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From the Minister’s Study
It is not my birthday
( . . . For unto us a child is born Is. 9:6)
Travelling through the town of Littleborough,
Rochdale, and most of our large cities, one would observe how the Christmas
lights were lit very early this year, ushering in the Season of Christmas and
its associated consumerism. Charles Dickens, reflecting on Christmas once
remarked: “I have always thought of Christmas time, when it comes round,
as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time
I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one
consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below
them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave and not another
race of creatures bound on their other journeys”. Dickens then goes on to say, “… though it
has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has
done me good and will do me good¾God bless it”.
Giving and receiving are well entrenched as
part of the season’s traditions. As Christmas approaches, perhaps it is time
for us to reflect on our expectations of it. Is it a time to give or a time
to receive? Perhaps both. On deeper reflection, however, Christmas has more
to do with giving than receiving. “For God so loved the world that He gave
His only begotten son” (John 3:16). As some of us parents know, the countdown
to Christmas starts months before it happens, as the list of wants grow from
Beanie babes to X-Box Playstation or from Nike shoes to the
full kit of Manchester United displaying their new sponsors. If we build our
expectations of Christmas on receiving, we may perhaps be disappointed.
There
was once a family that celebrated Christmas every year with a birthday party
for Jesus Christ. An extra chair of honour at the table became the family’s
tradition as a reminder of Jesus’ presence. A cake with candles, along with
the singing of “Happy Birthday” expressed the family’s joy in Jesus’ presence.
One year, a Christmas afternoon visitor asked five-year-old Ruth, “Did you
get everything you wanted for Christmas?” After a moment’s hesitation, she
answered, “NO, BUT THEN IT WAS NOT MY BIRTHDAY!”
What
a precious lesson from a five year old! What is our expectation this
Christmas? Perhaps the answer given by five-year old Ruth is good advice for
us all. It is Jesus’ birthday when we should expect to give Him our best: our
love, our lives, and our all. The best birthday gift you can give to Jesus
this Christmas is yourself, He longs for it, yearns for it, and died for it.
Let me remind you our key thought last Christmas: Remembering the words of
Lord Jesus himself “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts
20:35). Bearing in mind the principal meaning of blessed, is happy. May
we have Happy (blessed) Christmas remembering that IT IS NOT OUR BIRTHDAY, IT
IS JESUS’ BIRTHDAY. Let us give Him our best, our lives.
May
God bless you all as you celebrate Christmas?
Daniel
A prayer for Advent
Be ready for the coming of the
Lord, whether to all or to us in ones and twos as the allotted number of our
days foreclose. Be ready with your worship, so to practise the presence of
God so that, when he comes, we may pass from his presence as felt through the
physical senses of your mortal body to the presence felt Spirit to spirit.
The readiness born of a life lived wholly in You is true wisdom; the desire
for this wisdom leads to the inheritance of Your kingdom.
Seek
ye first the Kingdom of God; seek ye the wisdom that leads to this Kingdom;
seek ye the desire for this wisdom. Seek the Kingdom. Be ready for His coming,
that we may be taken to the Kingdom with Him.
Three ‘wise’ men?
Consider the three wise men in the Christmas story.
Or should it be the three ‘wise’ men?
The
only Gospel account to mention the wise men is Matthew, where we read in
Chapter 2, verses 1–12, of wise men from the East. The Church has since
invented a great deal of detail to ‘flesh out’ the story, but essentially we
know nothing about them. We are only guessing when we say there were three
wise men: the number three arises from the number of gifts, of gold,
frankincense and myrrh (Matt. 2:11), offered to the Christ Child.
But
were they ‘wise’? The early Church was unanimous in calling them astrologers
and magicians, that is, people who foretold the future by
studying the movement of the heavenly bodies, such as stars and planets.
Astrology was always forbidden within Jewish society, and all references to
astrology in the Scriptures assume the practice was explicitly forbidden. For
example, see Isaiah 47:13–15, where the ability of an astrologer to predict
the future is ridiculed. And, again, several passages in Daniel say the same:
see Dan. 2, 4:7 and 5:7. And men who performed any form of magic with occult
powers were to be put to death. Perhaps the wise men were not so wise after
all.
But
in fact Matthew’s Gospel does not use the word ‘wise’ at all, but ‘Magi’ ¾the meaning of which is now obscure. The more
understandable word ‘wise’ appears to have been substituted first about a
hundred years or so after Matthew completed his Gospel, during one of the
Church’s most severe persecutions, under the Roman Emperor Diocletian.
