9 days to go, so my children keep telling me and yet 9 days to what? As you get older, it is so easy to begin to lose the joy of Christmas and reduce it to a simple function, a something that must be wrapped up, gift tagged and offered with the feeling of another box ticked and another set of rules obeyed. 9 days to go to get it right, to get it all sorted, to get it perfect. The same is true for Church. There is a sense of that the wrapping becomes more important than the message, the paper somehow being the truth of what it is all about rather than the substance inside. It is my job to choose the paper, making sure it is not too attractive, nor too dull, Not too garish, nor too bland. Not too inappropiate, nor too irrelevant.
It is a hard job choosing the right pattern of the Wrapping and at times you sense in people it is more important that the actual gift of our Worship and Witness.
9 days to go. I hope that I can in Advent look at awe upon the message of God’s gift rather than upon the wrapping that somehow seems increasingly to be more essential than the gift and yet ironically is the first thing to be discarded after the big day, followed by the Gift from God when it’s batteries run out.
