Message

Too busy getting ready for Christmas? Is that a problem for us too? It seems to me the Christian festival of Advent is fairly low-key these days. Maybe it is rightly a time for contemplation, but we don’t quite seem to get the excitement or adventure there should be in this period, nothing like the anticipation we build up more solemnly during Lent in the lead-up to a joyful Easter. Are we too busy buying presents, preparing food, arranging visits – or to be visited – to think very much about Christmas until the day itself arrives? We should not disregard the irony within that statement of being too busy getting ready for Christmas. Without Advent, there would have been no Jesus, no resurrection, no Christian Church! How might it have been if back in history, other people had been too busy? How inconvenient it must have seemed to a busy carpenter in Nazareth to have to close his business and embark on a trek to Bethlehem just because the Roman occupiers wanted to take a census. How arduous was that particular journey for his heavily pregnant fiancee? The harassed innkeeper in Bethlehem was probably not cursing the Romans quite as much, after all, business was booming. But he could easily have claimed to have been too busy to bother finding a couple of strangers some space in his stable. What would have happened to those sheep out in the field if their shepherds had been too busy to look after them properly? Could those wise men from the east have found better things to do than follow a star?  Advent is all about the coming of Jesus. If there have been times when we failed to recognise Him coming into our own lives maybe it is because we thought we were too busy. It would be a tragedy if we were still too busy? Too busy getting ready for Christmas so that we miss out on the real thrill, the excitement, and the suspense contained within the season of Advent!

Hymn: STF no. 418/H&P no, 465 - We have a gospel to proclaim