Christmas Greetings and a Reflection

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I was struck by how conventional we get when we think of our Christmas greetings.  Even the flash mob video of the Hallelujah chorus being sung in an American shopping mall is just a variation on the usual.  So are all the variations we find within the Christian traditions which litter our planet and having had to read some books on the development of the concept of salvation and atonement the other day for a paper I was writing, reminded me of just how much nit-picking argument and disagreement there has been, and still is, over what so often seems to be either irrelevant or blinkered detail.

Like all the best pieces of electrical equipment I sometimes think that what we need is a reset button.  So the picture above is my attempt at a reset button.

The main picture is not of stars but of galaxies, in the centre is a picture of a star-forming region of our own galaxy; the eagle nebula is there because it looks nice and then there is our own earth.  If it was all to scale, our planet would be so small you could barely see it with an electron microscope....

And we make the outrageous claim that the One who is behind all of that (allowing for everyone's particular theology of creation!) cares enough about our lives and by implication life in the Universe, to become one of us.

It really is the most utterly outlandish, absurd and heartwarming claim that maybe at Christmas time we can simply set all our petty differences aside and bask in the thought.  Which also makes me remember the story of that famous Christmas Day during the first world war when both sides stopped killing one another and played football in no-mans land.  Wasn't that absurd? or wasn't it rather that just for once the power of what God has done actually broke through the insanity and made a difference? But then on boxing day the insanity took hold again.........

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