Over the last month I’ve been greeted in all sorts of places with this comment: “I expect you are busy!” It’s as though we ministers do nothing for eleven months of the year. Advent and Christmas time is mad but I thrive on it: carol services, in church, with the WI, the scouts, a community choir, schools, nursing homes, and in Ripon cathedral last night. Christmas dinners, Christmas concerts, a blue Christmas service and coffee mornings with carols, and Lego church this morning. Tonight I led communion in Bedale and I’ve been to midnight service back at the cathedral. Someone in a church was moaning there’s too much on in December. But if you can’t do Advent and Christmas you have missed the point.
I love Christmas Eve.Tonight once you’ve done all the running around is a time to pause, to stop and to wait. What are we waiting for?
The late Walter Bruggemann said it brilliantly “give us the grace and the impatience to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes, to the edges of our fingertips.” This is a holy night of anticipation and hope. There’s something in the air.
In O Holy Night there’s a phrase, til he appeared and the soul felt its worth..
What I need is for my soul to feel its worth. Worth not in how much someone spends on me or values me. What qualifies me for God’s grace is nothing more than my need for God’s grace. And the church is here to share that grace.
You know there’s a story that swirls round that we ministers don’t visit anymore. I want to challenge that story. Pastoral care at moments of joy and sorrow is the privilege of ministry. The lasting memory of this Advent time for me will be sitting at the bedside of a dying faithful Christian man. I held his hand and prayed from memory, the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you, the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace. The dear man couldn’t talk but he squeezed my hand at the word peace. We shared God’s grace with him at the end of his life as a church.
Our Christmas Eve prayer for ourselves, each other, our church, our town and our world is may your soul feel its worth.
It happened in this story. To those who have no worth … to an unwed, pregnant teenage mother, to her faithful partner who risked his own life and social standing to defend and accompany her, to a ragtag band of shepherds on the fringes of Bethlehem … it is to them and for them that this “good news of great joy” first comes.
So may he on this Christmas Eve give us the grace and the impatience to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes, to the edges of our fingertips. And when he comes let’s really celebrate. For here is Christmas: God keeps his promises to save and bless his world. His solution to our pining and our longing is simple – Jesus.
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