A Snake, a Parrot, A Rottweiler and Shopping at Morrisons - A Happy & Joyous Christmas !

Having reached three days before Christmas Day and not yet had the opportunity to sing Christmas Carols with gusto and joy amongst a crowd of equally joyous people, I attended the carol service at my local church last night.

I have bashed out some old favourites on the piano myself and sang along, over the last couple of weeks, which only resulted in the dog becoming extremely stressed, clearly thinking there was something drastically wrong with me.

My grandchildren are growing up quickly, as childen tend to do, and the three who are still at school avidly avoid such gatherings, at school or anywhere else, if possible. 

"Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart" and "All I want For Christmas Is You"  are lyrics that are more likely to be heard than "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks" as we go about our daily shopping, so I was looking forward to singing along with "real" carols at this service.

Anticipating that this service which would lift our hearts and souls and instill in us the true meaning of Christmas.    How wrong could I be ?

I had an inkling when the service sheet stated that the first "Lesson" would be Genesis 3: 8-15 - Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden ...Think misbehaviour, snakes and curses ...you get the idea

Maybe just me, but I couldn't get my head around the age old use of "lesson" to be "taught" rather than a "reading" to think about and draw our own conclusions. Even in my Primary Teaching days, we tended to talk about "activities" and "sessions" which seemed to have much more appeal to the children - now called students. I must have missed something along the way and not noticed that the church has gone back to ancient methods of indoctrination.

Next we had Isaiah 9 : The people who haved walked in darkness have seen a great light

Things were looking up - at least we had some light on us to cheer us up.

It went slightly downhill again with the first carol. "It came upon the midnight clear" is a beautiful tune, but the key that the organ was playing in was too high for most of us and also too low when trying to sing an octave lower. We did our best.

The choir then sang something we'd never heard of and someone read a poem  "Incarnation" which left us pondering on the meaning and to be honest, left me feeling depressed. You can find it here  and judge for yourself.

Some more lessons from Luke 2, Matthew 2 and the final one John 1: 1-14 

This is one of my favourite Bible readings, particularly because my maternal grandfather was named John and was an elder in the Baptist Church for most of his life.   It reminds me ofhis funeral where the service began with thise words, "There was a man sent from God ...".

My son, of course is John too. 

In the beginning was the word .. . ... There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

Finally, in this Carol Service, consisting of only 4 carols for us to sing, we had The Address.

I don't know the name of the vicar, simply due to me not having attended church in a long while, so I also don't know whether he was new to the job or if he had been doing it for years.

Regardless, I just wished he had spoken about Christianity and Faith in a more 2019 context. 

His story about the Parrot and the Rottweiler called Jesus is so old that perhaps it was written by Adam himself. If royalties were involved the "joke" would have made zillions, on the times that I had heard it, in church, alone !

There was an anecdote about shopping at Morrisons which had opened at six in the morning and buying mountains of food and alcohol. The anecdote didn't really have a point or even a lesson to it and I just wondered why the vicar had to be there doing his shopping at 7am. 

And then the last carol - Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

I sang this to the best of my ability within the key and octave situation and didn't need the hymn book at all - only to find that after all the ancient lessons using ancient language in this service, the words in the last verse of Hark the Herald had been changed to more modern ones.

So I belted out : 

Mild He lays His Glory by

Born that Man no more may die !

Born to raise the sons of earth

Born to give them second birth ...

only to find that everyone else was singing "we" instead of "man" and "us" instead of "sons" and "them".

Ah well, as my daughter mumbled as we left to leave, "Now we remember why we don't go to church anymore ".

It would have been a fitting end to the evening if we had come across Santa Claus on his "sleigh" driving around the town playing "So here it is Merry Xmas " at full throttle, but he'd done his route earlier so we remained in sombre mood, until arriving home where I put Carols from Kings on Youtube.

Happy Christmas. 

Greg Lake - I believe in Father Christmas