Dear friends

This is the final Christmas message of the year, and a bumper edition to cover Christmas and the New Year period. I’m writing this now amid school carols and end-of-term occasions, and preparation for Christmas celebrations in our church community. Yet it’s still been a very distinctive Advent for me. Something about arriving and having lots of things planned already, and having excellent ministerial support from Phil, Chris, Steve and Anne has given me more time than I normally would to savour the season of Advent.

It's taught me something about pacing. If it’s anything, Christmas is a story—a ripping yarn, you might say. And good storytelling relies on good pacing. This year, Advent has helped me to pace myself, and to take each moment of the season, each lighting of a candle on the Advent wreath, at closer to the pace it deserves if it is truly to serve as a preparation for the festival of the incarnation of Jesus to come.

Because it is still to come; it’s still not here yet! Yes, I might have sung Away in a manger a good few times already—although I have dodged any mince pies so far!— but at this point we are still waiting and letting the anticipation build.

And the virtue that this has revealed to me this year is that of simplicity. Christmas is plagued by complexity. We’re surrounded by ever more busyness, ever-increasing expectations, and ever more frenetic activity. Much of it happens around families, but some of it related to church. But really, church is where we can hold up a big stop sign to all of that activity, and return to simplicity. The God whom we worship is simple—it’s our attempts to understand, explain and elaborate that complicate things. In the 4th century a Bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, wrote: ‘What shall I say? And how shall I describe this birth to you? For this wonder fills me with astonishment. The Ancient of Days has become an infant. He who sits upon the sublime and heavenly throne now lies in a manger. And he who cannot be touched, who is simple, without complexity, and incorporeal, now lies subject to the hands of men.’

This Christmas, let us return to God’s simplicity in Jesus, kneel in adoration at the manger throne as awed and wondering children of God, and give him our hearts.

With joy and blessings

Sam