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Good tidings we bring!

As the least musical person in my family, I do enjoy this time of year especially, because people are busy preparing to play and sing at different concerts and carol services, and the sound of Christmas music begins to fill the house. Last year one of us was learning to play We wish you a Merry Christmas, which contains the famous line that you’ll have seen on the front of the magazine, and which has given us inspiration for all our church posters and cards this year. We also have a brass player in the family, which gives a very nice festive feel to things, despite this person enjoying wearing a T-shirt which has a picture of their instrument and the words “I Destroy Silence.”

The line from the song has its roots in the Christmas story, of course, with the angels’ word to the shepherds not to be afraid because “We bring good news of a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” In a world where so much of what fills our screens or newspapers is so often such bad news, here is something which is entirely good.

In a world where we can feel that everything depends on us, that we pay for our mistakes, and that we have to make our own way, the angels bring good news of a Saviour – a rescuer.

If we feel let down, or anxious about the future, or struggling with doubt or uncertainty, the angels bring good news of Christ, God’s chosen one, promised from the beginning.

If we feel the world is spinning out of control, whether it is war, or politics, or climate change, or all three and more, the angels bring good news of a Lord, one who holds everything in his hands, and will do forever.

And the one who doesn’t just bring good news, but is good news, is Jesus: he is the Saviour who is Christ the Lord. No wonder the angels tell the shepherds that this is “good news that will cause great joy for all the people.”

The Christmas story seems at once so long ago, and at the same time a bit too familiar, so it is hard to imagine now what it was like the first time. But at the time of Jesus’s birth, for centuries people felt that they had not heard from God. Had he forgotten them? And into this void comes an amazingly noisy story: heavens opening, angels singing, joy echoing, and babies crying. God speaks: his Word, Jesus comes into the world, and destroys silence in the very best way.

It hasn’t changed, really. People still think God has forgotten them, for all sorts of reasons – maybe you do – but he still comes to destroy the silence of our fears, speaking instead good news, bringing great joy, telling of a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.

Happy Christmas, everyone

Even though there is a lot still to organise for December, we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit in the churches this year when it comes to Christmas. Not that all the events are organised by any means; cards have to be designed, and posters printed, and slots on rotas filled, and buildings decorated, and all the usual things that need doing at that time of year. Where we have been getting ahead of ourselves is that a month or so ago we felt we should start reading through one of the gospels again on Sunday mornings, and we settled on John. The opening includes some words which you might have heard at carol services before: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

There are some complicated ideas here, but if you basically assume that “Word” means Jesus here, you’re on the right track. A very popular modern version of the bible – a less literal translation – uses the phrase “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.”

The world has changed a lot in 2000 years, but one thing there still is are neighbourhoods. You might feel really rooted in our village communities here, like lots of people do, or you might find your neighbourhood somewhere else. Maybe it is the school your children go to, or the place you work, or a big friendship group, or something else, but most of us have some kind of neighbourhood.

I wonder what it means to you that Jesus has moved into it? I’m always eager for everyone who belongs to our churches to be active in our community in all sorts of ways, because when we do that, we bring Jesus with us, and he is good news for everyone. But this is another place I am aware of not getting ahead of myself, and how I need to remember that Jesus so often goes before us too: the job of his followers is to follow him, to see what he is doing, and join in.

I am sitting in the house at the moment, and feeling that I am in the wrong place to be writing this; as I type I am picturing the streets and the houses in the villages and asking Jesus where in the neighbourhood he is at work. Where are people catching glimpses of him? Where are his grace and truth being revealed? Where amongst us is there a real sense of Jesus coming close to us, like a neighbour? Could that be what you have been noticing recently: the Word who became flesh and blood moving into the neighbourhood?

If you read this quite often it probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that some months it feels that there is something obvious to write, and other times a bit less so. You wouldn’t normally get away with not writing about Christmas in December, or Easter in the spring, so at least then you don’t have to decide on a theme, although you do have to work out how to say something a bit different from what you said in the 12 previous years!

