20. In Their Faces

Finally, Magi.  Wise men.  

I love these guys.  They have by far the best theme song, that one about "we three kings of orient are" which I feel would work well recorded by Blur in their cheeky chirpy Cockney phase: "Field 'n' farntin, moor 'n' marntin, follerin' yonder star… oooooooooooooh!"  I love how children don't know the verses but launch enthusiastically into the chorus again and again.

So.  Wise people.  Not necessarily men, not necessarily three.  But apart from that…

Not necessarily these three.

Could you cast yourself as a wise man?  They find their way into Matthew's gospel - Luke, for some reason, is less interested by them.  And yet in several ways they fit the profile of the outsiders that his gospel champions.  Maybe it was the wealth that did it?

Any road up, the Magi are foreigners.  Not even Jewish foreigners!  They're probably Zoroastrianists, which is a religion I can't even spell, let alone explain.  It is one of the world's oldest religions, "combining a cosmogonic dualism and eschatological monotheism in a manner unique... among the major religions of the world."  So now we're clear on that.

One of the reasons these funny foreigners with their funny accents and their funny clothes were received so well was because they brought presents.  You'd be surprised how much suspicion can be dissolved if you've got gold.  Or myrrh even.  Or, as our lovely primary school children would have it, Frankenstein.  Or Frankincest.  That one.

Well, those gifts maybe go some way to counterbalancing their strange funny foreign ways.  And maybe go a tiny step towards making up for clodhopping into Jerusalem and bringing down the wrath of Herod on the heads of a number of toddlers.

But what if you're just strange and have no gift to bridge the gap?  What if you feel disqualified because you have no gift to offer?  What, as the song goes, can I give him?

One of my favourite nativities (okay, one of my least favourite, coming a long way behind every angle one I've enjoyed in primary schools in seventeen Christmases in holy orders) is The Flint Street Nativity.  It's an ITV thing, I think, in which grown-up comedians (Josie Lawrence, Ralf Little, Julia Sawalha) play primary school children putting on a nativity.  Neil Morrissey - him off Men Behaving Badly and its curious sequel Bob The Builder - he plays the third wise man, the one with the frankincense.

Except.  Except he has a lisp.  Imagine.

So he brings frankinthenth.

That's the right Morrissey.

And he's mercilessly mocked by another wise man for his speech impediment and told he'll be sent to the specialist unit, so he spends much of the hour and the play hiding outside under the school climbing frame in the rain, desperately trying to say "Frankincense" without lisping.  And he can't.  Not to save his life.

Do you ever feel disqualified because of what you can't do?  Or looked down on by anyone because you can't quite do something?  I can't kick a football straight and my sense of direction is terrible.  I have a major learning disability when it comes to driving (that's my phrase) a canoe, although that's mostly about learning in a large group under pressure.  I can punt.  But I can't do those slider puzzles to save my life.  

Can do.

No can do.

What will Neil Morrissey do?

In the end the three wise men turn up at the Flint Street Nativity, and the first one declares, "I bring you… the gift of… gold."  The second declares, "I bring you… the gift of… myrrh."

And Neil Morrissey, soaked through, holds out his slightly limp package and - after a long pause - says…

"I bring you…

… the gift of…

…

…

…more myrrh!"

Way to go, Neil.  In your face, mockers.  In. Your. Faces.

And if anyone ever looks down on you, in or out of church, just remember: more myrrh.  Find out what God's given you and come on in.  The people who look at you disdainfully?  Screw them.  Don't fit in with their ideas just to keep them happy.  Rock their boats.  In their faces.  They're not worth your energy.

Us, today, we're less likely to disqualify ourselves because of race or religion, but we can all think of reasons why we don't think we belong.  But God casts his net wide and opens his door beyond the hinges' limit to include us regardless.

Us lot, however unworthy we think we are, whatever we think might disqualify us, we're on the inside now, whatever you're bringing to the party.  And our work is to bring other people from the outside into the inside, to turn the world upside down and inside out.  To let people know it's okay not to bring frankincense if what they've got is more myrrh.  And if our church isn't shaped right to let new people in, then our job is to knock down some walls until people can come in regardless of who they are.  

Wise men: possibly scruffy seekers after something.

