ST ALBAN’S CHURCH COPENHAGEN

Sermon preached on Christmas Day, 25 December 2015,
by the Chaplain, the Revd Darren McCallig.
Christmas – it is without doubt, the most magical time of the year. It is a time
that is soaked in memories. For those of you with little ones, with little children
in your lives, I know that this is a very, very special time indeed. I remember
some years ago calling to a house during the week before Christmas and asking
the little boy there if he was ready for the Big Day. “Oh, yes,” he told me. “It’s
only four more sleeps until Christmas!” Well, not anymore! Isn’t that
wonderful?
And incidents like that remind me – as I’m sure they do you – of those
Christmases in my childhood when time was measured in sleeps. And as
Christmas grew closer and closer it got harder and harder to go those sleeps,
such was the growing level of excitement and anticipation. And while we’re on
the nostalgia, I remember other things from my own childhood Christmases. I
remember hanging up my sock at the end of the bed. My sister, by the way, was
always worried that a sock mightn’t be quite big enough for her presents and so
she used to hang up her tights instead! Clever girl! I remember too my mother
warning me that Santa Claus might bring me a lump of coal if I wasn’t good -
luckily he never did. (Perhaps that ‘coal’ threat is a peculiarly Irish thing?)
But all that was then and this is now. And I think that one of the sadness of
getting older is that, in many ways, we lose that magic of Christmas, we lose
that sense of excitement and giddy anticipation. In many ways, we lose that
sense of wonder. As the great poet Wordsworth put it: “Heaven lies about us in
our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.”
How true that is for many of us. And it really won’t do. It certainly won’t do at
Christmas time. So, before we go any further let me share with you some words
from G.K. Chesterton which I find help to rekindle that sense of wonder at this
time of the year. In this piece Chesterton writes about how that great icon of our
modern celebration of Christmas – Santa Claus – has grown larger and larger in
his imagination and in his life. He writes:
“As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at
the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full
stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not
worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. I had not even been
good – far from it. And the explanation was that a certain being whom people
called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed toward me …
~ 10 ~