Trent: St Andrew

December's View from the Rectory Perhaps it has something to do with the warm weather that we are still experiencing in mid November, but I only became aware of Christmas music playing in a shop a couple of days ago. 2024’s Christmas Number One, ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! (the only band with a name featuring a punctuation mark?). In fact ‘Last Christmas’ became the only single to be a Christmas No.1 in two consecutive years, although Wham! had to wait forty years for this to happen. The tradition of a Christmas No. 1 began in 1952 (“Here in my Heart” by Al Martino) and in some years the song has been incredibly apt. “Mary’s Boy Child” was crooned by Henry Belafonte in 1957, reflecting the incredible birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Cliff Richard reminded us that Christmas is our “Saviour’s Day” in 1980, while Alexandra Burke uttered several “Hallelujahs” in 2008. Other titles were not so appropriate - “Return to Sender” (Elvis Presley, 1962), “I love Sausage Rolls” (LadBaby, 2019) with a follow up of “Sausage Rolls for Everyone” two years later. And who can forget “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” from St Winifred’s School Choir (and, believe me, I am trying very hard to forget and I apologise for the inevitable ear worm). Perhaps the most haunting of Christmas No 1s was Band Aid’s “Do they know it’s Christmas?” First sung in 1984 to raise money for those starving in Africa, it was sung again in 1989 and 2004. The song includes the lyrics, “There's a world outside your window, and it's a world of dread and fear, where the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears.” In the run down Palestinian town of Bethany, just outside Jerusalem, there is a boys’ orphanage called Jeel-Al-Amal. It was started in the early 1970s by Basil and Alice Sahhar, Palestinian Christians, whose hearts went out to the children that had been orphaned by war and violence. As far as I know, their daughter, Samar, still runs the home which now includes an additional primary school. In many places in the building were simple posters saying, “In which language does a child cry?” This made a huge impression on me and I often think of this phrase. Jesus was born into a horrible world. His homeland had been conquered by the Roman army. A puppet king was so fearful of being usurped by an infant that the Magi predicted, that he ordered the death of all boys under two years of age. Mary and Joseph could only find a grim stable in which Jesus’s birth took place. This was not the ‘Away in a manger’ sort of birth at all but I can still imagine Mary and Joseph’s relief when Jesus first purged his lungs with his opening cries. But what language was he crying in? Of course the answer is in every language under the sun. Crying is the universal language, especially when uttered by a newly born baby. As we celebrate Jesus’s birth this Christmas, may we also think of all those born in difficult circumstances - within the boundaries of the Queen Thorne, within our country and across the world. May we feel the urge to feed the world. And, perhaps, once again, we can let them know the real meaning of Christmas. Rev’d David