Christmas Day
Luke 2.8-20
The sweet smell of love
I love the smells of Christmas - roast turkey; brandy blazing on a pudding; a pine tree in a warm front room; hot mince pieces; that gunpowder smell after crackers have been pulled –
The TV suggest other things as Christmas smells –Givenchy, Davidoff, Armani, Calvin Klein, Christian Dior, Clinique, Lancome, Ralph Lauren – or maybe you got one of those fragrances marketed with a celebrity’s name:
"David Beckham's Instinct is a masculine, sexy, exceptional fragrance for the modern
man, which reflects the personality of the celebrity himself. The distinctive scent is a blend of orange, mandarin and Italian Bergamot, with the middle notes of cardamom, pimento and star anise. Finishing off with vetiver, white amber and patchouli. Unique."
The smells of Christmas. Smell is perhaps the most primordial of our senses – something that is deeply rooted in our living as sensate beings, something that communicates with an immediacy and power we cannot control. I was in a tiny one room bookshop in a small Welsh town. Browsing the shelves was a farmer who had obviously brought a cart load of sheep to market – bits of them still hung from his very woolly and very large pullover –there was no escaping the smell of sheep. The air of the shop was drenched in a dense odour of incredible potency – no escape. I noticed other browsers cough and then leave. I breathed shallowly and cowered behind a bookcase. The only one who seemed not to notice was the farmer himself.
The shepherds were living in the fields, Luke tells us. Carrying sheep, untangling sheep, milking sheep, nursing sheep, birthing sheep, and sleeping amongst the droppings of sheep. These good working folk stank of sheep – and probably goats too! A deep and lasting stench that went with them everywhere.
This is where the glory of the Lord shone – amidst the stink and labour of working folk whose lives are absolutely dependent on their closeness to their animals – in every sense. To them the good news comes– this is very specific – to you is born this day a Saviour. Not Givenchy but greasy wool and grime. Not Estee Lauder but essence of muck and mess.
And will the stable be any sweeter? Of course not. You mix together eau de cow, donkey, and horse – don’t forget the camels outside. This is Cawblymie not Armani! And in the middle of it all a baby in trough from which the animals fed. A baby in a manger. Do you get it?
As a new father I used to get very worried about an elderly lady in one of my congregations who would pick up our first baby and say, “You’re lovely you are, you’re good enough to eat, good enough to eat.”And that’s the point – the new born with their bright eyes, velvet skin, and miniature perfection, are so sublime they seem good enough to eat. The purity, and promise, and perfection, and possibilities of this holy child will indeed be food to the lives of his people. He will feed us all with the love of God –and that certainty is there right at the beginning, in the stable; the child but hours old. Christ loved us, scripture says, and gave himself for us as a fragrant offering [Ephesians 5.2].
And every new child reminds us of that promise, and every Eucharist shared fulfils it. Even the cosmetic manufacturers get it –don’t they sell baby lotion for adults to use? We’ll make you smell like a baby again; make your skin perfect and smooth and wrinkle free; you can start over –physically anyway. Except of course, in reality we can’t – not physically, emotionally, or mentally. But spiritually, that’s different; here we can begin again. The baby in a manger comes ever new to us. The shepherds knew it – just as every lamb born makes real life new, and fresh, and hopeful.
I bet you’ve seen her, or someone very like her. Like the shepherd in the bookshop, a certain atmosphere surrounds her. But unlike him it is not her work that creates the smell, but simply the decline of years and her inability to care for herself properly – her life too isolated for anyone to help her, and her senses too impaired for her to know herself what has happened to her.
She in hunched over the supermarket trolley – it is holding her up as much as she is pushing it. She moves slowly along the shelves, picking things up, examining them carefully and sometimes dropping the occasional item in the trolley. Is she shopping, or is she just passing the time in place much warmer than her squalid home? Other shoppers skirt around her – pretending not to notice the smell but moving rather more quickly than usual. Some youngsters make faces and snigger, but she doesn’t seem to see them. The staff are kindly enough, in a remote kind of way. They neither really engage nor ignore her. A studied kind of letting be, I suppose, born of the fact that on occasions she has taken them to task about an item not on the shelves, or something she has bought that turned out not to be to her liking.
For Mrs Mander the whole of life is like that. People turn away from her not just because of the smell, but also because she has about her an air of criticism and anger that people find hard to deal with. Is it her way of coping with people’s reaction to the state she’s in, or are there deep wounds oflong ago in her experience that weep within her soul as angrily as the ulcers on her legs weep? Who knows? Well no one actually, for no one ever gets that close to her.
As you might imagine, