FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Christmas: Light and Darkness

Apologies for mix up!

 
Rant Number 567         17 December 2013
 

 
Lying to children is wrong, right? Hence Rev Tatton-Brown, Vicar of St Andrew’s, Chippenham, is praiseworthy because he told a school assembly that Father Christmas doesn’t exist.
 
Instead, the double-barrelled Rev raised a furious mini storm. The little ones were in tears, The Times reports. And parents were hopping mad – indeed some threatened to boycott Christmas services. Mr Tatton-Brown apologised: ‘I got it wrong’, he declared.
 
What shocked brats and oldies alike was the story of St Nicholas. The good bishop of Myra, a city in Lycia (now Turkey – I have been there), whose mighty deeds gave rise to the childish figure of Santa Claus. Nicholas was holy man, endowed with miraculous powers. Indeed, he once brought back to life children slaughtered by an evil magician – a forerunner of Harry Potter’s Voldemort, perhaps. Too gory a tale for Christmas, the bien-pensant, middle-class burghers of Chippenham decided.
 
Odd how a luminous miracle should be upsetting. The episode is about good triumphing over evil, no? Isn’t that good news? What Christmas is all about? I suppose the Vicar could have prudently chosen another story: the three girls whom the Saint saved from prostitution by a gift of three bags of gold – again, you dig the Father Christmas connection. Except that…ahem…prostitution? What’s that? Today they are called sex workers. No, that too may have struck some as too indelicate a word. Tricky. Not so easy these days to sanitise evil…
 
What should a Vicar preach on 28^th December, I wonder? The Feast of Holy Innocents.  About a children’s massacre. St Matthew records how the monstrous King Herod in a rage had his henchmen kill all the male children of Bethlehem, seeking to murder the child Jesus himself. The fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentations, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, for they were no more.’ But God sent an angel warning Joseph to take boy and Mary to Egypt. So evil was partly frustrated - still another sanguinary, blood-curdling narrative. Schools are shut after Christmas but what if there are kids in church? Does the Vicar strike off the story from the Gospel reading? Apologises in advance for ‘upsetting’ the congregation? Or what?
 
Or take 26^th December, St Stephen’s Day. OK, my Vicar perhaps is low-church, an Evangelical type. As such he wouldn’t give a toss for Saints Days. Yet, it is in the Prayer Book. What would he preach if he had to? St Stephen’s martyrdom was atrocious. His fellow Jews stoned him to death for blasphemy. That sounds like any other manner of execution but… Have you ever seen the stoning of a human being? I have (thereby hangs a tale – my lips are sealed). It is most horrible. It is long and slow. Flesh lacerated, bones being broken, blood spurting, the poor victim squirms under the blows then cries and whimpers like a dog…no, it is not a nice thing. Yet it is how the very first martyr, the first Christian witness suffered for Christ. Perhaps this account too would be expunged from sermons. Too ‘upsetting’, surely.
 
Come to think of it, the Vicar could also fit in another martyr.  A fellow Englishman, Archbishop St Thomas Becket. Feast 29^th December. Murdered in his own Canterbury Cathedral by four Norman knights, at the behest of King Henry II. The powerful men wielded long swords and Thomas opposed no resistance. The first blow was so violent that the sword sliced thought the crown of Thomas’ head and came down, striking the stone floor with such strength that sparks flew off it. The other knights joined in the butchery. St Thomas was literally carved to pieces.
 
As a good Protestant, our Vicar may not relish the figure of St Thomas and so he’ll pass him up in silence. After all, that Archbishop stood up to the King and the C of E since the reformation by law has had to kiss the monarchs’ arse – never mind how ludicrous God’s anointed was. Just as well, because, were he to regale his flock with details of the martyr’s death… No, definitely not a very delicate business.
 
Yes, Christmas is about joy, redemption, holiness, peace and love, the good news, not about hatred, gore, murder and mayhem. But the good news takes its meaning at least partly by contrast with the bad news. ‘The Son of God came to destroy the works of the Devil’, says Holy Scripture (I John 3:8). Therefore the job is remedial. For Syrian refugees the good news would be an end to the horrendous civil war and the return to their homes. For the sick in mind and body a wonderful medical breakthrough. For the unloved, the desperate and the broken-hearted…fill in this space at will. The Devil is behind all the bad news, sure. Nonetheless the tremendous good news is that at Christmas the Light battles against the Darkness and that Light wins out.
 
Too much truth to bear? Too much emphasis on the dark side of Christmas? Children to be protected from that? But, never mind how sensitive you wish to be, Christian children above all have to be told why the good news is good. And there is something grotesquely hypocritical in pretending kids don’t know the dark side. Bad Dr Freud had sobering things to say about that…Plus, given the access virtually any child has to the social media...all the horrors are out there, at the click of a computer and a mobile, no?
 
‘Does the priest tell you about the Devil?’ an embittered, anticlerical Irishman once asked kids of my youth group at Speakers’ Corner. ‘No, he doesn’t!’ a boy called Robert replied. A little anecdote to reassure you, dear reader. I was never devil-fixated. The Devil can go to hell.
 
Christmas is not about any stupid, fat Santa. It is about Christ the Light. The light that shines through God’s Saints. The Light that shines in the Darkness and the Darkness does not overcome it.
 
Revd Frank Julian Gelli