And if some traditional lot of snooty-nosed people look likely to get to those outsiders first with a frown and a disdainful sneer, a patronising air and the sense that they might be about to police the boundaries, then get in ahead of them.  Don't let the church be run or represented by the stuffy.  It's our church too.

19. Sweatier Than A Shepherd's Jockstrap

Where was I?

Oh yes.

We can cast ourselves as almost anyone in the Nativity story at different points in your life, and we can look fruitfully at how God weaves what look like disadvantages and challenges into his unfolding story.  You could cast yourself as Gabriel, busy with errands.  You could cast yourself as Mary, undignified with a huge belly.  You could cast yourself as Joseph, just about holding things together in a bamboozling world.

What about a shepherd now?

You can cast yourself as a shepherd because God has also cast… he's cast his net wide to invite everyone in to the story, everyone into the stable.  

There are all sorts of reasons why - hearing this story properly, for the first time - you'd be shocked to discover who else is on the guest list.  No Pharisees, no teachers of the law, just shepherds and foreign miss men (and anyone passing by the stable).  From the very start, the life of Jesus and the kingdom of God is open wide to pariahs and the unacceptable.

We forget that.  We forget that because we all know the story, and we've made the deeply unlikely entirely cosy.  What's cosier than a tea towel and more towelling and a dressing gown cord?  But what was smellier and sweatier than a shepherd's jockstrap?

Not how the Blessed Virgin Mary greeted the shepherds, we hope.

But remember.  Shepherds.  Like security guards or nightclub bouncers, it's a job that you can do if you've spent some time at Her Majesty's pleasure when no-one else will look at your CV.  Some of the shepherds may well have been ex-cons (that's how Moses wound up shepherding in Midian, by having killed an Egyptian and fled for the hills).  Or totally uneducated.  Or born on the wrong side of the sheets and sent off into the hills to be forgotten (good question: why was David shepherding when Samuel came a-looking for a future king?).

Certainly rough.  Probably smelly.  

And who's the modern equivalent?  That set of people would certainly include scruffy people with dogs on a string, or the people whose Tourette's keeps them out of polite society, or the sex offenders trying to forget and to live quietly.  People who - if they sat next to you in church - would have you checking your purse and trying not to breathe through your nose.

Jesus welcomes everyone.  God makes a point of welcoming everybody.  The invitation to shepherds says, more clearly than sky-writing or spelling it out in tulips, EVERYBODY WELCOME!

Simple as that.  No sub-clauses.  

And let the welcome spread from our noticeboards to our faces.

That's the tagline of my present church, the beautiful St Mary's in Moston.  I take very slight umbrage to the statement, not because I'm less than inclusive, but because all churches say that everyone is welcome in principle, but when it comes to practice you may find that everyone receives a warm welcome, but for some it's warmer than others.  

My real beef is that there are groups of people - and I'm not just talking LGBT but that's top of my list - who've learned to treat this "everybody welcome" schtick with the suspicion it sometimes deserves.  When you're not welcomed, or when some aspect of your personhood is not welcomed, that devalues the "everybody" and the "welcome" - and it means that it's no longer enough just to say it.  We need to show it.  "But it says on the sign…" is not excuse enough for not going out and being proactive.  It's our job to show we mean the stuff we say and pin up on notice boards.

(armchair not included: actual seating may vary… okay, it's pews)

So if people in the world have been reasonably led to believe that they're not quite welcome, it is our responsibility to show them that they are welcome here.  Divorced and single, bereaved and gay, trans and asylum seeker, tattooed and pierced and fresh out of prison.  

Yes, your notice board says EVERYBODY WELCOME.  Good on you.  Now make sure people know that it's true.  Break some walls down yourself and pave the way with welcome mats.  Use your imagination… your press… your everything…

Like this...

18. Baffled!

So I asked which Nativity character you feel most at home being.  Angel?  Mary?

Today… Joseph…

If angels are busy and Mary is undignified, then maybe the best word for Joseph is… baffled.  In the space of a very few short years he's shocked to find his fiancé pregnant and he undertakes to be father anyway.  I can't think of anything more sleep-robbing than being responsible for another human being: two of the biggest and most memorable nightmares I've had were both about becoming a dad, once in the back of a yellow VW Beetle in the Midlands.

