Expository Times, Dec 2008
Several disparate memories as Christmas approaches.
I cannot have been much more than ten at the time. We were on holiday somewhere south of Edinburgh, when my minister father decided we should go for an afternoon’s run in his borrowed car. We ended up in the manse of Whitekirk, calling on another minister who had been an army chaplain along with my father during the second World War, and for a time a fellow minister afterwards in the west end of Glasgow. Is my memory playing tricks when I see the minister of Whitekirk, small, and neatly bearded. That, however is how I remember William D Maxwell, and the memory only came back recently when I was reading his magisterial History of Worship in the Church of Scotland in preparation for some lectures I had been asked to give to Church of Scotland students for the ministry. Maxwell argues that Christmas was the first of the seasons of the Christian year to be given an annual celebration because of the necessity in the fourth to defend the reality of the Incarnation against, for example, Arian heresy. And once the celebration was settled the period of fasting which grew into Advent developed.
Many years later, sometimes in the 1970s, I was asked to take part in a radio programme called What day’s Christmas anyway? Professor William Frend of Glasgow University and myself were quizzed by the late Magnus Magnusson, who was allowed in those days to puff at his pipe in the studio, while the three of us enjoyed a festive glass of wine or three. We chatted about the irony that the date of Easter, of which we can be fairly certain, moves around the calendar, while the date of Jesus’ birth, of which we have no certain knowledge at all, has a fixed date on December 25th. Was it really because the early Church was certain that Jesus died on what we call March 25th and, believing that his perfect life must be reflected in a perfect annual cycle, decided that March 25th should mark the annunciation to Mary? And therefore to complete the cycle he must have been born exactly nine months later on December 25th? I don’t know, but suggesting it kept the conversation going for quite a few of the forty five minutes. I suspect the award of the Imperial Tobacco award for the best radio programme of the year owed more to Magnus’s puffing on his pipe in the background throughout than to the quality of the discussion!
When that programme was broadcast I was minister of a parish in Glasgow, and for a year allocated a student to train generally in the practicalities of the ministry and to give experience in preaching. I decided that if I had to take at least four school Christmas assemblies, preach at special services from the Sunday before Christmas to Christmas Day, as well as turn up at parties for all ages from infants to senior citizens, I was entitled to a rest the Sunday after Christmas and so the young student could preach. I was not unduly worried when he had not turned up quarter of an hour before the service. He was not one for punctuality. But my anxiety level was hiked up when a member of the Kirk Session came into the vestry and said that the student had got as far as the manse on his bicycle, wasn’t feeling too well and wouldn’t make it to church. I had neither hymn list nor prayers prepared, nor, more importantly, a sermon. I asked the member of the Kirk Session to shut the door. The service would start when I was ready.
Sitting at the desk, looking at a blank piece of paper, and realizing it was already past eleven o’clock, I suddenly remembered a sermon I had heard, preached by Hugh Montefiore in Great St Mary’s in Cambridge on a very snowy Christmas morning in 1966. Its theme was myth, the meaning, and the message of Christmas. I wrote down the three alliterative words, and decided I’d worry about what to say during the singing of the hymns. I have no memory now of what I said, but I have a clear memory of what I did not say. I lacked the courage to begin with Hugh Montefiore’s startling opening: “What would have happened if Mary had had a miscarriage? Or if Joseph had dropped the baby on his head on the floor?” I suspect I found some other way of suggesting that the Incarnation involved God taking every possible and real risk!