My first thought when someone says ‘Christmas’ is almost bizarrely specific. It is of the smell, then sight, then taste of the mincemeat that would bubble out of the sides of my mother’s mince pies and become a sort of caramelised goo. We used to put the lids on as children and, little hands being what they are, the pastry was almost always mashed on with gaps, through which the filling would escape. I suspect that if I say ‘Christmas’ to you, a similarly strange or specific mental evocation of that time will enter your mind.
Perhaps your first memory will be of a particular tree decoration from childhood or the taste of your grandmother’s bread sauce. It might be a recollection tinged with melancholy; memories of those whom we love, but see no longer, can be more evocative than ever at this time of year. Perhaps it’s a composite of Christmases past or your first thoughts are of this one to come. That is the thing about Christmas, it’s timeless. As Charles Dickens knew so well, it isn’t only a moment in time, but a meeting place of past, present and yet to come.
Nowhere will that sense of time collapsing into a single moment be stronger than at your local parish church. Imagine it, in the first moments of Christmas, filled with the coated and behatted, as those final strains of ‘O Come, Let Us Adore Him’ merge with the striking of 12 at the midnight service. You will stand in the same place and mark the same mystery as people have for generations and generations. It is a particular place at a particular time, but it is also a scene soaked in both history and in hope.
Many aspects of our particular place and time are very far from the details of the first Christmas. The story of the stable and the manger, the shepherds, the angels and the Wise Men, of Mary and Joseph, of the Christ Child, might well be the best-known image of Christmas — indeed, the reason all the other images exist — but we shouldn’t forget its power and its strangeness merely because it is familiar. It was as amazing — scandalous even — to state then, as it is now, that God, in the fullness of his love, came to Bethlehem, a particular place at a particular time, to share that love with the whole world.
Bethlehem today, of course, is in some ways as far from our English country Christmases as it was 2,025 years ago. It has very specific problems, ones of violence and discord, of political and religious tension. Yet, in the midst of all these all-too-human problems, Bethlehem still represents to billions of people across the world something immensely powerful: hope.
I wrote about this in my recent book, Twelve Churches, specifically about how the Church of the Nativity — a higgledy-piggledy mess of a building that bears all the scars of human history — still moves monarchs and presidents, saints and celebrities and millions of ordinary people to tears. Why? It is there that those events of the first Christmas occurred, there in that very particular place from which the whole story flowed. It might seem very different from your local church or your cosy family Christmas around the fire or the tree, but the two are innately linked.
The Church of the Nativity, which has stood in Bethlehem for 1500 years, is — like all our churches — a place that speaks 'both of constancy and of mystery'.
What theologians call ‘the scandal of particularity’ is at the very heart of all that is really important about Christmas. God does not come down and take flesh because the world is cosy or perfect, because it has its priorities sorted or because we can manage on our own. God doesn’t come down because all the presents have been bought on time or because the goose has been perfectly basted. God comes down at Christmas as the infant Christ precisely because the world is a mess, precisely because it is fallen, precisely because it needs love. He comes to that specific place then and to our particular places now.
That is what churches up and down the country will be evoking this Christmas. These buildings have been constantly trying to spread that message and be symbols of that love for thousands of years. In a world that is as fragile and broken as ever, where there are fewer and fewer things we can take for granted, the church as a constant has never been more important.
Doubtless the churches you will flock to this Christmas will have their own particular problems. Perhaps the roof is leaking, perhaps the vicar is going to do one of those embarrassing sermons with farmyard noises. It’s possible that you haven’t got a functioning loo. Yet still these buildings and the life of which they speak are worth maintaining, because they speak both of constancy and of mystery. In an ever-changing world, they remind us that we are part of something bigger; in a shallow world they remind us that we are called to something deeper; and, in a world in desperate need of the Christmas message of God’s love, they remind us that this same love never fails.
The fact they speak of this deeper life is why, I think, the church is a constant at Christmas time — indeed, congregations have grown year on year over the first half of this decade, because people are seeking a link to that sense of the eternal. Of course, they are also part of the wider, warm feel of Christmas, a part of the cosiness and comfort, but they are much more than places that evoke warm and fuzzy feelings: they are set aside to be holy. They are meant to speak, by their very stones, of the beautiful, the hopeful and the true.
The fact we set aside specific places for this is common to all faiths. Everyone needs spaces to reflect. What is special about our churches is that they set this aside in the context of Bethlehem; the context of the story of God became Man, of love found in a manger. It is a story of both the simplest miracle in the world — a baby being born — and of the most world-changing one: God coming among us so that we in each of our specific times and places might be reconciled to his love. Specific places matter. This is because the hope of Christianity is that this incredible story means that anywhere can become a Bethlehem: a place where we encounter God made flesh, with all the ramifications that has for our own humanity.
Whatever special images are conjured up for you this Christmas — be it bread sauce or mince pies — I hope that it is a happy and holy time. When the plates are cleared away, as the fire dies down and the family snoozes, I hope you might smile a festive smile of contentment at whatever your ‘scandalous particularity’ has involved. Above all, whether it’s in a tiny church on a moorside or marsh or in one of our great cathedrals, I hope that you will join the myriad angels and the billions across the ages in acclaiming the great joy of a God whose love has come down among us.
The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie is vicar of Charlbury with Shorthampton in Oxfordshire. His latest book is ‘Twelve Churches: An unlikely history of the buildings that made Christianity’ (Hodder & Stoughton, £30)