St Mary's, Highley

Saving Christmas and Saving Us (part 2)

Again we hear politicians and commentators asking how we can save Christmas. I offer two quotations, one from a recent meditation by Sister Theresa White and the other the words of Jesus from St Luke’s Gospel.

“Two thousand years ago, Jesus came to bring good news to the people of the troubled world of his time. He comes todayto give the same message; in the midst of the turmoil, the sorrows and disappointments of everyday lives, God’s faithful love is at work in our broken world.”

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

We do not save Christmas, Christmas save us.

Rev David Poyner

Advent 1955 and Now

Advent begins this Sunday. John Betjeman wrote this poem in 1955; as I gear up to write my Christmas cards, it speaks to me….

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It’s dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound –
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out ‘Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.’

And how, in fact, do we prepare
The great day that waits us there –
For the twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ? For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards, And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know –
They’d sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell’d go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
‘The time draws near the birth of Christ’.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

Rev David Poyner

Christ the King

The 3rd Sunday in November (21st this year) is celebrated in the churches year as the festival of “Christ the King”; a time we acknowledge that Jesus is the ruler of what he called the “Kingdom of Heaven”. In his lifetime, people struggled to make sense of Jesus; they thought he might be the much anticipated “messiah”, the ruler sent from God who would finally set the Jewish people free, but they really did not know what that ruler would look like. Would he be a political revolutionary, a soldier, a priest? At the end, it seems that the Jewish religious authorities tried to persuade the Romans that he claimed to be a king who threatened their rule. In his Gospel, John has an exchange between the Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor and Jesus, where Pilate appears baffled by Jesus, who in one breath says that he is a king and then that his kingdom is not of this world. But Pilate was, indeed is, not alone in being puzzled. Throughout the ages, Christians have had to live with the tension in Jesus’s words; his Kingdom is not of this world, but we live in this world; he rules over the world, but he is not of the world. At the heart of this is Jesus’s insight that the world as we live in is not how the world is intended to be; through his life and death, he shows us what our world and indeed ourselves should be. That is a world lived out in love, not coercion; a world of self-giving, not self-gain. It is a pattern for living that I doubt any of us achieve, but Jesus shows us what it looks like. That is why Christians acknowledge him as King; but perhaps it is so counter to the world we live in that it is not surprising Pilate and the authorities of his day could not understand his authority.
Rev David Poyner

Remembrance

A prayer for remembrance, for Sunday and for any time:

God of all nations, active throughout history and in our own world, we remember those who serve or have served in our armed services. We hold before you all who have been killed in action, or by disease, the bereaved, the lost, the families which have been shattered, the wounded, maimed and injured, those who held or still hold in silence unspeakable memories of warfare.

As we remember those who fought in the past, those who serve at present and those who remained or now remain anxiously at home, let us pray that God will heal all memories, speak a word of peace, and bring us his healing. Amen

Rev David Poyner