Week 50 2011 20.12.2011

Tendring Topics.......on Line

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL BLOG READERS!

Next Sunday is Christmas Day.  I decided that I wouldn’t write my usual blog this week but publish an article that I wrote for The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, last year.  Three hundred years ago the first Quakers didn’t celebrate Christmas.  Some Quakers still don’t, though for rather different reasons.  I think that Christmas should be remembered and celebrated by all.  I entitled my article for the Friend, ‘Christmas for Quakers’.  This time I am calling it ‘Christmas for Nonbelievers*’ because even to those, of other faiths or of none, who may think that the Christmas story is ‘nothing but a myth’, I believe that the Christmas story conveys a truth about the nature of God far more clearly than historical fact or theological argument could ever hope to do.

It is the God revealed in that story who draws me to a celebration of an Anglican Mass every Sunday morning at 8.00 am followed by an hour of prayerful and expectant shared silence at our local Quaker Meeting for Worship at 10.30 a.m.  This blog may help to explain why it is that, though I am ninety years old, and would be housebound but for my electric mobility scooter, I  do so week after week.

*'Nonbelievers' in this context, means simply those who do not accept the nativity story in St. Luke's and St. Matthews Gospels as historical fact, though they may otherwise have a firm Christian, or other, faith.

Christmas for Nonbelievers

‘How will you your Christmas keep: feasting, fasting, or asleep? asks Eleanor Farjeon in her poem ‘Keeping Christmas.’ 

Early Quakers would have answered without hesitation, ‘We don’t keep it at all, nor do we keep any other Christian festival’. This was not because they doubted the virgin birth of Jesus, or that he was God’s Word made Flesh, or the accounts of his crucifixion and resurrection, but because they claimed to celebrate those events in their hearts every day of the year.

            There are Quakers today who maintain the testimony against observing ‘times and seasons’ but very few, I think, for the same reason as those early Friends.  It is likely that many believe that the Gospel accounts of the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, the shepherds’ angelic vision, and the visit of the Magi, are all a myth, invented to add some ‘magic’ to an otherwise prosaic narrative. It is no more literal historical truth, and of no more importance, than the story of Adam and Eve or, come to that, the Greek myth of Pandora and her box.

            Nowadays, they say, no one really believes the Christmas story and it’s just an excuse for a spending spree, overeating and boozing!  Best to forget the whole silly business and get on with daily life, as those early Quakers did some three centuries ago.

           Like early Quakers, I do believe that Jesus Christ was God’s word incarnate (made flesh, personified – whichever you prefer).  Unlike them though, I think that it is right to commemorate and celebrate his birthday.

            Do Quakers who pay no heed to ‘times and seasons’ ignore their own children’s birthdays or their own wedding anniversaries?  If they do, they must have unusually tolerant and understanding families.  I think it unlikely that Jesus’ birth occurred exactly as recounted in the Gospels, but I do think that the Christmas story contains a measure of historic truth.  I believe too that even if the whole thing were invented, it would be no less important because of the insight it gives us into the deepest convictions of the early Christian Church.

            Think about it.  The traditional Christmas story proclaims that the mother of the man who was human but also divine was Mary, an ordinary village girl born and living in Nazareth and engaged to be married to a carpenter. She was to bear her son under circumstances that would bring into doubt his paternity and could even have resulted in her facing an accusation of adultery. He was destined to grow up in an obscure village in the remote province of Galilee, far from Jerusalem and the Temple, the centre of Jewish faith and culture. The first reaction of Nathaneal, when he was told of Jesus, was incredulity; ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’

            After having been told that she was to be the mother of the future Messiah Mary composed a triumphal revolutionary anthem that makes The Red Flag appear pale pink in comparison!

He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

            It can only have been thanks to the Grace of God that the Magnificat has survived generation after generation of rule by ‘the proud, the mighty and the rich’ to give hope to the poor and to inspire such martyred Christian leaders as Fr. John Ball of Colchester in the 14^th century and Archbishop Romero of El Salvador in the 20^th.    

The birth took place in Bethlehem. The only inn in the town was fully booked. There was no room available. Temporarily homeless, the expectant mother and her husband found shelter in a stable. It was there that their child was born, a cattle trough serving as a cradle. 

