St Cuthberts Saltcoats Parish

Dear Friends  December 2009
                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
This has been a busy year for us as a family and we are now grandparents.
Our daughter Angela gave birth to Jacob on 14th November. 
Mum and baby (and dad!) are doing really well.  
It is lovely to have a baby in the family again. Only thing is, sometimes you have to queue to have a hold! 
The phone rings often, people very kindly ask if everything is going well.  
People are delighted to see the baby.  

It is an exciting time and so many people have been very kind to us.By contrast, Mary had no family with her or near her when she gave birth and no friends to share with.  There was no rejoicing with family and friends. How very different. She had no hospital, doctor, midwife, or health visitor.   She knew nobody in Bethlehem, she had no bed, no family nearby to share the news with. How long was it before her family heard about Jesus?   She did not take the baby home, for soon she and Joseph had to flee to Egypt; a new baby, a strange land, a foreign people, and a foreign language.  How did they cope?   Did they find a Jewish community there?  Perhaps, for there were many, but what could she tell them?  Can you imagine Mary saying; “We are not married”, “I am a virgin”, “meet your Saviour”? When a baby is born, the new parents want to talk all about their baby. What could Mary say?  To whom could she tell her story?  There could have been nothing easy about the first days, weeks, months and years of Mary’s motherhood.But there was great rejoicing!  
There was more rejoicing than any other new born baby has ever evoked.

The greatest rejoicing of all was that of the heavenly host.   The purest praise this world has ever seen, the praise of heaven, was openly revealed and seen for the first and only time by men. Never before, nor since, has there been such an appearance.   The host knew that God had achieved his purpose for that night He had brought His Son into the world.   He had announced him as Christ and Lord to men who would bear witness.   The first men to proclaim the Saviour’s birth would be shepherds. Strangers to Mary were the first men to rejoice, some of the roughest, toughest people she might meet - the shepherds.  They delighted to see the baby Jesus, for they saw someone whom they would remember for ever.   Their life was changed and their faith in God lifted to new heights.  Their encounter with Jesus turned them into preachers and worshippers. ‘They spread the word - - - about this child’ and they ‘returned, glorifying and praising God’.

Then there were the wise men, wise and aristocratic, from the opposite end of the social and international spectrum. These men had known that they were to witness greatness. In all their splendour, they sought out two of the poorest people they would ever meet, and the baby they cared for. They rejoiced to see the baby Jesus.  They saw one who would become far greater and wiser than they would ever be! They stripped themselves of any pretensions of superiority, and bowed down and worshipped.   They are perhaps even more remarkable than the shepherds. They had travelled from culture and sophistication, to one of the most despised places and peoples in the ancient world, to find a socially deprived baby with a far- fetched claim to kingship, and they were not ashamed to say “we have come to worship him”.

Amidst the harshness and hardship surrounding the birth and early part of Jesus’ life, there was great joy.   For Mary, especially, the challenges would be immense.   For modern man, too, there are plenty of challenges in the Christmas story.  Unlike the heavenly host, we cannot see as clearly or as fully the will of God and how it unfolds.   But the challenge is to discover what we can and have greater cause to glorify our heavenly Father.   The shepherds’ experience can challenge us to examine our encounter with Christ: has it made us witnesses and worshippers like the shepherds? The wise men teach all modern men the folly of pride.  Had they been proud, they would never have known and adored their Saviour.   They teach us that, if we think that our (superior?) age - or anything else for that matter - makes us superior, then we will miss true greatness:  we will miss salvation.May God make us pure in spirit like the host, outspoken like the shepherds, and humble like the wise men, then we may know the joy of Christmas.Yours in ChristBrian Oxburgh