Perhaps that’s part of why it is sometimes tricky: 12 ½ years or so, minus three months of sabbatical, adds up to about 150 of these articles, which is at least 60,000 words of content – the lower word limit for a PhD thesis. It’s a lot of ideas.

But maybe October is particularly tricky because sometimes in churches there is a bit less happening. It’s often after Harvest and before Remembrance and then Christmas, so it can feel a bit like normal service – if you can excuse the obvious and awful pun. And because of that, October is when the Church of England counts people. If you want to know who is there week in, week out, not just for special occasions, then October is apparently when to do it.

Some vicar friends and I were talking just the other day about counting. We get wary of it for lots of obvious reasons. Small numbers might make us feel depressed; big numbers might make us complacent: all the obvious things. Like lots of you, we don’t work for an organisation where numbers are the best way at all of measuring success, and most of us in Christian ministry don’t really think success is the best thing to be measuring anyway.

But - and those of you who for some reason have read 150 of these could hear this coming, couldn’t you? – there is a place for counting, I think. When Jesus gathers people – his disciples, or a bigger crowd, or somewhere in-between – the numbers are counted. In the Book of Acts, as we watch the exciting and explosive growth of the early church, someone was there keeping count. It wasn’t meant to be something for a special occasion; every day, every week, every month was supposed to be part of the church seeing God “adding daily to their number those who were being saved.” Even October.

So if you feel that this October might be the month that you want to be counted in that number, why don’t you get in touch and have chat with one of us? We’d love to find time to do it: it’s a quiet month, after all.

Yesterday I was pruning our big rose bush; it produces loads of little pink flowers and doesn’t take much looking after at all, which is very good news if you prefer low-maintenance gardening. But the one thing I do know about it, is that if I want the flowers to keep coming, I have to cut the old ones off as soon as they have finished, in order to encourage new growth. This year I have been a bit slower than I sometimes am, and there are quite a lot of rosehips starting to form already, using up potential flower energy.

As I was merrily snipping away at them, it occurred to me that what I was actually doing was cutting off the fruit. It doesn’t matter with a rose bush, of course, unless you are going to make syrup or jam or tea with the hips – or, as I think I recall from a childhood book, itching powder. But with plants which we grow for their fruit, like apples or pears or tomatoes or whatever, it would be madness to cut off the dead flowers in search of new ones; there would never be any fruit.

All of this got me thinking, like most things do, about being a follower of Jesus, and about making followers of Jesus. It struck me that it is fairly easy to make something look good, like a flower looks good, but that a lot more work, or energy, whether on the plant’s side or ours, is needed to produce fruit. And I wondered whether sometimes we can be so keen to chase after something that looks good, that we end up choosing that over the fruit that will take longer to grow, but will be so valuable in the end.

It is so exciting when someone becomes a follower of Jesus for the first time. It’s just like my rose bush bursting into flower. But that flower has to change into fruit, and that doesn’t happen straight away, or make a big show of it. The rosehips I was cutting back yesterday were green and boring compared to the lovely pink flowers, but slowly the potential for new life was forming – at least until my secateurs got in the way. When the bible talks about the Holy Spirit producing fruit from these first flowers of faith, it lists a lot of things which take time, and aren’t superficially impressive: patience, goodness, kindness, and so on. It strikes me that our social media age is one of flowers rather than fruit, and that maybe patience just doesn’t look so good on TikTok or Instagram. But when I sit at a table with my family and there is a vase of flowers and a bowl of fruit on there, I know which one is going to get eaten.

Oh well. Not for the first time, football hasn’t come home. The original 30 years of hurt have extended to 58, which doesn’t really fit the song so well, does it? In my case I remember back as far as Italia 90, which puts my personal years-of-hurt tally at 34. Some of you will go all the way back to 1966.*

Thinking the other Sunday about the amazing possibility that this time football might just come home got us thinking about ways that the Christian faith expresses the idea of coming home.

