Rector’s Weekly Blog Friday 18th December 2020

It’s all very well saying, ‘Do not be afraid’, but I’m afraid that infection rates are rising and I won’t be able to see my family at Christmas.  It’s all very well saying, ‘Do not be afraid’, but I’m afraid that my furlough will be permanent.  I can’t see how the company can continue.  It’s all very well saying, ‘Do not be afraid’, but I’m getting more and more anxious about everything at the moment and it’s beginning to get me down.

There’s a lot of fear about.  And fear is corrosive.  More often than not it leads to paralysis and muddled thoughts because everything circles round and round in your head.  Normally in the middle of the night.  Fear is not good.  But it is a normal part of the human self-protective existence.  You’d be unlikely to jump out of an upstairs window unless the fear of staying in the room was greater than the fear of hurting yourself when you landed.  Fear is a sign of what we see as danger.

Mary was understandably frightened when the angel Gabriel appeared to her.  (That was presumably nothing compared to the fear she felt when she was plucking up her courage to tell Joseph, or her parents, or when she was about to give birth in that grimy stable, or when her wayward son kept doing such outrageously dangerous things when he grew up.)  If you keep your eyes open you’ll discover one of the most common command in the bible is ‘Do not be afraid’.  Does that mean, ‘don’t worry, there’s nothing to be frightened about’?  I don’t believe it does.  For in that case it would be give us carte blanche to ignore Covid control restrictions, infection rates would soar even higher and there would be quite a lot to be frightened about.

So what does Gabriel mean when he says ‘Do not be afraid’?  If you look at the life of Mary, or St Paul, or Jesus, or just about anyone else who figures in the bible, you will quickly realise that God called them to do some pretty risky things.  And he didn’t often promise them what the world thinks of as success.  But he did tell them that they were loved;  ‘you have found favour with God’.  He did tell them they had a calling to follow, a mission, a job (Mary had a baby, yes Lord …) and he did tell them to take courage because he would lead them and walk with them.  And perhaps Mary discovered that the things she was afraid of weren’t actually as dreadful as they seemed.   For I know I would rather be loved by God and mocked by my contemporaries than the other way round.  I know I would rather be convinced I was living a life of value striving to follow where God calls me than I would a life safety where I never really faced any challenges.  And I know that at the end of the day, death is the beginning and not the end, and whereas I do not relish it, it does take its sting away.

This Christmas, think about how your faith in God affects your fear.  I hope it transforms it!

A Celtic prayer

O Lord, our Father,
almighty everlasting God,
we ask you to send your holy Angel from heaven
to guard,
cherish,
protect,
visit
and defend
all who dwell in this house;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

This week I offer another Malcolm Guite Sonnet on the theme of ‘O Radix’, one of the nicknames for Jesus which we think about in the days before Christmas.  Radix is the Latin word for root.

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,

Rose from a root invisible to all.

We knew the virtues once of every weed,

But, severed from the roots of ritual,

We surf the surface of the wide-screen world

And find no virtue in the virtual.

We shrivel on the edges of a wood

Whose heart we once inhabited in love,

Now we have no need of you, forgotten Root,

The stock and stem of every living thing

Whom once we worshipped in the sacred grove,

For now is winter, now is withering

Unless we let you root us deep within,

Under the ground of being, graft us in.

very blessing

Andrew