"What?  What?!  WHAT!!!?!"  Textbook baffled.

Joseph becomes this woman's protector, this little one's protector, in ways he never thought he'd have to, perhaps in ways he never thought he was capable of.  There's not just a long perilous journey making sure no-one falls off the donkey (which may or may not have existed, a bit like Schroedinger's Donkey).  There's not just the faint feeling of failure he must get from having to lodge in a stable: he would probably blame himself for not getting there earlier while all the time making sure the journey didn't overstretch or overtire Mary, which is why they were last in.  

The BBC's Joseph.  A normal, ordinary man.  He can do it.

On top of that is the bafflement of all these other guests turning up.  And then there's the night he has a dream and God tells him to flee, to become the protector of his wife and toddler while they're asylum seekers in Egypt, not speaking the language but having gold about them, looking like foreigners to be shunned or exploited.

And Joseph rises well to the occasion.

When I was Joseph (aged about four) all I had to do was rat-a-tat-tat.  I even got that wrong.  I was perpetually baffled at the age of four.  Plus ca change…

Anyway, maybe you feel like Joseph.  A bit baffled, a bit overwhelmed, a bit Rory Williams, wondering what the next challenge is and whether you can step up to it.  The news throughout the BIble is that God takes ordinary people, nervous and nervy people, even complete char lies and he turns us into something magnificent.  You may be new to the faith and God might be asking you to do more than you ever imagined.  That's okay, that's how I feel most days when I step up to preach or lead a service or take a funeral or school assembly.  I realise I'm an adult and I look around for a more adult adult… but it's me!

Rory Williams: often baffled, never shy of stepping up.

From the timid and timorous little boy afraid of praise, to the callow and clueless student, to the long and languorous vicar typing here, it's a good job we have a God who will do with us - for us, through us - more than we can expect or imagine.  It's okay to feel like Joseph.

And you don't have to be male to be baffled, although we've cornered the market in general bamboozledness…

A baffled woman, yesterday.

Who have you cast yourself as so far?  

Whichever of those you cast yourself as, you can cast yourself into God's hands this Christmas, cast yourself into the everlasting arms of the one whose love is deeper than time and who himself moved heaven and earth to be here on earth with us.  You can cast your burdens onto Jesus, because he really does care for you.  And you can cast your worries and dreams for the year ahead - whatever angelic errands, Marian indignities and baffling responsibilities it may involve - into the lap of God, and let him catch you and carry you, help you and hold you, love you and lift you.  

Or else what point is there in his coming down at all?

17. Quarrels With Carols

So I've been carol singeing.  That's not a mis-spelling.  Carol-singeing is when you lose concentration in an especially long and tedious carol and start doing something else.  Usually the only other things you can do in a carol-singing situation are distracting and naughty, however creative.  If I had a cigarette lighter I'd be setting light to the ends of the carol sheet for my own entertainment.  Hence carol-singeing.

My friend Matt is a master of the carol singeing, usually in supermarkets.  If he's not leading or planning the thing, you can expect some borderline disruptive behaviour from him.  This is why he's been ordained: to give him enough to do in church services that he doesn't feel the need to set fire to things or sing the rude words to Christmas carols.

The same is true of me, of course, so when Matt was leading the carols in a residential home yesterday evening, I sat with the residents (because they had better chairs and because I'm incarnational; not necessarily in that order) and tried to keep my mind on the business in hand.

Carols were good for teaching the stories and theology in a non-book culture.  I salute them.  But…

This evening I sang a couple of very long ones, and in the course of them I found myself fashioning my santa hat into a hand puppet and making it sing, variously as a kind of Fingermouse, then one of the Fraggle Rock creatures by the trash heap, then as Jane's Truth Snake from Coupling.

  Fingermouse.  Bearded Yoffy not pictured.

In the second long carol I figured out how to make my santa hat stand erect on top of my head by judicious use of a table-top Christmas tree.  It wobbled alarmingly, but I think that added to the charm.

So let's look briefly at the downside of carols.  Tomorrow we can get back to the nativity characters.

Drawback 1: Being too long.  Covered that.

