I will not posting any blogs for next few days. I
will be busy playing with our grandchildren.
In C.S.
Lewis' book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis takes us to the
land of Narnia. When Narnia is living under the authority of the witch, it is
"always winter, but never Christmas." Can you imagine how discouraging that
would be to a child? Still, there are people today who are living in a winter,
and Christmas never comes to them. What joy could be theirs if only they would
allow Christmas to come to their hearts!
Every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there
is displayed, beneath the great Christmas tree, a beautiful 18th century
Neapolitan nativity scene. In many ways it is a very familiar scene. The usual
characters are all there: shepherds roused from sleep by the voices of angels;
the exotic wise men from the East seeking, as Auden once put it, "how to be
human now"; Joseph; Mary; and the Baby. All are there, each
figure an artistic marvel of wood, clay, and paint. There is, however, something
surprising about this scene, something unexpected here, easily missed by the
casual observer. What is strange here is that the stable, the shepherds and the
cradle are set, not in the expected small town of Bethlehem, but among the ruins
of mighty Roman columns. The fragile manger is surrounded by broken and
decaying columns. The artists knew the meaning of this event: The gospel, the
birth of God's new age, was also the death of the old
world.
The Herods of the world know in their souls what we perhaps have passed over too lightly: God's presence in the world means finally the end of their own power. They seek not to preserve the birth of God's new age but to crush it. For Herod, the gospel is news too bad to be endured. For Mary, Joseph and all the other characters it is news too good to miss.
The Herods of the world know in their souls what we perhaps have passed over too lightly: God's presence in the world means finally the end of their own power. They seek not to preserve the birth of God's new age but to crush it. For Herod, the gospel is news too bad to be endured. For Mary, Joseph and all the other characters it is news too good to miss.
“Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox;
that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every
home.”
― G.K. Chesterton,
― G.K. Chesterton,
"I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come
round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if
anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- 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
journeys." CHARLES DICKENS, A
Christmas Carol
"To an open house in
the evening Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless" G. K.
Chesterton
Pastor
Brown
