Four responses to Christmas

Four responses to Christmas - 1. Santa

Last night, at our Advent Sunday Café Church service, we explored Glen Scrivener's 'Four Kinds of Christmas' www.fourkindsofchristmas.com . This is an utterly brilliant resource which explores different ways we react and behave at Christmas. You can take a quiz on the website to find out which is your default approach to Christmas. The first time I took the quiz, I got 'Santa.'

Santa people LOVE Christmas. They get really excited. They love all the pretty lights and decorations, the Christmas music, the party food, the presents, the fun. They put up their Christmas tree in October and start watching Christmas films as soon as the nights start drawing in. This is definitely me. I put my Christmas earrings in and my Santa hat on at the Christmas Fayre on 19th November and this will be my normal attire until 6th January... or for as long as I can get away with it. Last year my husband had to insist that I take down the Christmas decorations as January drew to a close. I left up one set of lights which, fortunately, he never noticed. Or pretended not to.

For a 'Santa', life is good and there is no expectation that it will ever be any different. And there's the rub. Santas are in danger of failing to see, or of glossing over, those parts of life that are not pretty and shiny, or those people who aren't in the party mood. There is a danger of superficiality in a 'Santa' Christmas which is all froth and no substance. Christmas definitely is a time to celebrate - for everyone, and especially for Christians - but it is a celebration of the birth of a baby who came to bring light to a dark world.

Comments

Making the best of a bad situation

This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street. Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky. Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties. This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks. The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids). I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday. The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children. I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too. I decided to carve a simple fish and c

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral. The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness. During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead. I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home. Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that. But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness? My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent. I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity. I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have heard sin desc

Coffee Theology

Search This Blog