The most encouraging thing is that coming home is an absolute certainty. One day, football might just come home. Maybe, just maybe, this new manager we are now looking for will do the job for us. (At this point a pessimist would point out that no English manager has even won the Premier League in its 32-year history since going back to the summer of 1992, but I won’t go there.)

But as followers of Jesus, we are coming home. One day, all of us will come home to a place where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away. One day, all of us will come to a place that has been prepared for us, a room amongst the countless rooms in the Father’s house for everyone who has come home to Jesus.

Jesus tells the story of a man who leaves his Father’s house, and goes out and wastes his inheritance. And one day, he decides he would be better off back where he came from. He realises that he should come home. Arriving at his Father’s house, he is astonished that where he expected to meet anger and judgment, he encounters someone who is so delighted at his return that he runs from the door to greet him as soon as he sees him coming. He can’t wait for him to get home.

But it isn’t just about us coming home. He brings us home. Fans of Les Miserables will know that song as well, sung by Jean Valjean as he prays over his friend Marius. Rescue him, Lord: bring him home.

When I was thinking about this song the other day, for the first time I pictured a conversation between Jesus and his Father as he prepared to come at Christmas time. Of course it wouldn’t have happened quite like this, but I imagine the Father looking down at the world with all its sin and mess and pain, looking down at you and me, and saying to Jesus, “Bring them home. Bring him home. Bring her home.”

So yes, if we follow Jesus we are coming home, but only because Jesus, faithful to his Father to the point of death, has done just as he was asked. He has brought us home.

*I am very aware that for the purposes of this article I have ignored the brilliant Lionesses’ win at Euro 2021. Three years of hurt doesn’t make the point quite so well, does it?

Like all parents of teenagers, I am a consistent source of weary amusement in our house, but recently I have been particularly laughable because of my attempts to make some sourdough bread. Before I get into this too much, I’d like to offer in my defence that I’m fairly sure Cathryn was the one who suggested first that we give this a try.

The main thing you are confronted with is that it takes ages. If you make the starter (which is what you use instead of yeast to make it rise) it takes days at least, but I was anxiously tending to mine for weeks before it seemed to grow in any significant way. Once there is enough yeast from the air in the jar to get it going, you have to remove some of the mixture and feed the rest regularly with more flour and water to keep it active. If you aren’t using the stuff you discard to make bread, you could give it to your friend as a present (this is genuinely Jamie Oliver’s suggestion), or I have found it makes nice pancakes.

Only after this can you start to make bread. This takes about 18 hours, from the point that you mix a load of your starter with more bread and water, to when you add the rest of the flour, leave it overnight in the fridge to prove, and then bake it in the morning. I have got to the stage where my family will happily eat it, but I do recognise that there are people in the village and in our church community who bake it for a living, and need to be clear that the stuff I have made definitely isn’t anywhere near as nice as the ones in the shops.

Am I just writing a baking column this month, you ask? Well, possibly. But the many hours I have spent not so much fiddling with this bread, as worrying about whether it will turn out ok, have given me some space to think about the process. I have got thinking about what Jesus says about how the kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman kneads into about sixty pounds (!) of dough. Now apart from what that says about her impressive kneading muscles, for the first time I have thought about how she wouldn’t have had superfast supermarket yeast, but something perhaps a bit more like sourdough, which needed time to work slowly and grow through the whole of the bread. It says to me that being transformed by God, so that you become more and more like Jesus, and can do more and more of the things Jesus does, will take time.

This is an important lesson if you are like me, and you feel that you would prefer to do something you see the impact of tomorrow, or not bother. And when I look around our churches, I see things happening now which look like the result of a very long process of kneading with (in my case) very feeble muscles over a long period of time. So if you are just at the point of making a first decision to follow Jesus, please celebrate if you feel you are growing really quickly, but equally please persevere if it feels like working a little yeast through a very big batch of dough. The growth and the change will happen, and the results will be amazing.