-->

One of my favourite Christmas songs is Perry Como’s “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”. There’s something about his easy crooning style that seems just right for the song, but there’s also something about the sentiment – the excitement that Christmas is coming near.

In church we have particular Sundays that mark the passage of Advent and the coming of Christmas. On the first Sunday we consider the Last Days – the Mayans were three weeks late. Later we think about the Prophets and John the Baptist and then finally the prophecy that Gabriel gave to Mary, that she would bear a son who would be the Saviour of the world. These are the markers that we have in church.

There will often be another set of Christmas rituals that we have in our homes. One of mine is getting the poinsettia from the supermarket, marvelling at how its still the same price as last year and congratulating myself on what a fine specimen it is. Then there is the purchase of the Christmas Radio Times which I pore over and see lots of films that I’d like to see. A small percentage I’ll get round to recording and these will then stay unwatched until next Christmas comes.

Other Christmas markers are the stories that appear in the news. These are the mixture of good and bad news stories – with nothing in between – that are peculiar to Christmas. They are designed to show that either a) individuals or organisations are Scrooges, or, b) that the spirit of Christmas is not yet dead. There have been a number  of these this year.

You might have seen the story about the NYPD cop and the homeless man. The incident happened at the end of November, so if we work on supermarket scheduling, that’s well inside the window of Christmas. New York police have not been always received good publicity as one headline suggested: NYPD Officer Caught On-Camera Doing Really Nice Thing. The nice thing that the 25-year-old Officer Lawrence DePrimo did, was to buy a homeless man a pair of shoes.

The homeless war veteran, in his fifties, was begging on a cold night, when the officer seeing he was homeless, went into a shop and bought the man some shoes. A nice touch was that he used his police department discount card to get 25% off. A tourist took a photos of the officer giving the man the shoes and by the power of the internet the policeman became famous.

A British policeman wasn’t so lucky. He interrupted a school Nativity Play to ask parents to move their cars because they had parked on double yellows and were obstructed the entrance to a doctor’s surgery. There were mixed feelings about whether to boo or cheer the policeman’s action as although he disrupted the play, the parents’ parking was clearly causing a problem and besides, it was a fee-paying school and the cars were all 4x4s, BMWs and Mercs, so they could be said to have deserved it.

There was no ambiguity about another story involving a traffic warden. The warden booked two coaches that were loading on a party of disabled children and their wheelchairs. To make matters worse, the children had been carol singing for a homeless charity. The two £70 fines have since been waived – although it would have been a bit of a waste for the Council to collect a fine from a school that is funded – yes, you’ve guessed it – by the same Council.

But let’s end with a good news story. Did you see the teacher whose boyfriend turned up at the school where she worked and interrupted the Nativity Play. This time, it wasn’t about getting the parents to move their cars. It was so that he could ask his teacher girlfriend to marry him. Like all public proposals, this was clearly a high risk course of action, but the lady said ‘yes’ and so the children and 200 parents went away happy.

School Nativity plays have a long tradition in schools, although it is unusual nowadays to see a straightforward take on the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. For example, I know of one school that this year told the story of aliens helping the crew of a crash landed spaceship return to earth for Christmas Day. Those schools that do have Nativity Plays often include extra characters. The film Love Actually has a scene in which a child plays an octopus in the school Nativity. I also heard a newsreader on the radio this week say that as a child she was a Spanish lady who brought a net of satsumas to Jesus. We saw something of this creativity with our own Travelling Nativity set when our wise men were photographed on the back of a stuffed toy rabbit.

I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I’ve always liked the story of the young lad playing the inn-keeper in  the Nativity story. Rather than turn away Mary and Joseph when they came to his door, he greeted them with a big smile and beckoned them saying, “Come on in, there’s loads of room!”

I like that inn-keeper, because it seems to me that he epitomises the essence of the Christmas story. OK, so it rather messes up a significant element of the story, but if truth be told, there wasn’t an inn-keeper in the version in the Bible. There were shepherds – generally considered undesirable people on account of their smelling of sheep. Then there were the wise men – they weren’t even Jewish and they were astrologers … and we know what Christians think about astrology. These shepherds and wise men were the first people to welcome God’s Son into the world. The outsiders became insiders, because that’s what Christmas is all about – God turning the world upside down. The Church hasn’t always been very good at demonstrating it, but God’s love is for all and there are no exclusions. The message of Christmas is, “Come on in, there’s loads of room”.

