Hold tight!

We always awaited the arrival of Christmas cards for our housemate Steve with eager anticipation. This was not because he received especially expensive or exotic ones. There were no cards from rich relatives stuffed with £50 notes so it could be his turn to buy off the landlord for a little while longer. No, our eagerness for what is, one would have to say, not the most inspiring product of Western Civilisation, the greeting card, was entirely because of Steve’s mother’s taste. Or should I clarify that and say Steve’s mother’s appalling and pathological lack of taste, a condition expressed most visibly and extravagantly in her choice of Christmas cards.

‘Nora’  I’ve changed the name to protect the innocent and apologies to any Noras in the congregation.  Let me just say what an unusual and charming name you have. Nora’s name was a byword  among her own children for the tacky and the tasteless. If they were caught in a shop momentarily unsure of the tastefulness or otherwise of, say a pair of shoes or an ornament they could be found quite unselfconsciously turning to their siblings and asking the question  ‘Is this nice; or Nora?’

It was something that simply couldn’t be hidden. Nora had taken Truman Capote’s advice to heart: if you can’t get rid of it, make a feature of it. If the colour was bright, the material tacky, if it featured glitter or tinsel or sickly sweet doggerel verse, Nora was in her element. If it was kitsch, she couldn’t resist; the more saccharine the sentiment, the sweeter to her taste.

Nora’s Christmas cards. Fond memories indeed. Anyway time marched on, fresh pastures beckoned and away we all moved and for many years I missed the delights of Nora’s gimcrack greeting cards until some years later I found visiting my erstwhile housemate. I was not to be disappointed. Steve had just popped out to get some milk so I was let in by his recently acquired wife and there towering above the fireplace, dominating the room was Nora’s crowning achievement in card. It was at least three foot high and featured more or less every possible Christmas character and symbol emblazoned in a gaudy and highly improbable glittery seasonal  tableaux, anomaly meeting anachronism over a repast of sheer bad taste. Most impressively, because the battery still had days to go till exhaustion, it was quietly and incessantly chirruping Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer, with one wrong note, to itself.

“You  must have met Nora!” I said, turning to Steve’s wife, before launching into an extended eulogy of her tastelessness. ‘Look at this card’ I snickered ‘it just about says it all. The verse inside is sure to be a treasure’. Ignoring the somewhat odd look on her face, I opened up the card. The verse inside was indeed a sterling example of toe-curling doggerel verse with few peers.  So I read it out. It was only when I got to the final couplet that I realised I had made a terrible, terrible mistake. 

‘So now’s the time, I know I ought to; 

wish Happy Christmas’

it said

‘to my Dearest Daughter’. 

Nope, Nora had not got it wrong. I had. This ‘treasure of tastelessness’ was not the Christmas card from Steve’s mother. It was from his wife’s mother.  If ever there was a moment when a person wished their life had a rewind button, that was it.

Life is peppered with such moments, or at least mine is. Moments when a time reverse gear would be your deepest desire. Your moments may not be quite so tactless or embarrassing, but there will be that moment of chilly certainty when you realise as you are settling on that bargain Ryan air flight from Stansted to sunnier climes or more cultured ones that you did indeed leave the iron on; or the pit-of-the-stomach cold nausea when the child who was with you in the shopping centre is no longer in sight. If only we could press undo and go back to just before the bottom drops out. 

Joseph was not the first man to find the bottom of his world dropping out when he discovered that his wife-to-be was pregnant with somebody else’s child; he was certainly not the last. It‘s unlikely that knowing his plight was not unique was much comfort to him, as with heavy heart he contemplated the shattered pieces of his future life and prepared to quietly divorce the woman who had cuckolded him. I’m sure that if the technology had then existed he would have been unconsciously desperately trying to press ‘rewind’ back to before he became betrothed.

And then, this curious, this bizarre, this strange, disturbing dream. This horrible situation is not so terrible at all. It is God’s work. “Do not be afraid” says the angel  “to take Mary as your wife.” Go to sleep another betrayed boyfriend, wake up the stepfather to be of the Messiah. So what to do? Unbeknownst to Joseph, Mary has already had a visit from Gabriel- in person rather than a dream- and has said ‘yes’! What should Joseph do? Trust in his dream? Or trust in the voice of cold reason, the voice which says he has been betrayed, that Mary cannot be trusted, that everybody will think you are a fool if you marry her now. Drop the dame, rewind the tape and start all over? The gospel reading seems to make the decision sound obvious and easy, but I’m certain it wasn’t.

When God calls, it is not to live the life of Riley; often we are called wholly contrary to our social nous, in opposition to our own good sense, with our sense of self-preservation kicking and screaming ‘say no!, stay home!, better to keep your head down, better to let the woman go!’ 

Mary had earlier had the courage to say ‘yes’ to God so also now does Joseph, and another link in the chain of courage which constituted the history of our salvation is forged. There are those dramatic decisions, those big moments when everything seems to hang in the balance: Mary says yes, Abram ups and leaves Ur, Esther goes before the king: and then there are the smaller links without which the chain would be a disconnected heap of rusting scrap metal: Sarah sticking with her husband on his wanders, the healed Gerasene going back to his everyday life, Joseph’s quiet, supportive persistence. 

Each step took courage, each time it would have been easier to not listen, each time easier to step back and out of the picture, easier to grab the remote and press ‘back’. 

Christmas is a happy time, it is quite easy to be a Christian at Christmas. At this time of the year people find that- despite Cliff Richard- they might  even like us a bit, some push the boat out and come to our churches. But fortune is fickle, popularity is fleeting. Christmas is soon done, reason returns, sentiment yields to harsh realism, the warm glow fades and in the furnace of the faith, many melt away.

Hold tight in there. If we are not prepared, like Joseph, to risk the ridicule of our peers, to reach out to those we would rather push as far away as we can, to step into the unknown when there is every  chance that it will end in tears, to believe the craziest of tales an angel might whisper into our dreams; if we are not ready for those risks, then we have already slammed shut the door, declared that there is no room at the inn and there is no room in our hearts. 

If there is no room in our hearts for the Christ Child, what cold, empty, desolate places they will be. So let us open our hearts, let us be filled with the burning fire of faith, let us be aflame with  the Love Divine. Like Mary, like Joseph let our response be, quite simply ‘Yes: Come Lord Jesus!