Drawback 2: Having convoluted syntax.  I mean, screwing with sentences in a way that would confuse Yoda himself, just to fit the sentiment, theology or rhyme of the piece.  A smartie or a big kiss (your choice) to anyone who can successfully punctuate the following:

Silent night holy night Son of God Love's pure Light radiant beams from Thy holy face with the dawn of redeeming grace Jesus Lord at Thy birth Jesus Lord at Thy birth

Anyone know what they're singing?  Yoda?  No?  There are lots of carols with terrible word-order, which make the meaning more opaque rather than clear as day.  If we're trying to communicate a good truth, why not do it clearly?

To you a Christmas happy wish I, said Yoda.

Drawback 3: Having bad scansion.  The ruddy words don't fit the tune.  Prime examples would include In The Bleak Midwinter. After all, what congregation can come to a consensus on how to sing:

"Yet what (I) can I give him (?)

Give my heart."

Moreover, in O Come All Ye Faithful, where do you sing the "be" in "begotten" in:

"Very God, begotten not created" ?

Do you sing:

"Ve-ery Go-od,

Begotten not created"

or

"Very God be-

Gotten not created."

And how do you feel about people singing the other (wrong) one while you're singing the (right) one?  Basically, would it have taken a grand smashing poet like Rossetti long to have come up with a set of words that fitted and rhymed?  I mean, she was a poet!

I don't for a minute think you should be able to understand things before you can sing them.  But we complain such a lot about losing the meaning of Christmas that it would make more sense if carols worked with us.  Clarity, please, in punctuation!  Clarity, please, in syntax.  Carols are so full of good theology that it's a shame if we can't extract it.  One of the fuddiest and duddiest of carols - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - features some of the best theology:

"Jesus Christ our Saviour was born upon this day

to save us all from Satan's power 

when we were gone astray…

...To you is born a Saviour in David's town tonight

To free all those who trust in him 

from Satan's power and might."

How cool is that?  How many sermons would kill to be so straightforward?

We may not be living in a book culture now, so the clearer our carols, the better.

Fraggle Rock trash-heap monster

Drawback 4: Being Schmaltzy.  

"No crying he makes"?  

No thank you.  

"How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given." 

Since when was childbirth silent?

"For he is our childhood pattern."  

Jesus left his parents and gave them every parent's worst nightmare!

"Christian children all must be 

mild, obedient, good as he."  

Ooh, preachy.  Let's not sing embarrassing lyrics that were invented for some Victorian drawing room.  I'm not sure shoehorning dubious moral imperatives into carols is what they're really for.

That's all.  For now.  

Did you spot, then, that I love carols?  I only complain about the things (and people) I love.

Jane and the Truth Snake from Coupling, yesterday

Carols are brilliant.  Go decipher some, and then sing them.

16. Cameras Go Up, Cameras Go Down

Yesterday I asked which nativity character you felt fitted your personality best.  I banged on about lobsters and offered you the option of being an angel.

But maybe you feel more like Mary.  Good news:you don't have to be a woman or even a virgin to feel like Mary.  The most important thing about Mary is that she was… well, she was pregnant.

Some of you have been pregnant.  It may well be beautiful but it's undignified.  There's morning sickness and I'm told you can't see your feet for the last trimester.  There's all the birth-giving, the sweating and straining and all that business below stairs.  And that terrible indignity - crowned by the further indignity of it all happening in a stable - is the miraculous path that God forges to come into this world.  In Genesis there's a suggestion that pain in childbirth is some sort of result of sin… and yet God weaves even that into his weird plan to become human and save us.  The Jews had (indeed have) a thing about childbirth and even menstruation making women unclean.  Even a couple of generations ago women were expected to be "churched" after childbirth.  Do you know how difficult it is to find a picture of a pregnant Mary?  That bulge has been airbrushed out of things, as if it were shameful rather than beautiful.

How we wish we looked when we're pregnant.

But God takes this dangerous and undignified process and makes it his own.

