Dear Friends,
As I woke up this morning, I heard the news on the radio that Christine McVie had died at the ripe old age of 79. If, like me, you were a teenager in the 1970s, you will remember her contribution to one of the greatest British-American Rock bands of all time – Fleetwood Mac. I think they were the only rock band that had not one but two female members who composed songs, sang, and played. McVie wrote or co-wrote many of those songs and contributed to the success of the band that has, thus far, sold over 120 million albums. Arguably, one of their most famous songs on the album ‘Rumours’ is ‘Don’t stop’ released in 1977. In that song there is a recurring refrain:
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.
Now, if you have ever watched the famous BBC documentary on Fleetwood Mac, you will know that the lyrics of their songs often played out in public what was going on in their personal lives, but ‘Don’t stop’ has certainly inspired many people since it was first performed, encouraging them not to dwell on the past but to look to the future.
There is something remarkable about rock singers and the way that they continue to write and perform long after many of us would hope to be retired. One of the most well-known Christmas songs in Britain to vie with the popularity of ‘Silent Night’ is the band Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody!’ released in 1973. Noddy Holder, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of Slade (now 76 years old) is currently appearing in World Cup adverts on UK TV asleep in a chair as he waits for Christmas! In Slade’s most memorable Christmas song this refrain appears:
So here it is, Merry Christmas
Everybody’s having fun
Look to the future now
It’s only just begun
‘Yesterday’s gone’ : ‘Look to the future’ – these are, of course, Advent themes even though I am sure that the lyricists were not thinking of theology at all when they wrote them. Soon, we shall hear again the stories of the fall and the ancient carol ‘Adam lay ybounden.’ We shall reflect on how the word Eva, the name of the mother of all the living in the bible, can be reversed into the words uttered by Gabriel when he greeted Mary of Nazareth – Ave. Yesterday’s gone – look to the future, it’s only just begun.
It’s funny how popular songs stick in the mind many, many years after we have first heard them. The year I was ordained, Julie Gold wrote a song called ‘From a distance’ recorded three years later by Nanci Griffith, but it became a real hit when it was re-recorded by Bette Midler in 1990 in time for Christmas during the Gulf War. It’s meant to be a song of hope when one first hears it:
From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the land.
It’s the voice of hope, it’s the voice of peace,
it’s the voice of every man.
From a distance we all have enough,
and no one is in need.
And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease,
no hungry mouths to feed.
And that’s true, I guess – from a distance it’s hard to actually make out what’s really going on at all. The refrain, however, is most telling:
God is watching us
God is watching us
God is watching us
From a distance
We humans may choose to have blurred vision when it comes to dealing with difficult things, but to suggest that God is also watching us from a distance simply has no place in the Christian faith – and it is certainly not at the heart of Advent or the Christmas mystery. We do not believe that God is watching us from a distance, but in a God who entered into our world in a very physical way, in Jesus Christ – the Word made flesh. God, in Jesus, saw people close up – their joys and their pains; their love and their anger; their hopes and their resentments; their births and their deaths. He came to help us deal with the past and to offer us a new tomorrow.
Even now, as the Church celebrates the Advent hope, God is attempting to break into that fragile world just as he did 2000 years ago as a vulnerable child born in cave in a backstreet of Bethlehem. Bethlehem – still a place of tension where the story of no room at the inn takes on new meaning because of the wall that has been built around it, and the check points that we saw on our pilgrimage to the Holy Land at Easter. I snapped this picture as we entered Bethlehem:
Even when we get to the feast of Christmas itself, the stories and the feasts of late December pointedly remind us that this is not a scene from some fairy-tale. The birth of Jesus is surrounded by danger and risk; the journey to Jerusalem forced because an occupying power wanted to have a census – a neat way of finding out who belonged and where they should be. The birth was marked by homelessness – a young pregnant woman not even considered vulnerable by most of the people of Bethlehem. The gifts of the Magi pointed not just to royalty and priesthood, but also to death and sorrow. The birth of a child was marked by the slaughter of innocent children by a despotic king, and by the flight into Egypt forcing Jesus and his family to become refugees. For every moment of joy, there was the possibility of tragedy. This is the power of the doctrine of the incarnation – that in order to save us, God came close to us and humbled himself for us.
Preaching at Canterbury Cathedral at Christmas, at the time those songs I mentioned were hitting the charts, Archbishop Michael Ramsey said this:
How did Christ become poor? By coming to share in the limitations, frustrations, and hard realities of our human life, our pains and sorrows, and even our death. The imagery of Christ’s riches and his poverty is a vivid picture of the Incarnation; but it is another thing to grasp its moral message and to live by it, the message of simplicity and self-sacrifice. Christ gave himself to us to enable us to give ourselves to one another: that is the message of Bethlehem to a world in trouble.
Come to Bethlehem once again: see the stable—see the child. Knowing that he is God made man, knowing that he who was rich has become poor for us, let us kneel in the darkness and cold that is the symbol of our blind and chilly human hearts, and say in a new way: ‘yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.’
Or (I guess) in the words of Christine McVie, don’t stop thinking about tomorrow; don’t stop, it’ll soon be here; it’ll be better than before: Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.
Affectionately,
Carl
Your Priest and Pastor
