'Some two thousand million people round the world will celebrate Christmas in a variety of ways.' Photo: Alberto_VO5 / flickr CC.
Dare to trust
Bernard Coote reflects on the story of Christ’s birth
Some two thousand million people round the world will celebrate Christmas in a variety of ways! Two millenia of telling the story, and no sign of a loss of interest. It’s a phenomenon of human history.
Two ordinary people, under pressure, in a troubled occupied country, who find shelter in a stable for the birth of a baby, in primitive conditions. It’s a story now embellished with angels and shepherds, a star sign for the baby, a visit of Wise Men and later a massacre of children!
The story has made a profound impact on centuries of human history, art, music, literature and thought. Every Christmas children in Western schools are carefully coached to act out this story of a child, announced by an angel, fathered by a spirit and born to a virgin. None of this corresponds to everyday reality any more than Santa Claus. How do we make the transition from the innocent beliefs of a child to the maturity expected of an adult? Of course, all this is ‘in the Bible’, a book too important to dismiss, but it leads us to strange places.
In Quaker faith & practice there is only one passage about Christmas. It refers to a ‘testimony held by early Friends… against the keeping of “times and seasons”… part of the conviction that all life is sacramental… what God has done for us should always be remembered and not only on the occasions named Christmas, Easter and Pentecost’ (27:42). No Christmas festivities for them, a tradition which still applies in some Meetings.
Quakers have thought deeply on this subject, Sydney Carter, in Rock of Doubt, is one: ‘What happened in Palestine 1,900 years ago may have started a chain of events leading to the revelation we receive today. Gospels, creeds, works of art, ritual, and above all, the lives of countless men and women, may, as a wire conducts electricity, as the human body transmits life through centuries, have conducted this revelation to us. The records of the past, of living Christians (and non-Christians), raise for us the question that Jesus raised in his disciples: “Is this [way of life] a possibility we dare to trust?”’
For Jesus’ followers in every century celebrating Christmas (or Easter or Pentecost) is actually ‘to embody the hope, the danger, the beauty and possibility held out by Jesus’. Dare we?
Any birth is a matter of risk and trust. This one has invited twenty centuries of humanity to ‘dare to trust’.
Ruth Burgess, from the Iona Community, wrote:
You are a risk taker God…
Yours is an ongoing creation
…a story that is shaped in the telling,
a life that is pregnant with joy and pain.
And you made us in your energy, in your image,
holy and loving and courageous;
needing to risk the power of beginning…
…and to grow.
It is the invitation to belong, not to a closed community of belief but to an open community of vision. A possibility we dare to trust?
Two thousand million people keeping Christmas. Amazing company!
