It is the season of Nativity plays and Carol Services. It is not unusual to find clergy with a near phobia of 'O Come all ye faithful' and the compulsory mince-pies as the Carolling service season stretches from late November to Christmas Day.
I sang two Carols last week that have made me think. The first, was in the wonderful Bishop’s Christmas concert in St. Thomas’ Church in Salisbury. Once in Royal David’s city began sublimely with a treble solo and a Choir verse, but then we all sang verse three, the words of which are to the left. While I am deeply fond of the students at Bishop’s, the styling of them as ‘mild and obedient’ might be a stretch! For parents across the country it might raise an eyebrow as they think of their own broods. I am not even sure we know that Jesus was like that. The account in Luke’s Gospel of how he worried his parents witless by staying at the Temple without telling them and then giving them a bit of lip when they finally tracked him down, does not quite fit Once in Royal’s beautiful, Victorian characterisation of mild, obedient and good. There’s a danger of Christmas being made into an impossible Winter Wonderland that is the polar opposite of the squalor of Bethlehem’s stable and far from the reality of life.
The second Carol was another Victorian classic, ‘O Little town of Bethlehem’. I met six young people, of Sixth form age from Bethlehem last week, as they came to dance in Salisbury Cathedral. ‘How still we see thee lie’, in ‘deep and dreamless sleep’ go the words of the Carol. But the Bethlehem of these young peoples’ homes is another world. They live in Aida Camp, a refugee camp that has been in Bethlehem for 70 years, with a population density of 77,464 per sq km. Compare that to Salisbury and a population density of 4,214/km and stillness is not a term I’d choose. One of the young visitors wanted to be an interpreter, one a doctor, one a nurse. They wanted to show me their photos of their sightseeing trip in London and spoke of how their mothers were worried about them while they were away. I was struck by the common threads across humanity of parents and children, hopes and dreams.
I wonder what Christmas is to you, what that newborn baby in an unsterilized animal trough means? For me, it is an honouring of all humanity that God took flesh in Jesus and brings hope for every human being in every land, of every faith or none. Bethlehem and too many other places in the world are not like this in 2022 - Mariupol, the city of Mary; Mogadishu in Somalia; the eight year old tragedy in Yemen. There too are parents and children, hopes and dreams. There too – I believe – is humanity that God yearns for us to cherish better than we have done in 2022.
SMW