Anyway, not all of you will pop a sprog in a city farm.  But indignity… we will all face indignity.  Sooner or later all of us will have medical procedures that leave little dignity.  Cameras go down, cameras go up (get that in the right order!).  You sit on a draughty ward with a hospital nightgown that doesn't quite fasten all the way up at the back.  Someone may have to feed us or take us to the toilet or bath us.  Indignity, I'm afraid, is part of being human, and while we shouldn't invite it, we should notice that God graces even the lack of dignity involved in childbirth and pregnancy.  When King David worshipped God in the Old Testament wearing nothing but a linen ephod - effectively his y-fronts - the only person who came out of the story badly was his wife who sneered at his lack of dignity.

Possibly accurate.  Probably no crown.  Who knows?  

You may be suffering indignity already.  You may be fearing it.  You may need to cast yourself as Mary in this nativity story, because God gathers up even the worst indignity and lets you know you're still his, and he even weaves it into his long game of winning everyone back.  How we are in our worst moments may win more people to Christ than a lifetime of grace and poise and looking fabulous darling.

Go on, hoover and dance to the Lord.

It's okay to feel like Mary.  God hasn't forgotten you.

It's okay to dance like a loon.  God loves it.

15. The Christmas Lobster

Were you in a nativity play?  Who (or what) were you?  Back in the day there were only about six options: Mary, Joseph, wise man, shepherd, innkeeper, angel.  Herod at a pinch.

Of course, these days someone (not me) has stretched the cast list so that we can include everyone.  Who can forget the memorable scene in Love, Actually…**

Karen: So what's this big news, then?

Daisy: [excited] We've been given our parts 

in the nativity play. And I'm the lobster!

Karen: The lobster?

Daisy: Yeah!

Karen: In the nativity play?

Daisy: [beaming] Yeah, first lobster.

Karen: There was more than one lobster 

present at the birth of Jesus?

Daisy: Duh.

The Christmas lobsters.  As you do.

You think that's bad?  At one of my previous schools, they hit on the idea of stocking out the stable with sundry animals.  There were cows and horses and sheep and… pigs.

Yes.  Pigs.  In a Jewish stable.

"The piglets are oinking, the baby awakes, 

But little Lord Jesus, no butties he makes… 

Because he's Jewish!!!"

Pigs might.

What made it all worse was that there was one little boy who was terribly upset because he wanted to be a Christmas pig.  And he'd been denied that role, deliberately or otherwise, which was perhaps fortunate because he was… Muslim.

He could have wanted to be anybody: sheep, wise man, Joseph.  No problem.  But imagine the scene in some family homes when the Muslim son arrives home to declare he's playing porky pig in a Jewish stable in a Christian play.  Clue: it's the pork bit that has the greatest capacity for a diplomatic incident.  

The real Christmiss Piggy

That was long ago and far away.

Thank goodness.

When I was a boy, I was cast as Joseph!  The next year I was a shepherd.  The following year I was on percussion.  That's been my trajectory ever since…

Joseph was not a taxing role.  Except to a nervous young boy who didn't want to be up on a stage.  All I had to do was walk with Mary (one of the slightly stuck-up girls from my class, I thought), rat-a-tat-tat on a door or two and report back to 'er outdoors that "there wasn't any room and we can't stay here, they haven't any room for strangers, though the night may be dark and the wind might be cold and full of funny noises in the night."  Odd that I can remember, 37 years on, the lines that proved so elusive back then.  My class teacher Mrs Williams told me that if I forgot the lines once more she'd punch me on the nose.  

Gosh, all my childhood trauma is coming back.

Anyway.  That was me.  Who were you?

The Christmas octopus?  Was that you?

And an exercise I find fruitful at Christmas is asking yourself just who you'd be in that story.  And rather than run a Cosmo-style Christmas Quiz (Score 45-50?  You are such a Herod.  Keep those children away this Yuletide!) I thought I'd spend a few days offering you some alternatives and a thought or two.

My preferred Christmas Piggy.

Today… are you most like the angels?  Angels are busy in the Christmas story.  Busy with mary and Joseph and shepherds and filling the sky with their dancing.  Maybe you're a busy person?  Maybe you feel you should play the angel, flying hither and yon, running errands and making sure everyone else's Christmas works.  Maybe you've got so many people you feel you have to look in on and care for that you don't seem to get a moment to yourself.  I have no tree and I rarely dangle my baubles anywhere, and that's mostly because of the busy thing.  So maybe you've met yourself coming back and you feel either tired or faintly resentful at everyone else stealing your time and energy?  Maybe you have a list of engagements as long as Mr Tickle's arm of stuff you need to accomplish and people you'd like to visit before Christmas comes.

