PARISH OF LLANDUDNO, NORTH WALES
December 2007
As some of you may know, I was recently involved in a
presentation of the Christian faith to a group of Muslim folk,
organized by the Conwy County Cytûn. It followed a visit to
the Mosque in Llandudno Junction by members of the Cytûn
group. I hope that these events will be the beginning of a growth
in friendship between Christians and Moslems in our area and lead to
greater understanding between our communities. When preparing for the presentation, we realized that it would be impossible to try to cover every aspect of the Christian faith. So we decided that each of the three presenters would talk briefly about what was most important in the Christian faith to them. This would make it more personal and therefore (we hoped) more interesting.
My presentation was based on the Christmas message that God Himself came into our world in the person of the infant Christ. I made the point that members of other faiths might be forgiven for thinking that Christmas, as celebrated in Britain, was really about eating and drinking, buying expensive presents etc, that it was primarily a commercialised and materialistic celebration rather than a religious one. I illustrated the true meaning of Christmas by reading a short poem which I had chanced upon while on retreat, part of which I will quote now: ‘Strange and wonderful it was that God, the Lord of all, should show himself unto the world as something weak and small, choosing for this miracle a Jewess undefiled to be the wise and gentle mother of the holy child’.
I went on to say that what Christmas is truly about is that God, the Creator of the Universe, for love of us, came into the world in the person of the infant Jesus. As St Paul puts it in his letter to the Philippians:
‘He was in the form of God, but made himself nothing, assuming the form of a slave. Bearing the human likeness, sharing the human lot, he humbled himself’.
He shared our human weakness and vulnerability so that we might share His glory.
This is a message which we all know, yet it is easy to become complacent about it and forget how amazing it is that God should do that for us and for all humanity. There’s nothing wrong with eating and drinking and buying presents, nothing wrong with having a wonderful time at Christmas, but let’s make sure that at the heart of all that we do over the festal season is our worship of the Word made flesh; to say thank you to Our Lord Jesus Christ for coming and loving us and wanting us to be His own.