Some
historians think the way Church changed the word ‘Magi’ to ‘wise men’ was an
act of deliberate sarcasm. Imagine a blood-thirsty dictator clinging to power
at all costs: King Herod killed many members of his own family, causing his
overlord Caesar Augustus to say he would prefer to be a pig in Herod’s
household than one of Herod’s family. And now imagine requesting an audience
with this dictator and saying, ‘Please tell me where I can find the person
who will take over your position as King’! The persecuted Church would have
immediately understood how stupid was the action of the Magi since it
immediately led to one of the worst acts of persecution in the Middle East
for several generations, the killing of all children under two.
At
the time of Diocletian in about 160 ad,
when the penalty for being a Christian was the death sentence, non-Christians
were paid by the Roman authorities to act as informers, to say where
Christians were hiding. The actions of the Magi in Matthew 2 must have
resonated with our early forebears as they struggled to pray and praise under
a hostile regime.
Perhaps
we should call the Magi the ‘Unwise Men’ !
No room at the Inn?
There are lots of stories about children doing
Nativity plays. Here’s one that I like:
A school class was preparing to do a Nativity
play and one of the boys was a child with special needs. He wanted a speaking
part instead of just standing on stage as a shepherd. The schoolteacher knew
that he had difficulty in remembering things, but thought he might handle
the part of the Innkeeper. When Mary and Joseph knocked on the door, he was
to open it and say, ‘No room’. When Mary responded, he was to say again, ‘No
room’. The teacher placed a prompter behind the door who could prod him and
remind him to say, ‘No room’.
On
the day the play was presented, everything seemed to be going well. Mary
knocked on the door, the Innkeeper opened it and said, ‘No room.’ Mary
responded, ‘But it’s cold, I’m freezing and I am going to have a baby. Have
you nowhere we can stay, or my baby will be born outside in the cold night?’
The
boy stood there in silence, looking at her. The prompter nudged him and
whispered, “No room,” say, “No room”.
The
boy turned to the prompter and shouted, ‘I know I should say “No room,” but
she can have my room!’
God
doesn’t always use the wise and clever to bring us His Word. It is often the
simple, the humble and lowly people who find loving comes easily and is
readily expressed. If you are not one of those, ask God to help you, through
an infilling of the Holy Spirit, to be a channel of His love. Derek
Ackroyd
Seeing
God
Lord, purge our eyes to see
Within the seed a tree,
Within the glowing egg a bird,
Within the shroud a butterfly,
Till, taught by such, we see
Beyond all creatures, thee.
Christina Rossetti
Orthodox Canon: Compline–Christmas Eve
That
Thou mightest fill all things with thy glory,
Thou hast come and bowed the heavens
Till
they touched the earth.
Did You Know?
The Sadducees were a group of Jews who did not
believe in resurrection (Matthew 22: 23). But their own Scriptures, our Old
Testament, do refer to a resurrection on the Last Day. Daniel 12:1–3
says, ‘At that time . . . of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth
many will awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting
disgrace. The learned will shine as brightly as the vault of Heaven, and
those who have instructed many in virtue, as bright as stars for all
eternity.’
*
Have you ever wondered why the Virgin Mary is so
often shown wearing blue? In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the blue
pigment in blue paint came from Lapis Lazuli, which had to be obtained
from Lapis mines in what is now Afghanistan and was very expensive
and difficult to get. So by using this costly paint for Mary’s robes,
medieval painters were showing how important she was. Similarly, many
Renaissance Dutch paintings show Mary in a red dress. The kind of red robes
she is wearing in these paintings are like the dresses worn by the most important
ladies in the Low Countries at the time, so again, by using this colour, the
painters were saying that Mary was very important.
Notes hQuotes h Anecdotes
In the beginning was the Word and the
Word was with God and the Word was God (John 1:1)
The Word became flesh and dweltamong us (John 1:14)
LOVE (GOD): became what we are so that we might
become what He is!
Christmas
Day declares that He dwelt among us. This is the festival which makes us know
indeed that we are members of one body; it binds together the life of Christ
on earth with His life in heaven; it assures us that Christmas Day belongs,
not to time, but to Eternity Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872)
Cameo Character Corner
JOSEPH
Was engaged to Mary. Luke 1:27
Of the lineage of David. Matt. 1:1b
This ensured the fulfilment of prophecy in Micah 5:2
He was entrusted by God to:
Name the baby. Matt. 1: 21, 25
Take care of Mary and Jesus through Herod’s terror.
Matt. 2.
Care for God’s son through childhood.
What a responsibility!
But what a wonderful relationship with God to be
thus chosen!
In a Nativity play, a small boy
was disappointed at not getting the part of Joseph. He was cast as the
innkeeper. On the night, when Joseph asked if there was room in the inn, he
wrecked the whole play by saying, ‘Yes, of course, come in !’