That you?

The thing we should spot if we feel this way is this: the angels joined in the celebrations.  They trumpeted in the sky after their visit to the shepherds.  They were never too busy to join in.  

Don't you get to the other side of Christmas and wish you'd stopped to hear the angels sing.  Make some space.  Remember that other Mary - she of Mary and Martha fame - and how she sat down at the feet of Jesus in defiance of all her sister's fevered preparations and busyness.  Martha was busy building up a steam of resentment in the meantime, and when her pressure cooker burst its banks* Jesus had only this deeply infuriating (or deeply inviting) thing to say: "She has chosen the best thing and she won't let anyone take it away from her."  

A pressure cooker, yesterday.

It's okay to feel busy, as long as you don't let busy have the last word.  Light a candle.  Guard your own time with Jesus.  Be an angel to yourself as well this year.



*mixed metaphor.  Sorry.

** My theory is that the best Christmas films are the ones in which it's only incidentally Christmas: Love, Actually or Die Hard Whichever or Gremlins or It's A Wonderful Life.

My other theory is that people put up blue Christmas lights because it puts criminals in mind of the police and deters burglaries.  What does anyone think?

14. Spiders

So imagine you have a friendly spider.  You love her very much but she does tend to wander off into danger.  And imagine you, as a human being, have much spider wisdom to impart.  How do you let your spider know that (a) you love her (b) you want the best for her (c) that you may have some sound advice about plugholes?

Danger, Incy Wincy, danger!

That's the question I posed some Year 4 pupils today, and after some exciting suggestions - text the spider, hold up a love-heart, shout very loud at her knees - we decided the best thing would be to shrink down to spider-size and communicate with that beloved spider face to face.  Multiple eyes to multiple eyes.  Be able to have a good whisper in her knees.

I found some scary spider pictures, but I respect arachnophobes too much to use them.

It's a fun way of thinking about what God does at Christmas.  He's created this human race whom he (a) loves (b) wants the best for and (c) has a good idea about the best way to live as human, how to keep oneself from running into danger and falling into sin.  How does he communicate?

Well, there were commandments, but they really only go so far.

There were prophets, but - amazing fact, fact fans - there's really only one "successful" Old Testament prophet whose words lead to repentance and change of life… and I'll tell you who that was at the end.  Have a think about it.

So God decides to come on down himself.  God the Son arrives here in human form.  God shrinks himself down to human size - better still, to the size of a cell, an embryo, a foetus, and then an air-breathing baby.  

Anything like this?  Discuss.

And he does it not only so there's a proper sinless God-human who can die on the cross and make peace between humans and God.  

He does it not only so he can speak to us on a level, and be clear about what God loves and hates, what God stands for ad what God most definitely doesn't stand for.

He does it so that he can know from the inside out what human beings go through.  Pain and pleasure, splinters and sexuality, joy and jokes and jealousy, hunger and happiness (make up some more Jane Austen titles if you like).

By the time he's lived and died and been raised and ascended, Jesus really is our brother.  Forged in fire and faith, proved in pain and power, knowing not just about us, but knowing our human condition.  Jesus alone is qualified to save us, and he saves us not a patronising Lord Bountiful who's been above the penury and poverty and bunions and blisters, but as someone who has lived our lives, walked our earth, sneezed and snored and stubbed his toe.  Someone who's grieved and groaned, walked and wept, shed the blood, sweat and tears that are as much part of us as DNA.

Rejected?  Check.  Spat upon?  Check.  Loved?  Check.  Misunderstood by family and friends?  Check check.  Jesus has a full house in humanity.  Tempted and tested and tried.  It means whatever I suffer, I can go to him, tai to him, run to him, crawl to him, cry out to him, and he'll know about it.  God with us, God in us, God like us.

Are you spotting yet that this is my chief - possibly one and only - Christmas sermon… and possibly the one you'll hear from me more than once, in different cloth, through the year?  Life can be really shitty, but in Jesus there is so much grace that we can make it through.  Not without pain, not without questions, but make it through nonetheless.

