Unbelievable!

December 2022

Dear Friends

It’s almost the perfect story for little children: nothing more scary than a dazzling angel (if you leave out Herod’s rage) and nothing more upsetting than finding, after a long journey while heavily pregnant, that the inn has no record of the booking (leaving aside the barbarism of Herod’s soldiers).  Then there’s cute animals, a cute baby and majestic kings riding exotic camels carrying expensive gifts.

But when little children grow up they start thinking like us adults and that means they have problems with the story, especially with angel messengers, a pregnant virgin, and a star that can stop over a house without incinerating our whole planet.  These things are problems for them because we teach our children that we live in a closed universe full of wonders but with nothing outside it, and so we close their minds to anything beyond; there can’t be any answers that don’t begin and end here.

But the Bible writers began with a different assumption – that there is a creation and a Creator.  Their minds were open to the possibility that this Creator could do things differently from usual.  Creatures who are not part of our material world could appear here if he wanted them to, human life could begin without a human father, and a dazzling object in earth’s atmosphere could function as star-nav.  The Creator is not limited by our closed minds.  If there might be both a creation and a Creator then perhaps Xmas is more believable than you thought?

And if this world’s exquisite beauty and intricacy tells us something about the wisdom and purposefulness of our Creator then perhaps the bizarre events of the first Century were actually  part of a carefully planned rescue mission, the answer to our deepest needs.   Perhaps Christmas is a whole lot better than you thought?

Rebecca McLaughlin has written a brilliant little book called “Is Christmas Unbelievable?  Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About the World’s Most Famous Story.”  You can get it on Amazon for £3 but we have lots of copies to give away too and you can pick one up at this year’s Candlelit Carol Services.

Happy Christmas!

Graham Burrows