much more ancient pagan festivals, Yule for instance in northern Europe and Saturnalia within the Roman Empire.
I have always felt that that supports, rather than impedes, the Christian message. No one knows exactly when in the year Jesus Christ was born. What could be more appropriate though, than to celebrate the advent of the Light of the World just a few days after the shortest day and longest night………when pagans were celebrating the very first indications that the world’s plunge into darkness had halted? The sun was once again returning to restore life and light to all creation. C.S.Lewis, author of the Narnia books, and great Christian scholar, always maintained that God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ was the fulfilment of the pagan religions of Europe as well as that of the people of Israel.
The Nativity story, even if not all historical fact, surely tells us a great deal about the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He was born to a working-class girl whose home was in one of the few places in the Holy Land that don’t even get a mention in the Old Testament. By many of his contemporaries his parentage would have been considered dubious. At the time of his birth his parents were temporarily homeless, taking shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’, with a manger having to serve as a cradle for the baby.
The first people to be told of his birth were neither wealthy and powerful nor wise and pious. They were neither princes nor priests, neither prophets nor scholars, but farm labourers looking after sheep on a hillside. The first people to bring him gifts were not even his own compatriots but Gentiles who would have been considered to be among the ‘heathen’ by his fellow-countrymen.
Finally, very shortly after his birth, his parents had to flee with him for their lives, to become asylum seekers in a heathen foreign land. Christ’s Nativity and its aftermath is a theme that resonates throughout the history of mankind, today no less than at any time in the past! If part of it is mythical it surely is a magnificent myth, unequalled I believe, in any other culture.
One of the late Sir John Betjeman’s lesser-known poems is Advent 1955. It discusses the way in which we celebrate Christmas, comparing greetings and presents given with those received, and possibly mentally pricing both.
It concludes with the following lines:
The time draws near the birth of Christ,
A present that can not be priced,
Given two thousand years ago.
And if God had not given so,
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the Manger.
The God revealed to us through Christ’s nativity, life, death and resurrection is not ‘a distant stranger’. He is to be seen in the loving mother, the baby in the cot, the workman at his lathe, tending his sheep or, nowadays, bending over his lap-top, the suffering victim on the cross and in the modern ‘interrogation cell’…….and in the risen Christ triumphant over evil and over death.
Iraq – Before and After
It may seem inappropriate, even sacrilegious, to consider those under scrutiny in connection with the Public Enquiry into the War in Iraq at the same time as our celebration of Christ’s incarnation. However our God is one, ‘to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid’ and one of the titles of the Risen Christ is ‘Prince of Peace’.
Possibly to pre-empt the questioning to which he will undoubtedly be subjected at the Public Enquiry in the New Year, Tony Blair who, as Prime Minister, led us into that war, has been talking to national tv about his motivation. This, it appears, was not the threat posed to Britain by Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as we may have imagined, but the need for ‘regime change’. Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator and, even had he known that there were no WMDs, our Prime Minister would have found some other justification for invasion!
That, I must say, is very frank. Just think. There was no need for that ‘dodgy dossier’ that was said to establish, beyond a shadow of doubt, the existence of these terrible weapons. There was no need for the ‘leaked intelligence’ that gave rise to scare headlines about ‘our boys in Cyprus’ being in danger from them. All Mr Blair had to do was to persuade the rest of us that getting rid of Saddam would amply justify the certain loss of scores of British and American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi ones, not to mention the laying waste of Iraq’s cities and destruction of its infrastructure.
Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, but was not the only such ruler in the Middle East. In some ways his government was an enlightened one. There was a substantial and influential Christian minority that worshipped regularly and in safety. Where are they and their churches now that Iraq has been ‘freed’? Where are they in the lands of our Middle Eastern allies? Women in Iraq under Saddam enjoyed a freedom and the ability to develop their potential that their counterparts in other Middle Eastern countries would (and often do!) die for.
Whatever Mr Blair may have known and kept to himself, he won that vote for war in the House of Commons for no other reason than that he had persuaded sufficient of its members that Saddam Hussein did possess terrible weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. Without having done that he would have, and should have, lost the vote.
I believe moreover that Messrs Blair and Bush were fairly confident that there were no such weapons. Had they not been, they would surely never have allowed that relatively leisurely build-up of troops, weapons and war supplies just over the Iraq border in Kuwait. Saddam would only have had to wait until the build-up reached a critical point, and then destroyed the lot with his WMDs!
I am more than ever proud of the fact that my sons, grandsons, wives and girlfriends were all part of the million strong march that protested in vain against the war through the streets of London. I only wish that I had been physically capable of joining them!
The Christmas Crib
To get away, if only momentarily, from the rather grubby world of the 21st Century, here’s the Christmas crib at St. James Anglican Church Clacton-on-Sea, taken at Christmas time last year. Similar cribs will appear on Christmas Eve in tens of thousands of Christian churches world-wide, to remind worshippers that Christmas is not about illuminations, Christmas cards, over indulgence in food and drink, or even about Santa Claus. At its heart is the story of a temporarily homeless couple who found shelter in a ‘lowly cattle shed’ where a young mother gave birth to a baby who was the ‘Light of the World’.
‘And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth’
St. John 1.14
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