Jesus is there for me.  For you.  For everyone who finds Christmas - or life - tough.  All hail the great shrinking God, and the way that somehow his heart might have gotten even bigger by shrinking down to talk to us, live with us, die for us.  Amen?




Oh yes.  The only successful prophet was Jonah.  Inauspicious start, running in the wrong direction.  His experiences were stormy, fishy and hard to swallow, but when he told the bad bad Ninevites to change their lives, they did.  Ninevites!  There's not much record of God's actual people, the Israelites, responding well to prophets.  Jesus seems to think they did away with the whole gamut of them from A to Z…

You'll never believe who I had in the back of my throat last week...

13. Followed By Strawberries

Have you ever been followed around by strawberries?

I have.

A couple of weeks ago I was visiting a parishioner and I noticed a fruity smell in the air.  Yankee Candle?  Air freshener?  Whatever it was, it was a slightly clinging strawberry smell.  But I've been in worse-smelling places.

The smell followed me into my car, and I pondered on whether strawberry could linger like cigarette smoke or incense in your soft furnishings and clothes.  Usually I'd visit my smoking parishioners all on the same day so that I'd only have to wash one set of clothes.  I wasn't all that keen on the strawberry aroma.

Strawberries.  They stalk you.

Coincidentally, the same smell was in someone else's house the next day.  Maybe the church's advent candles, given away to people to help them observe advent, had background notes of fruit?  Or maybe there'd been a job lot of strawberry oil at the local Home Bargains?  

I kept missing the obvious explanation.

It was on the third day that I began to wonder whether the solution was closer to home.

You see, I recalled a story of a man who'd gone around all day smelling poo everywhere he went, and not understanding until he found - I don't know how - a small brown smear on his moustache.  The whole world didn't smell of poo.  The answer was under his nose.

Moustache.  Poo not featured.

And thus it turned out with me.  I knew that my deodorant wasn't strawberry (I'm not Rainbow Brite or a Care Bear, you know!), my shampoo is orange, my toothpaste was minty and my washing powder Ecover.  But I'd missed that I'd bought a fresh tube of hair gel from Netto… and that turned out to be the answer.  The strawberry was in my hair.

Needless to say I was straight into the shower and washed that strawberry right out of my hair and sent it on its way.  And then passed the gel onto someone else.  Good luck!

I've met people marrying for the umpteenth time, and they've been very clear that all three spouses they'd previously had were the problem.  People who've hopped from church to church and found fault everywhere.  People who've been turned down for jobs left right and centre and swear blind that all the interviewers were prejudiced against them.

Sometimes the answer is under our noses.  Sometimes the world doesn't need changing.  Sometimes it's us.

It's a trait I've spotted in quite a few people who think they're prophetic.  Generally it's been people who want to protest at women in roles of responsibility, or the inclusion of our LGBT brothers and sisters and siblings in ministry or marriage.  

Proof of their prophetic status often comprises the fact that they are not well-received.  Rejection, it seems, = what Jesus suffered, what the prophets of old suffered.  And by a leap of strange illogic, therefore, anyone who is rejected must be prophetic, if not actually Messianic.

This is not always straightforward.  "By their fruits" etc.

But sometimes the people rejecting our viewpoint aren't Pharisaical hypocrites.  Sometimes they're right.

Sometimes being the voice of one doesn't mean we're John the Baptist.  Sometimes it means you really are out of step with what the world and the church and God himself are about.

Sometimes Christians are prophets.  Sometimes Christians are idiots.  Spot the difference.

Not all idiots are American, you know.  We grow our own too.

We need to have a good luck under our noses before we start casting stones in any other directions.

12. Ebenezer? Good.

"And so this is Christmas and what have you done?

Another year older and a new one just begun…"

That's John Lennon, that is.  Asking a good question.  What have you done?

What's changed this year?  How have you changed this year?  For the better?  For the worse?

Me?  Ask me again at the end of the year.  It's been trying.  

Ebenezer Scrooge didn't have a year.  On that Christmas Eve when he was visited by four ghosts, it was shown to him that the next year he'd be under a cold stone slab in a graveyard.  Ebenezer had one night only, one night only, that's all he had (sorry, I went all Elaine Paige there for a moment).