The Curse of Fred Perry

With England out of the Euros – those pesky penalties again – we can concentrate on what we do best – cheering on a Brit at Wimbledon in the hope that this year the name of Fred Perry will no longer need be mentioned as the last British male singles winner. A little research has reveals that the last British man to win the men’s singles at Wimbledon was not Fred Perry, but Jaroslav Drobný. As his name suggests, Drobný was not born within the sound of Bow bells or anywhere near Sauchiehall Street. He was a Czech, but he defected to Egypt and won Wimbledon while playing under their flag. He was already a UK resident at the time, but only his last Wimbledon appearance came as a British citizen.  At the time of his death, Jaroslav Drobný had held a British passport for longer than he held allegiance to any other nation and so I think that we can say that he is the last British man to have won the Wimbledon men’s singles. Although, we shouldn’t get excited as it was 58 years ago!

I’m guessing that Drobný spoke his English with a Czech accent, but we have become used to hearing accented English spoken by international sportsmen and women. Of course, the accent that we usually hear is American. Whether the player is Czech, Russian, Croatian or Serbian, he or she will be guaranteed to speak good English, but like an American. This is something that I find slightly irritating. If these players are going to speak English, why can’t they do so with an English accent?
You will already see the flaw in my argument. Is Andy Murray’s accent less authentic, because he is Scottish? I would say not. Murray learned his accent from his parents and from the people amongst whom he grew up – his cultural influences. Like it or, the majority of cultural influences that young people experience are not from this side of the Atlantic. So Sharapova and all the other –ovas speak English with the accents that they have heard – American.

It is almost impossible to separate the Christian Gospel from a cultural setting. It was given to us in a cultural setting – 1st century Palestinian Judaism – and it has been transmitted through the ages by Christian missionaries who have their own cultural baggage. Acknowledging this is important, because it might help us to understand that some of what we think of as Christian is simply the package in which the Gospel came to us. The trouble is that when we receive the Gospel we tend to hang on to the box it came in once we have unwrapped it.

When a parcel comes mail order, there will often be instructions that we should keep hold of the packaging in case we need to send it back. The Gospel comes in a package, but we must be careful not to pass it on. This is true for mission overseas, but it’s also true for communicating the Gospel in our own country. The Gospel might look very different in affluent London suburbs from how it looks in a deprived urban estate.

Our job as Christians is to try to understand what is transferable and what is just for us and our day. It’s a difficult task, but it’s one that Paul faced in Athens and elsewhere and reading the accounts of his journeys abroard is a good place for us to start.

Hope of Promotion

As a supporter of a football team who rarely achieve any success, I find it hard to sympathise with those who follow clubs at the top of the Premier League. Their games are televised every week, they have the best players and yet still their supporters complain that they haven’t won any silverware for the past three years.

This season, my team, Brentford, known by their fans as ‘the Barcelona of the lower leagues’, have finished 9th in League One. The top two teams are promoted and the next four play-off for the opportunity of playing in the Championship. The ‘Mighty Bees’ will have finished about six or seven points short of that elusive 6th position and that was how it has been for most of this season. However, for a period of about three weeks, having won five games in a row, it began to look as if they might just sneak into that 6th place.

It was at this time that I remembered a quotation from Clockwise, a film from the mid-1980s in which a character played by John Cleese said, “It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.” You see, it is the lot of a supporter of a middling football team to know every so often that hope, only, inevitably, it seems, to have that hope dashed. Having hopes raised before being  snatched away in this fashion must surely be worse than following a team who haven’t scored for weeks and who are already destined for relegation by January.

I’m not sure that hope of promotion is much like the way that the Bible describes hope, although one used to hear elderly church members describing deceased friends as having been, ‘promoted to glory’. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, defines ‘hope’ most clearly: “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” No one ‘hopes’ for what they already have. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews adds his or her two penn’orth: “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Faith is hoping with confidence, ‘playing to the best of your ability until the end of the season’ or, to use an expression I discovered a few weeks ago, “Faith is not being sure where you’re going … but going anyway.”

John and Mary - not their real names - were expecting a baby. A day before the due date Mary was concerned because she couldn't feel the baby moving. She thought that it might be because it close to delivery and getting ready for the final part of the baby's journey into the world. However, a visit to the hospital, an ultrasound and connection to a foetal heart monitor, told them that the fear that lay at the back of their minds was a reality. Their baby had died. For not apparent reason, just one day before they were due to meet their first born, he died. Mary had to go through the process of giving birth - a painful experience, but now without the promise of bringing home a bouncing baby son.

Matthew was born and, after a time with Mary and John, he was taken away. Certain tests were done to try to establish cause of death, but the parents were reluctant to add the trauma of a full post mortem examination to what had already happened to them and their son. So, Matthew was collected by a local Funeral Director and this was where I came in.