Florence
‘The mind of Christ?’
Sometimes we can be too familiar with the
Scriptures¾so familiar that we see the
words but have forgotten how to actually read them. 1 Corinthians 2:19
is a case in point. In it, St Paul promises us that, ‘we have something of
the mind of Christ.’ This promise is so huge that we can subconsciously rush
on from it to the next verse, and ignore it.
The
context of the passage in 1 Corinthians 2 is the work of the Holy Spirit, but
the key is another passage, Ephesians 1:9, in which we read how God has made
known to us the ‘mystery’ of His will. The idea of mystery is explained more
fully in Colossians 2:2, where Paul tells us that ‘we may have the full
riches of understanding,’ and goes on to explain, ‘We may know the mystery
of God, namely Christ.’ But how can we know Christ?
It
is true that, according to 1 Corinthians 13:12, ‘We only see in part’
. .
. a phrase which J.B. Philips
helpfully translates as ‘seeing a great landscape a piece at a time in small
mirror.’ So we only ever know a part of the mind of Christ.
1
Corinthians 2:10 tells us how God reveals things to us through his Holy
Spirit. Similarly, in Colossians 1:26 (which again talks about the Holy
Spirit) Paul tells us this ‘mystery’ has been disclosed to the saints¾a theme which is more fully understood in the
light of 1 John 3:24: ‘Those who obey God’s commands live in Him and He in
them. And this is how we know he lives in us: we know it by the Spirit He
gave us.’ The saints are those in whom the Holy Spirit lives.
As we tie
together these threads, we are led to understand that when the Holy Spirit of
God lives inside us, He informs us, communicating God’s desires to us, and
allows us a glimpse into how Jesus viewed the world when he was on earth.
Perhaps this also explains why Ephesians 4:13 can say that we can ‘attain to
the full measure of the fullness of Christ’¾we attain it by allowing the Holy Spirit full
reign.
Hymn
739 in Hymns & Psalms is the perfect response:
May the mind of Christ
my Saviour
Live in me from day to day
By his love and power controlling
All I do or say.
Christmas¾What
pictures come to mind?
Modern commercialism? Tinsel? Presents? Pantomime?
Nativity scenes?
The First
Christmas
There was a young girl who loved
God and knew the Old Testament Scripture, looking for the Messiah as
promised. She was not the Mary portrayed in the crib scenes as a plastic
figure with a halo fixed to the head and sitting lifeless. She was a real,
living, godly girl engaged to Joseph, a good man, of the house of David.
Then their
lives were transformed¾they
were each visited by angels¾ Mary to
be told that she was pregnant by the Holy Spirit! And Joseph that he was not
to be afraid of what was happening but that all this was part of God’s plan
and he was to be responsible for the earthly care of this little family while
the Son of God, the Messiah, grew up. This Mary, who sang God’s praises to
Elizabeth, was to be ‘Mum’ to this precious baby. Her heart rejoiced. As He
grew, she kept and treasured all His sayings in her heart (Luke 2: 51).
At the wedding
in Cana, she said, ‘Whatever He says to you, do it’ (John 19: 25). She was
there at the Cross. Jesus gave her into John’s keeping and she went to live
at his house.
I am sure she
would have been there with the other women at the Resurrection morning and
also shared the blessings of Pentecost.
She was special, as we are special to the Lord
too when we, like her, know this baby was the promised Saviour and come to
the Cross fully trusting Him and treasuring His sayings in our hearts. Florence
Prayer for peace in Iraq & the Middle East
We come to you, God Creator,
You are the source of life and beauty and
power.
Your son Jesus is the way of faith and hope
and love.
Your Spirit is the fire of love, the fount of
wisdom, the bond of unity.
You call us at all times to be people of the
beatitudes,
Witnesses to the Gospel of peace and love and
forgiveness.
You call us at this time, when war and rumours
of war, weigh heavily on the peoples of Iraq and the Middle East.
Their lives are already broken by suffering
and violence.
We renew our acceptance of your call.
We promise to work:
- To bring the light of the Gospel to those living in darkness,
- To
bring the hope of the Gospel to those living in despair,
- To
bring the healing of the Gospel to the lonely, the disadvantaged, the
marginalized,
- And
to bring the peace of the Gospel to a divided world.
Amen
Life is filled with meaning as soon as Jesus Christ enters into it
Stephen Neill (Bishop)
Our divisions prevent our neighbours from hearing the Gospel as they
should
Pope John Paul II
If you don’t get close to people you can’t love them
Bill
Kirkpatrick (Anglican priest)
The Christian life is not a way ‘out,’ but a way ‘through’ life
Billy
Graham
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