Fourth  Sunday in Advent: Hollowell 2014-
Here we are at the Fourth Sunday in Advent,  and the celebration of the birth of Jesus  is almost upon us.   Our reading from the Gospel today , the Annunciation of the BVM, is as familiar, I imagine, to all of us almost any passage in the Bible   The words from the KJV resonate ing over 400 uyears :  “ And Mary said “ behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according o thy word. “    
Thus heralding for Christians a unique event in world history.
Around the Annunciation and the subsequent events at Bethlehem has grown up a story almost a cult dare I say it, and traditions that extend almost to our own day.   Next week one such will  be the Service of  Nine Lessons  from Kings College Cambridge , a  “ tradition “  ( if one can call it that)  that began on Christmas Eve 1918.
The first broadcast by the BBC in 1928.   And televised in 1954.  In these and other ways the service has become public property not only in this country but around the world, via the BBC overseas service. 
The Christmas story is a charming and inspiring story not least because of moving prose of h KJV. story.  We know it more or less off by heart.  The Manager ,the Shepherds, the Wise Men, the Angels, Herod.    And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed…………
Yet we know that a great deal of that story, not least as portrayed on our Christmas cards is an imagined tradition.  Wasn’t Jesus born on 25th December ?  Unlikely if the Bible is anything to go by.  The few clues about the season with the shepherds watching their flocks by night , the census ion Bethlehem, all point away from midwinter in Judea. 
Yet the choice of mid-winter was a good one, coinciding with the winter solstice on 21 December , a time when meat was plentiful and fruits had fermented into wine and there was little to do in the fields.   In  fact the 25th December was decreed by Pope Julius I  in about 350 AD .  The idea of commemorating the birth of Jesus did not appear until the reign of the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine in the fourth century , coinciding with the annual month long binge of Saturnalia. 
Christmas gathers momentum in the middle ages with the appearance of St., Nicholas became linked with gift giving.   Feasting and sport, plays, dancing. 
Puritans do not like it as after the  Reformation. 
“ What masking and mumming, what dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used”  complained a pamphleteer half way through the reign of Elizabeth I , to the great dishonour of God and impoverishing of the realm.” 
Complaints about materialism, Black Monday,  & Panic Saturday not new.   £2.7 million.
Christmas banned by Parliament in the days of Oliver Cromwell.  In 1645 I read that a book called the Directory of Public Worship ruled that   “ festival days, vulgarly called Holy Days , having no Warrant in the Word of God are not to be continued “
Didn’t work  .People wanted a knees up in mid winter. .  Restored by the Merry Monarch Charles .    Father Christmas invented by American Washington Irving.  By 1821 the first printed image of Santa being pulled by reindeer. Two years later a poem appears that we now know as The Night Before Christmas. 
Charles Dickens.  Queen Victoria, Albert and the Christmas Tree. Tom Smith and the Christmas Cracker .
The Birth of Jesus crowded out by fun, fantasy and myth. 
This PICTURE: 
It is cold, blue sky  but not in a cheery Robin Redbreast kind of way.  People trudge through the snow.  It’s not a festive scene.   Yet this is the first picture to set the Christmas story in the Northern  winter landscape.   Nethelands, brick built houses.  A pig being slaughtered – not Palestine. 
Naturally no one aware that an event in the eyes of Christians about to change the world. 
Fun.  Tax collector.     Tax Gloomy picture’s main theme.
Figures on a donkey not very noticeable.  About to change hewolrd in the eyes of Christians. 
1566  Stirrings of revolt against Philip II  Tax Inquisition.    in August 1566  iconoclastic fury by Calvinist mobs ant-catholic. 
Start of the Little Ice Age.   
This painting show a society in the process of breaking into warring fragments Catholics, Protestants fighting over who rules territory, murderous groups divided by finer points o f theology.  
In Christmas 2014 a state of affairs that is grimly familiar. 
All we can do is focus on he small figure on th donkey and the message that came from the child’s life some 30 years after that Roman census.  A message of love and kindness to the less fortunate among us
Paul senior, Paul  Junior , Garry etc.  Just kep digging at tha mountain of suffering and deaspoair with a Christian teaspoon. 
