Christmas – An Inconvenient Truth

I attended a Christmas service today.  Big deal,  you might say.  And indeed no big deal, but it was no small deal too.   It did take some effort to get up in time on a public holiday to attend a 8 am service.  It did mean making the effort to suss out wh ich church did offer a Christmas service as most churches would have worked in the Christmas story during last Sunday’s service itself.  It did mean being out of your element not being in your home church.

It strikes me as being a microscopic illustration of what the preacher in this charming little Anglican church in a wooded setting said today about the Nativity story.  It must be a challenge to give this well-told account of Jesus’ birth a new twist.  But he managed to, by contemporising it, borrowing the line from the “Inconvenient Truth” movied.  Talked about how Jesus’ birth was an inconvenient truth to the players of the day.  To the wise men who travelled afar from the East in search of Him, such that by the time they got to Him, He was no more in a manger because there was no room for Him in the inn, but in a house already.  (Happily, today, wise men still seek Him).  They went out of their way in search of the Child to worship.

Jesus’ arrival was certainly an inconvenient truth to Herod, who feared competition from this source.  And was it not too, to the chief priests and scribes of the people that he had gathered around him to establish the facts of Jesus’ birth, who knew that His birth in Bethlehem had been predicted, and yet, unlike the magi from the east, chose not to go in search of Him.

And so it was for me that I went in search of the boy King this morning,  inconvenient though it might have been.   It was important that on this day signposted as a religious holiday for Christians that I did not treat it like any other public holiday.  If it’s to celebrate our Lord Jesus’ coming, I wanted to honour Him by remembering Him first in the day before all else.  And I was happy I found this traditional church with its traditional service form (its later service is the more contemporary one) which allowed me time to reflect on our Lord’s goodness.  One thing hit me hard during the service – when the preacher said that He came to die.  That was His mission in coming – to die for us.  It just boggles the mind.  Not one of us earthlings would think that way, that we live for to die.

It is like my former staff worker who visited me in the office on Christmas Eve – charmingly child-like in her walk with God.  She commented to me – how awesome can it get, that to us Singaporeans who think of eating all the time, that He should say, “Eat, drink of Me, and when you do, rememer Me.  I envied her her obvious  delight in the Holy Communion privilege that she could relate to it so personally.  Bit by bit our hearts become hardened.

And so this morning was good, as I contemplated Him in quietness and in solitude.  In the end, the inconvenient detour was no inconvenience.  And I’m sure the wise men from the East felt likewise more than 2000 years ago.

“And she will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for it is He who will save His people from their sins”.  (Matthew 1: 21)