I was asked to conduct a service for Matthew and his parents and we arranged to meet. It was a good meeting as we discussed what form the service might take. We touched on some of the deeper theological issues and I suggested that the Psalms are full of the cries of people who are angry with God for allowing 'bad things to happen to innocent people', while the wicked appear to prosper. We looked at possible Bible readings and Mary and John liked the passage in Psalm 139 in which Psalmist speaks of God's knowledge of us and how he "created my inmost being," and, "knit me together in my mother's womb."

This wasn't the first such service I had conducted, but it had been a while since the last one. I still knew to expect to experience a visceral reaction when I saw John carry the tiny coffin in his arms. The service went OK. The family and friends were subdued, rather than audibly sobbing. What does one say about the life of a child who died a day before taking his first breath? This is what I said:

One of the particular sadnesses of this service is that at the time when we come to remember Matthew’s life we feel we have nothing to say.

Yet there are aspects of Matthew’s life that we can celebrate. We can celebrate the love of Mary and John that led to Matthew’s conception. While we are deeply saddened that we had Matthew for such a short time, we celebrate the joy experienced by Mary and John and their families and friends through their period of expectation.

Matthew was a person, yet a person that none of us have yet met. Matthew’s life was lived in the safety, security and warmth of his mother’s womb. His fate was not to know the joy of childhood, first love and parenthood, but nor did Matthew experience the suffering that is part of normal human life through all our years. Matthew’s life was different from ours, but no one life is identical to any other and God loves Matthew as he loves each of us. And he has loved us since before we were born and he will continue to love us long after we have left this earth, as this reading from the Psalms tells us.

I then read the passage from Psalm 139, most of which didn't seem as relevant. The passage from Mark 10 about Jesus welcoming children didn't help me much either - I felt that I was saying that "Jesus wanted another little flower in his garden".

Out we went to the grave - a considerably smaller area than full-size, but it seemed disproportionately deep. I led prayers and offered Matthew into God's hands. Rather than sprinkle dirt on to the coffin, the funeral director had some white rose petals which he offered to Mary and John and the other mourners. Things then took a slightly unexpected turn as John asked if he and some of the other male mourners could fill in the grave themselves. I'd only been involved with this once before - a funeral of a man born in the Caribbean - and then the women sang a funeral hymn while the men shovelled. This time it seemed different. There was silence apart from the sound of metal shovels dragging across the plywood on which the Council gravediggers had left the soil. But the sound of the shovels made little impact on the sound of straws being clutched.

As John finished moving the soil he muttered something like, "9 months and it comes to this". It was hard not to agree. For all the words about God's love and his knowledge and caring for the unborn, the truth was that none of us could really make sense of it. And I guess that this is what we - clergy and people - are not good at: accepting that things don't always make sense.

The balance of his mind was disturbed ...

The inquest into the death of Wales Football manager, Gary Speed, ended with a narrative verdict which told us that Mr Speed died by his own hand, but that this may not have been his intention. Therefore we do not know whether or not Gary Speed was part of the 1 in 6 proportion of the population who currently suffer from some form of depressive illness. While there is still some stigma attached to depressive illness, more and more people in the public eye revealing that this is a burden that they have borne has probably made it easier for ordinary people be recognised as sufferers.

The diagnosis of mental illness is not new, but ‘treatment’ often consisted of removing a patient to a place of safety for them and society. Surgery and Electric Shock Therapy remain controversial treatments into the 21st century, although execution for cowardice has been replaced by treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in cases of ‘shell shock’.

The relationship between mental health and the religious world is reflected in the changing times. Although there is the added dimension of whether or not the symptoms of what the Bible describes as demon possession are the manifestation of mental illness. However, a number of Bible characters and religious figures in the church have also shown signs of suffering from depressive illness. Both Elijah and Jonah in the Old Testament seem to have been unable to cope with circumstances in the lives. In the 16th century, Martin Luther seems to have recognised depression in a colleague who took his own life. He referred to his deceased colleagues state of mind: “This is the tragedy of our human condition, that we fall so far we can no longer see or hear the true God, and we imagine the condemning God is the only God. And then, the God we imagine becomes the God we get.”

Of all people, it is Jesus to whom we might look for an example of God’s presence at the time of greatest despair. It was Jesus who knew the sense of desolation that can come with depressive illness as he cried from the cross about God having forsaken him. The message is that God follows us to the very deepest point that we can reach.

However, this is not a claim that trusting in God will make it all OK. Mental illness requires just as much expert medical care as an illness that affects the body. A part of that care is a person’s need to know that they are not travelling alone. This is the sort of care that we can all offer. We may not know just how the other person feels, but most of us have experienced time in the wilderness and have experienced despair. We don’t need to know the pain of mental illness to walk along side someone who does. We simply have to follow our calling and take up our cross and follow Jesus to the Dark Place. In so-doing we share the darkness, while holding on to the light.