View from the Vicarage
DECEMBER 2025 Vicar’s message
Christmas in Reality
I wonder if you have finished using your stockpiled hand sanitizer from the Covid-19 pandemic. Unsurprisingly it was the fastest-selling liquid of 2020. The bottled liquid was often rationed to two per customer, panic bought and price-hiked– many now languishing in our medicine cabinets or cupboards out of sight and out of mind.
We daubed it, squirted it, rubbed it vigorously into our hands often to the point where our skin became dry and sore. Gin distilleries were turned into its processing. It was even gifted as Christmas presents. Hand sanitizer became a household staple!
It welcomed us before any human interaction, at the entrance of cafes, shops and churches. The sticky gloop took an age to dry and smelt clinically intrusive. The insistence on public hand hygiene crept into our everyday lives in a way in which it had never been before. The 20-second handwashing rule and regular sanitation has brought to the fore our need for cleanliness, for the eradication of anything unsightly or vulgar.
I wonder whether the same can be said for the way in which we tell and re-tell the Christmas story. Have we eradicated the unsightly in that most miraculous event, to deliver a story that is palatable, sanitized and uncontaminated?
The Christmas Cards that we buy and send to one another, I think, say a lot about us. That holy moment in Bethlehem shows an unsoiled stable with mother and father cradling the perfect sleeping baby, no baby-sick in sight, no messy aftermath of a birth, no detail about the length of Mary’s labour, no midwife clearing up the placenta, no traumatised husband in the corner, no blood, sweat or tears. The sanitized fairy tale has robbed us of the enchantment of the de-sanitized reality.
The real story of Christmas tells us that there is hope in this Christ-Child, struggling from the womb of a peasant girl, that will change the world. This tiny Christ Child is born to an unmarried virgin of low estate, with her betrothed as company, and laid deep in a feeding trough, but he is God in human flesh. Skin and bones, sick and poo, and God Incarnate. Heaven meeting Earth on that Holy Night.
THIS IS WHY WE COME!
We come to listen closely to the great story, telling with reverence and awe of:
The tumultuous arrival of life and hope and peace.
The Wonderful Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
The crying Christ-Child who will bear the world’s burdens.
The nursing mouth of Jesus comes to declare that He is the Mighty God.
The empty-handed infant who knows all beginnings and endings, is the Everlasting Father.
The stretching of His tiny arms proclaims ‘Peace on Earth’.
Happy Christmas to you all
Revered Paul