We publish a Parish Magazine 4 times a year and in each Magazine there is a letter from a member of the ministry team. Here is the Christmas 2008 letter:
Let's celebrate Advent as well as Christmas!
As we all know only too well by now, Christmas is approaching once again. The shops are full of gift ideas, the TV commercials are targeting every definable segment of the market and the Post Office is reminding us that we are probably already too late to post parcels to Outer Mongolia.
We may be in an economic recession with retailers fearing a decline in sales but you wouldn't believe it from the bright lights and urgent pleas to spend our way out of our winter gloom. Yes we all know about Christmas, but do we know about Advent?
Advent is the Christian Church's season of preparation for Christmas. It literally means 'Coming', and in the four weeks of Advent starting this year on 30 November we look forward with joyful expectation to the birthday of Jesus Christ. At St John's we have special services of music and readings (see elsewhere in this magazine for details), a series of joint weekday evening services with Southdown Methodist Church and, on 21 December, a Nativity play put on by our Junior Church.
So it's a busy time at Church as well as at home….but it's also a time for quiet preparation as we get ready to welcome the Saviour of the world. In the middle of the hectic activity of this time of year, the pressure to spend and to party, Christians are called to be still and to contemplate with awe and wonder the mystery by which God, the Lord of all creation, took on human form and was born - not in a royal palace - but to an unmarried teenager in a dirty stable in a small town in Palestine, the far corner of the Roman empire.
Why did God do this? Because he loves us. 'Love came down at Christmas', one of our carols proclaims; a love so complete and unconditional that it led Jesus to leave home and family for a life as a travelling preacher, and then, after inevitable conflict with the religious authorities of his day and the occupying Roman powers, to be rejected, to suffer and to die. But through his death God conquered death, rose again to new life and promised to be with his followers - us - always, even to the end of time. And so each week in Church, throughout the year, we 'celebrate the mystery of faith':
Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again
and in Advent we prepare not only to celebrate a birthday 2,000 years ago but to welcome the risen Lord once again into our lives and to make this world a place fit for his eventual return.
Have a happy Advent - and a blessed and peaceful Christmas!