The church grinch steals Christmas

... I feel
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come, see the oxen kneel
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know”,
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy’s wistful lines. I knew that Christmas morning at the local community church at Snells Beach would be deleterious to my poise and fragile tolerance, so somewhat to the disappointment of my wife and daughter I headed off to 8 am at the Anglican church in Warkworth. Surely that would be a simple, unadorned following of the liturgy which, after all, speaks for itself.

Oh dear, oh dear... I don’t know where the vicar was, but the service was conducted, if that’s the word, by some kind of geriatric clerical comedian who hadn’t actually prepared a damn thing. That in itself is insulting. The congregation was mainly elderly (like me), but what they were experiencing was evidently what they expected – a string of unfunny jokes, some of the familiar carols very badly sung, and some kind of “sermon” which was more an embarrassing quiz on the details of the Lukan story, with mild telling-offs for “not listening”. All this was to the unrelenting accompaniment of small children who had not the remotest awareness of where they were or why, yelling, running, fighting...

I had gone searching for some thoughtful statement of love and incarnation, grace, peace, pardon. It wasn’t to be. Once before, some years back, I had gone to Christmas morning communion at the same church, and that time the vicar at least admitted that he had prepared nothing, and so he told us about his dog. A couple of years ago, Mary and I attended 8 am Christmas Day communion at the Anglican cathedral in Auckland. Old Paul Reeves officiated – and so help me he had prepared nothing. He had to ask the organist what the next hymn was. A major Christian festival, and these blokes don’t even try. Once again I came home, got on the web and found the sermon of Rowan Williams in Canterbury Cathedral, and thus a bit of actual nourishment, some thoughtful and scholarly message from the fact of incarnation.

This morning we were not ten seconds into the service but we were talking about food. The local churches are obsessed with food. They can do nothing without first ensuring their food supply. They have committees on food. Confronted with the mystery of incarnation this morning, this chap began by telling us the food arrangements for the New Year’s Eve barbecue, while various women in the congregation jumped up to correct him. Mary says they’re good people and they mean well.
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On National Radio I heard some business luminary commenting lucidly on the economy: “The big driver going forward is the reverse of the one we had to start with.”