The Marleys wailing: Caine and chains.

And I love Ebenezer Scrooge.

First, the name.  Ebenezer.  What irony!  The Victorians would have been more used to the name, not least as part of that hymn that declares "Here I raise my Ebenezer…"  They had perhaps a little more Bible knowledge than we do now, and might recall 1 Samuel…

Go and read it.

Ebenezer means "stone of help" and is the name given by Samuel to a stone raised as a memorial to a great battle in which Israel perceived that God had routed the Philistine army before them.  And so to call the antihero of A Christmas Carol Ebenezer was either Dickens' way of prefiguring the man of hope he would become - a second father to Tiny Tim and so quite the stone of hope - or else reminding us that not even a great name can protect us from becoming bitter and selfish.

The Ebenezer in 1 Samuel might have looked like this...

These days the name Ebenezer takes people's thoughts back to miserly Scrooge (or else to the Shamen singing Ebenezer Goode on Top Of The Pops: I always wondered what that record was about…) but back then when A Christmas Carol was published it was a respectable, upright name.

Anyway.  Ebenezer changes overnight, from a miserable skinflint to a man who happily sends an urchin off on an errand to buy a turkey, optimistically imagining that the Cratchits will have the cooker-space for it and be able to cook it in time for lunch.  My guess is that they'd still be trying to brown it at Hogmanay.  But Ebenezer changes.

And Christmas - which comes round rather regularly - is a good time to check your own pulse, your own spiritual health, your own family's health.  Christmas is when you notice who's missing (like Tiny Tim's crutches leaning unneeded against a wall): who's died and whom you've fallen out with and won't allow to darken your door.

Christmas is a good time to see whether your heart is still open to everyone, or whether the spirit of bah humbug has started to encroach.  You don't have to like Christmas jumpers and Paul McCartney's music, but if your love for humankind is waning, this is the time to notice and reverse the dynamic.

(Incidentally there's a species of snail called bah humbugi after Ebenezer's words.  How cool is that?)

Around the world and ever since it was written - 1843 - A Christmas Carol has inspired countless pastiches and downright steals.  Remember Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder's Christmas Carol?  Catherine Tate taking flipping liberties with the tale in Nan's Christmas Carol?  Michael Gambon playing the Ebenezer-figure against Matt Smith in the 2010 Doctor Who Christmas Special?  Remember Michael Caine in the Muppet film?  

Ebenezer Scrooge by another name, on another planet.  It's universal, you see.

The list is endless.  The Flintstones, the Jetsons, Scrooge McDuck, Looney Toons, the Smurfs, Bill Murray in Scrooged…  Everyone who can has jumped on Ebenezer's bandwagon.  Everyone has a version.  It's because that story - repentance, change, hope - is so ingrained, so rooted in us all.  We all know that we need to change (and if you don't know it, be careful!  That means you're almost at a stage of not being able to change!).  Ebenezer shows us that we can.

It's not often I take John Lennon very seriously, but that question of his:

"What have you done?"

seems quite apposite for 2015.  Many of my friends and I have been through enough to make us very angry indeed, very indignant.  The key is how we will use that anger for good, rather than let it either fester into bitterness or be swept under the carpet and come back to bite us as depression.

One day God will ask me what I did with all that anger and indignation.  I'm working on an answer.

And if this Christmas there are some severe scorings out of names on your Christmas card list, you may well ask, "What have we done?"  If your country has just elected quite a weight of far-right politicians to power, it might well ask, "What have we done?"  If you find yourself on Christmas Eve knowing that you've hurt someone and not made any move to mend it, you may well need to ask, "What have I done?"

Bearing in mind, honestly, what we've done, what do we need to do next?  What could we mend and how could we do it?  Ebenezer was probably beset with shame on Christmas Day, and could well have succumbed to the temptation to go and hide under a stone for the rest of his life.  But to his eternal credit he first of all sent out a peace offering in the shape of a turkey and then went out himself to mend relationships.  Sent and went, that's Ebenezer.  I have to say, he's a more honest human being than many.  I think that's why I insist on calling him Ebenezer rather than Scrooge.  The stone of hope rather than the miser. 

What have you done?  And what do you need to do next?