NEWSLETTER
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From the Revd. Hugh Trenchard, Vicar. Dear Parishioners, May I wish you a most happy and blessed Christmas. I used to think that my grandmother was joking when she said, "the older you get the faster time flies", but she was and still is right. In one sense that should be good news because it means we should be on our toes ready for anything, but sometimes it frightens the life out of us because we're not prepared, not ready, in a panic and wish we could just stop. Being ready for anything is very much part of the celebrations we are beginning. It lies at the very heart of the Christ Child Himself. Our God is a God of "surprises' the God who will never fail to astonish us with what He provides and what He requires. The very nature of our Christmas is or should be surprise. I know that Santa's letters carry more the air of expecting rather than hopefulness and yet how many Christmas Days have gone by with the much talked of, campaigned for, nagged and daily reminded about, present being sidelined for some much smaller and much less imposing gift which mesmerises for hours and even days on end. It is the unexpected, which captivates far more meaningfully than anything we have come to expect does. The more rounded understanding of expectation actually is pregnant with the idea of surprise but a fast moving world has robbed us of that vitality. Somehow we have lost the plot and with it the power of the God in whom we believe. Of course it is preposterous to rest the hopes of the world let alone the universe on a child and yet it is this way and no other that God chose to reveal Himself right here among us. He comes not a God over us nor even God for us. He comes as God with us. The one who will always be alongside us through every turn and experience of our lives. This came over to me most pointedly last weekend (17/11) when the papers were filled with ghoulish reminders of the horrors of the Moors Murders. As I said in Church that Sunday, we were back to the evil outpourings, which were the very grave in which we buried paedophilia for nearly 30 years. Not one article I read that day or since dared to celebrate the innocence and profound defiance of those children against the evil that claimed their physical lives. Each one of them is not only at peace but have been in the care of the God who came as a child and who nearly died at the bands of Herod as a child. It is this God who enters the real and sometimes terrible lives of all His children who we prepare to celebrate again this Christmas. He is the God, the only God who hears the cries of all who hurt and are oppressed the God who calls out of the every day lives people who sacrifice themselves alongside the suffering in this world. This is the real magic of Christmas - God has no magic wand except you and me and many like us all over the world. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things, dull mundane tasks, which transform lives. The God of Surprises will always shock us, always change our attitudes, always make us look again and in our celebration of lives lost and saved find His face, His transforming love shining at us. The best Christmas present we can give another is our selves. In life our presence and in death our remembrance. In this Christ Child life temporal and eternal are perfectly conjoined and available. This is a gift most wondrous which will generate its own surprising lives. With every good wish, Hugh Trenchard Vicar |