Christmas is a time when we can demonstrate to our ministers just how much they mean to us.  It is also a time when ministers can discover just how much they need to grow in grace.

I have thought long and hard whether or not it was too ungrateful and unkind to tell the world of these three gifts I received this year.  But in the end I decided the amusement it would bring to others probably outweighted the embarassment it could cause if this post was discovered by the perpetrators of these opportunities for me to grow in grace....

No gold, frankincense or myrrh, I received...

• A Christmas decoration that would have been tacky when it was bought several years ago, but the big giveaway was the faded box demonstrating it had long been hidden away.  At least it was unused!
• A box of biscuits 8 months past their use by date.  Yummy!  Well the garden birds thought so.
• A secondhand tea towel!!!!!  Though to be fair this was in a parcel with two new (kitchen related) items.

I am sure that each gift was well intentioned... I'm just glad these people weren't among the mages of old!

I don't know, I sit down to watch some junk TV and end up with stuff relating to my research work!

In the Christmas Day edition, we had a character who claimed to be an expert in earth customs explaining what Christmas was about, and using lots of mildly amusing cliches along the way - such as Santa being married to Mary.  Well I found it amusing and mildly thought provoking, others may not have done.

Then I read an essay entitled 'Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate' by Lesek Kolakowski in Tamsin Spargo (ed) Reading the Past, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000.  This short essay is equally humourous, and presents a mythical debate between three scholars some 600 years into the future, into the story of John F Kennedy.  With only limited extant documents, interpolation, extrapolation and surmise are employed, with reuslts that are funny for 21st century English speaking readers but could, conceivably occur in several centuries time.

The essayist offers no commentary and on comment, like a parable, whoever has ears to hear is left to deduce what the story says.

So here's the interesting bit for me - what is the difference between Kolakowski's scholarly contribution and Hyacinth Bucket's husband (I can't recall the name of the actor or his character!) as a phony expert in Dr Who?

And, which is the message in each case, unless you were there, what can you REALLY know about the past?

On Christmas day we had our little quiz about "truth and tradition" in the Christmas story - the answer to most of the questions being 'actually we don't know.'  We don't know what colour Mary wore, how old Joseph was, what the angels looked like, how many Magi there were or how anybody travelled to Bethlehem.  Yet the so-called traditional nativity scene is how most people envisage Christmas; most Christians live with a neat synthesis of Luke/Matthew that skips over inconsistencies to bring us to a tableau in which shepherds stand stage right, along with a donkey and a lamb, and three kings, one with black skin and possibly one with oriental features, stand stage left along with a camel and three elaborate caskets.  I ended my 'quiz' with the idea from the book whose title I've forgotten that somehow God can speak 'new' or 'different' truth through this - that Christ is where rich and poor, educated and uneducated, black, white and 'everything in between' meet on equal terms.  That the whole of creation - humans, animal and maybe even vegtable and mineral - bow, or are laid, at the feet of their creator.  The familiar nativity scene isn't 'true' but it contains 'truth'

If this is so for scripture, could something be similar for history?  And in particular Baptist history?  If history is 'created as much as found' or is a form of 'creative non-fiction', how might it parallel or differ from the nativity play?

The Baptist histories I have read so far are definitely synthetic - the origins of one strand, the heroes of another and the useful bodies of a third are carefully drawn together into a nice whole, with struggles, tensions and inconsistencies neatly ignored to present an inoffensive whole.

So, if there are to be parallels with nativity stories, what, if any, 'new' truth arises from this synthesis?  What is distorted?  What is lost along the way?  In what way does the 'traditional' story work?

I think that some of what it (Baptist history) loses, and is diminished by, is the loss of struggle and tension, it becomes as clean and saccharine as the Christmas card glittery nativity.  The Bible is not a nice, happy story: both Luke and Matthew (especially Matthew) drop hints of the pain that accompanies Jesus - promises of a sword piercing Mary's heart, babies slaughtered by a megalomanic ruler; not a nice story for the kiddies, I fear.

The synthetic nativity story has its place in our Christmas celebrations.  It has its place in learning the stories of Jesus.  And while it is not 'gospel truth,' it can, with some theological creativity, point us to gospel truths.  For all that, we don't expect Christian disciples to stick with Mary in a blue dress and a baby who never cries; we expect them to cultivate a habit of discovering more and more about Jesus the man, the prophet, the Son of God, the saviour (see John 9, the man born blind, for support of this model of disicpleship).  Yet, when it comes to history, the history of our own faith tradition, we seem content with the infant school version.  Granted, it is not the most earth shatteringly important thing for us to devote time to, but I can't help feeling we miss out on useful insights into what it might mean to follow Jesus in an authentically 'Baptist' kind of a way because we don't actually take time to discover what our own story really is.

Four/Five days work to go (depending how you count) and five more services to be delivered and then 6 days off!  Hurrah!

I think I'm looking forward to the mania of the next few days - welcoming somewhere between 12 and 20 folk into my house for food and fellowship (service 2 of 5) tomorrow night and trying to round up a few waifs and strays for Tuesday lunch/tea.  After two years in Manchester of having Christmas dinner with forty otherwise lonely people, I have never been able to get back to the 'we four and no more' model, but round here it is really hard to persuade people that sitting alone with the grumps saying 'I'm fine really' is not the only option.  Whatever happens, Tuesday will include some time spent with lonely or hospitalised people - and the 'blessing' won't be all one way.

So, this blog is now having its own Christmas holiday.

Many thanks for reading this stuff through another year.  Special thanks to those who comment and/or if they know me in the real world phone or email.  I hope your Christmasses will be wonderful times of blessing, relaxation and renewal, and that 2008 will be peaceful and filled with hope.

Now I must de-Rachel my office, write some intercessions and attend to some thrilling admin...

Take care and I hope to 'see' you soon.

PS Here is some holly just because I like it!  The nativity scene is Brazilian.

Thank you to all those who read the 'signals' yesterday and prayed into a tricky pastoral situation, and epsecially to those who sent personal emails of support and encouragement.

Sitting in an open waiting area, seeing so many frightened and anxious people, some in tears, others masking terror with bravado, was a sobering experience.  How many broken lives, how many shattered dreams, how many worst fears realised?  Granted, some were old hands, knew the system, and I had to bite my tongue when I heard comparisons made over who was lower than who else... "for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God"

As I recall these shattered lives, these children of God who are scarred by life's experinece, those who are trapped in cycles of poverty, chemical abuse or even of knowing no different, I recall some words from two thousand years ago...

"Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom"

For those I saw today, for those I stood alongside wearing two inches of white plastic (it has some uses!), I pray it might be so.