            These were surely strange circumstances to have been invented by those trying to deceive the world into believing that the child was the long-awaited Messiah, destined to redeem Israel.

           More, equally inauspicious, events were to follow.  Those who were first informed of the newborn Messiah were not, as might have been expected, the prophets, scholars and priests of Israel. Nor were they the land’s temporal rulers.  Rome was ignorant of, and would have been indifferent to, his birth. When King Herod heard of it he sought only the baby’s death!

            It was shepherds, tending their flocks on the hillside near Bethlehem, to whom the news of the birth was first given.  They were well down the social scale and would have been even lower in the estimation of the rulers of the Temple and arbiters of spiritual life.  Shepherds couldn’t, by reason of their occupation, obey the Law of Moses to the letter.  Sheep need to be guarded and cared for seven days a week. 

Nature does not heed the Sabbath.  Yet, they were chosen by God to welcome the baby who was to change the whole world.

            The first to bring the baby gifts that were symbolic of his kingship, his divine nature – and his cruel and untimely death - were neither Children of Israel nor Jewish converts.  They were Magi from a distant land, heathen idolaters of the kind that had been roundly condemned throughout the Scriptures. They were surely symbolic of the fact that Jesus was God’s gift to the whole of humanity, not to Israel only.

            More was to follow. Within weeks, Mary and Joseph, with the baby Jesus, were political refugees, fleeing for their lives into the land of Egypt.  How long did they stay there?  No one knows. At least one apocryphal gospel suggests several years.  Other authorities believe a matter of months only.  Perhaps it didn’t happen at all and was just part of that meretricious ‘Christmas myth’.  Perhaps – but early Christians (and early Quakers) believed that, at least in the first instance, the Holy Family was dependent upon ‘the kindness of strangers’ and that they lived for months, perhaps years, among the idolatrous heathen.

            Those first Chapters of St Luke’s, St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels tell us that when God’s ‘Word’ (‘that was with God and was God from the beginning and without whom was not anything made that was made’ – and is also the ‘True Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the World’) was ‘made flesh and dwelt among us’, he did not make his home and find his friends among the powerful, the most wise or the most outwardly religious.  Throughout his life he made a point of his own lack of worldly possessions (‘The Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head’) and of his identification with social and religious outcasts, with the poor and the homeless, and with ‘foreigners’ dwelling in a strange land. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things (good or bad) to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’.  This, early Christians clearly believed, was the nature of their, and our, God.

            I do not know how much of the Gospel stories of Christ’s Nativity is true.  I have no doubt though about the truth of that summation.  If the Christmas story is ‘just a myth’ what a magnificent myth it is! It is a myth that reveals fundamental truths more clearly than could any cold recounting of historical events! For Quakers (whether believing, half-believing or disbelieving the familiar Christmas story), this revelation of the nature of God deserves to be remembered and celebrated, if not every day of the year, at least at Christmas time.

The Magi bring their gifts. (St. James' Anglican Church, Clacton-on-Sea

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.

'Advent 1955' by Sir John Betjeman

Every good wish for Christmas to all Blog Readers - and a New Year of Peace!

          A few weeks ago I would have hesitated to write the words above.  I had no idea how many – if any – people read my blog.  It could have been only a few close relatives and friends.

            Now, thanks to modern technology, I know that I have a substantial and truly international readership.  Last month, for instance, there were nearly 2,000 ‘views’ and on several single days there were well over 100.  What’s more – there are blog readers in every corner of the world!

            To my surprise the biggest group of readers do not live in Britain but in India!  Next come Britain and the USA, followed by Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Germany, Russia, France, the Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Australia!

  

            I feel very proud (but at the same time humbled) that so many people, from so many different countries, traditions and religious faiths find my words of interest to them.  They may not always be words that everyone wishes to read – but they are my own words.  No-one tells me what to write and what not to write.  Thank you for reading them.

        The Next Blog

          Next week, the final week of 2011, I expect to publish my blog a day or two later than usual - probably on Thursday 29th December instead of Tuesday 27th.  I shall probably continue to publish my blog on Thursdays in the future.