Comment by Harborough churches: Christmas in a Covid world

Viewpoint by Revd Barry Hill, Team Rector for the Church of England in and around Market Harborough

This week I received a copy of a small painting by Ukrainian artist Ivanka Demchuk. In it Mary and Joseph (both of a more accurate ethnicity than most portrayals) are teaching the toddler Jesus to walk. In the background, washing is drying on the line and saws, rulers and wood are on a carpentry bench. It’s a seemingly ordinary scene of a seemingly ordinary family.

At the same time, however, it’s an extra-ordinary scene by which our calendars were reset and the world changed. It’s a picture of God loving us so much that he chose to leave the perfection of paradise, letting go of its safety, security and privileges, to move into our neighbourhood, to save us.

Extra-ordinary hope in the ordinariness of life. God didn’t move into the place we would like to live in or the life we wish we led, but into the pain, rubbish, joy, grief, isolation and celebration of where we actually are. In short, Jesus came to a Covid world. And whilst on one level the offer of Jesus’ presence with us changes nothing – the washing is on the line, the tools on the table, the toddler is still teetering on falling over – at a deeper level it could change everything.

It’s the promise not of rose-tinted optimism, or of a merely positive attitude, but of hope. Hope rooted in the offer that the One born in the fragility and uncertainty of infancy, who spent his childhood as a refugee and much of his life facing death, and who offers that one day our tears and the causes of them will be no more. A hope hardened in the fires of life and grounded in the reality

of the world that gives purpose and multiplies love.

In the Bible, God encourages us that every time we have helped someone with their shopping, phoned someone who is alone, been kind to someone who is stressed, not returned anger for anger, encouraged a keyworker, collected a prescription for another, been nice to someone in a call centre after hours on hold, and all the many small actions which have made up this Coronavirus year, we

have served not just the other person, but the image of God in them.

The coming months will no doubt continue to be hard, and we must keep making sacrifices for the sake of others. The hope of a vaccine will make 2021 very different to 2020. But for all the considerable relief this will bring, Covid will not be the last battle we will face. At Christmas, God offers us to invite his extraordinary presence into the ordinariness of our lives and not to face these

battles alone. As we fight over board games, battle with facetime, walk in the winter air, struggle to sleep, oversleep, wonder where all the Quality Streets went, watch Bond repeats, laugh and cry, may we know that God is with us. Whether happy or not, may it be a blessed Christmas.

Revd Barry Hill is Team Rector for the Church of England in and around Market Harborough.

Details of all local Christmas in-building and on-line services can be obtained from individual church websites via https://www.harboroughchurches.org.uk/churches/town.html