Angels and Disruptions

by Michael Peat

Last year, one supermarket chain caused a stir by being rather over-zealous with its planning for Christmas. They began selling mince pies so far in advance that they had passed their best before date by early December!

These days it seems that, in the name of forward planning, the Halloween pumpkins are barely off the shop shelves before tinsel and snowmen are taking their place. I am inclined to join the chorus of complaints that something of the distinctness of the Christmas season is lost when its festive features appear on our high streets in early November. But since, as a minister, I need to start planning the churches’ Christmas celebrations well in advance to allow time for the necessary preparations, perhaps I should tread carefully here!

We live in a culture which seems to devote more time each year to laying plans and building expectations for Christmas. So it is helpful to be reminded that the story which gives this season its true meaning is actually full of happenings that turn long-held expectations upside down and scupper the best laid plans.

A teenage girl looking forward to a stable marriage and a quiet life is suddenly told by an angel that she is to have the most unexpected pregnancy imaginable; angels go en masse to Israel’s scruffiest (the shepherds) so that they can be the first to attend God’s long-awaited mighty Messiah, who is scrabbling about in an animal’s feeding-trough. Yet nowadays, these events have become the core ingredients of what we like to call a ‘traditional’ carol service.

I received just such a timely reminder from a recent book by Kevin Scully called Five Impossible Things to Believe before Christmas (which I confess to having read in November!). Fans of Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice in Wonderland) will no doubt have spotted the inspiration for the title: When Alice tells the White Queen that ‘one can’t believe impossible things,’ the Queen replies ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ adding that ‘sometimes I’ve believed in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

Scully’s book is an invitation to us to get more practice in dealing with those aspects of the Christmas story which seem impossible. But the practice he has in mind is not about learning by habit to take the ‘impossible’ for granted. His book is intended to help us unlearn our sentimental familiarity with the nativity story. It reminds us just how shocking and absurd the story of Jesus’ birth sounds when judged by the standards of conventional reasoning.

But it does so in order that we can become more practised at engaging with the Christmas story in all its ‘impossibility’, and thereby discover a heightened sense of awe and wonder in its most incredible truth; that the all-powerful God becomes, for our sake, "a baby who cannot feed, clothe, warm or even clean himself."

Scully also shows that when the story’s ‘impossible’ elements are considered in the light of the longer story of God’s relationship with creation, we discover that, extraordinary though these events are, they are not wholly unprecedented. Clues to their meaning can be found in the experiences recalled in the Old Testament.

In fact, you could say that one of the key lessons of the Old Testament is to expect the unexpected. For as Scully observes, "prophets cannot believe they are being asked to endorse the relatively weak and overlooked as potential leaders; the newly selected question their abilities; the to-be-led wonder why an individual has been chosen from a certain tribe, family or community. Clearly God is disrupting the social order they have come to accept."

This challenging theme of disruption is significant on a personal level as well. Each of the characters so often depicted huddling around the crib has their place in the nativity scene because they embraced the disruption that God’s action brought to their lives. Joseph set aside his original plan to divorce his pregnant fiancée on the advice of a dream.

Mary is renowned for saying ‘yes’ to the sudden, shameful and potentially dangerous disruption to her life that bearing the Christ child entailed. Shepherds left the sheep that were their livelihood and rushed to the stable. Eastern astrologers interpret a striking star as a summons to take a long journey of discovery.

The willingness of all these characters to change their plans, without prior warning or generally accepted reasons, is food for thought in Advent, as we focus on how best to prepare ourselves for Christ’s coming again. I will leave the last word to Scully:

"If we are open to interruptions – even those as seemingly incredible as happened to Mary – then there is a certain responsibility upon us to allow ourselves to be knocked off course. This means more than just allowing disturbances to occur. It may go against our nature, certainly as it is reflected in our personal and corporate plans. Individuals, groups and churches all like to dress up ambition in holy terms, yet God’s disturbing influence might allow a greater way of saying ‘yes’ than we had planned for."