Author: bob

In ALDI, I overheard a woman being reunited with her lost chicken and duck parfait. She was very grateful. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without this”, she said. I have a different idea of what’s essential for Christmas – Jesus, but I didn’t say anything. But who is right? By restricting social activities or shopping, would that ‘cancel Christmas’?

After all, there were midwinter festivals before people like me decided it would also be a good time to celebrate ‘God-with-Us’, Jesus. What makes Christmas Christmas? Is it the lights and the food and the booze? Or is it Jesus? FWIW I still think it’s Jesus.

The Lectionary for Christmas Day, in one of the options, includes Psalm 96, which begins like this;- “1 O sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth.” Christmas is a lovely festival, but looking at the supermarket ads and TV trailers, it all looks a bit samey. How can we recover that sense of wonder that God is doing a new thing in our lives and in the life of the world?

In an age where greed is more open and more in your face than it used to be, and encouraged by our leaders, then maybe the Jesus way is starting to look like a real alternative.

Perhaps this a thing for reflection – what cause has God given you to sing a new song this year? What cause has God given the world to sing a new song this year? For me… I am encouraged to see that there seems to be fairly widespread enthusiasm for looking after our atmosphere. Whether that translates into willingness to make the hard choices we shall surely need over the next few years… that is another matter.

A grey quiet day in the run-up to Christmas. days like this are bread and butter days. Days like this are days for peace and goodwill every bit as much as Christmas is.

…empty except of that aeroplane. People on the way somewhere, maybe to see their families. Uncertainties, worries about travelling in the pandemic, all crowded together in that plane in the wide sky.

God bless travellers, wealthy or desperate,
and bless those who stay;-
because of the pandemic,
because they have no money,
for reasons of conscience.

Please pray for everyone involved in the NHS and GIG.
Please pray for everyone worldwide who is affected by COVID.

God of love,
I thank you for this sweet life,
for the winter sunshine,
for the bright air
and the crackle of frost.
And I pray for your love and hope
to be with all who must come
to the end of this sweet life
in a room away from the outside light,
away from those they love;
all who must become
a forgotten statistic.
God help us all
to love one another,
by the masks on our faces,
and the needles in our arms,
showing that we care.

Omicron is a devastating reminder of the power of exponential growth. From small beginnings, it has come big very quickly, and is set to become much bigger still, bigger even than an Australian cricket score. Maybe it won’t be so serious as the other COVID variants, but from the first very meagre data it looks as if the differences are not huge. And it is the likely sheer number of cases that could be overwhelming. For once I have some sympathy (but not total sympathy) with those who resist restrictions – because the restrictions we’re being offered now don’t seem enough to slow it down noticeably. So there’s a voice in my head that says, “what’s the point, unless we do it properly?” Anyway, we’ll see. Vaccines and treatments have made the disease much less likely to kill people than it used to be … at least in rich countries … why the silence in the media about what’s going on elsewhere in the world?

Also, if the vaccines and the earlier variants confer limited immunity to Omicron, will getting Omicron give you any immunity to Delta? That might be quite handy.

BTW exponential growth isn’t necessarily quick or huge from the beginning – it’s just – well- exponential. And it will usually reach a limit at some point when other factors kick in. And exponential decay is also available. But the thing is, the very small can become very big.

This can be good as well, in some contexts. Jesus speaks of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 13) as like a mustard seed or like yeast. This little thing, this meme about God’s way, God’s priorities for human life, can grow and grow and grow from small beginnings. And the importance, the value of the small is part of those Kingdom of Heaven values. God honours those who have the least honour in human minds, and turns things round.

So I come to Sunday’s lectionary... In Micah, it’s written, “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” And in Mary’s Song (Luke) we read, “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

May we sleep safe tonight
under the gaze of God’s
ever-watchful eye.

The best bit of today was coming round the corner of a hill in Lyme Park and seeing the distant towers of Manchester with their heads poking above the mist. Sorry I do not have an adequate picture of this at the moment. J may be able to supply one in due course.

Often you can’t win with bananas. At least our local shop has fairtrade bananas (some don’t) – but the fairtrade ones have to be organic. I don’t know about the specific case of bananas, but on the whole ISTR organic produce is bad for global warming, because yields are generally lower, therefore it needs more land to feed the same number of people, land which might otherwise be put to a more atmosphere-friendly use. OTOH, who wants loads of excess fertilisers in their rivers, which is what you get when conventional production is mismanaged. Also you might point out the potential gains in releasing land, to say nothing of feeding more people, by simply not wasting food.

Part of next Sunday’s lectionary readings is Mary’s song, the Magnificat. Some people are familiar with sung versions, or versified versions. Why not try just reading it out loud, as it is in one of the English translations of the Bible. Try adding a bit of emotion, perhaps anger, and see how it sounds. How did the Church ever allow this to be said!

I’m getting fed up with walking through deep puddles, so I walked west today, instead of east – and Tameside (Greater Manchester) has these little marks of being different from High Peak (Derbyshire), like different bus stops and little dinosaur footprints painted on the pavement. Inwardly noting these kinds of things is part of doing a long distance (i.e. country-spanning) walk.