A date with tradition

As we approach Christmas, we are made more aware than at any other time of the year of the importance of tradition in our lives.
Christmas is full of traditions.
Some of these are individual and unique to our families.  In our house, I have always made the Christmas cake and we only put up the Christmas tree on the weekend of the main carol services at church.  Other families have traditions about the time of opening presents or the contents of the Christmas menu.
This church seems to have its own particular traditions - like the Christmas Card collecting box, mince pies after the Carol Services and the way in which our Christmas offerings are given to agencies working in the wider world.
The rest of the community has its traditions too.  But Christmas would not be the same, for example, without the holly and mistletoe; the Rotary Club’s Carol Float; the lights outside Chris and Cathie Songer's house and, of course, the Queen's speech.
Traditions are important.  In our rapidly changing world they provide fixed points of reference from which we can take our bearings and keep in touch with our past and our memories.  They make us feel comfortable.
But it seems strange that Christmas should be such a time of tradition.  We are celebrating the birth of the Son of God who came among us to shake up the world; to bring about a change in our attitudes and perceptions of life and death; to reorder humanity's relationship with God.
Our traditions can blind us to just how earth shattering and unsettling the birth of Jesus was and how radical his teaching and his continuing presence, by the Holy Spirit, continues to be.
The baby whose birth we celebrate came 'to proclaim good news to the poor, to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to those in prison.  To proclaim that the time has come when the Lord will save his people and defeat their enemies.’ (Isaiah 61:1-2) This is not the stuff of comfortable tradition.
Our celebrations of the birth of Jesus should be challenging to us.  Amid the trivia of tinsel and turkey we are called to see something profound: the moment of 'Emmanuel' - God with us.  We are called to see God's love for his world made flesh - an act which brings us hope for the peace of the world and our own eternal future.  We are called to see the Light of the World bringing light and truth to the darkest places.
Amid the comfort and the pleasure of our Christmas traditions, may we remember that Jesus was born so that we might have our comfortableness challenged by the realisation that, in Jesus, God is among us and is calling us - and the world - to hear his challenge to follow his way of peace, justice and forgiveness.

A Happy Christmas to you all!

by Graham Clarke.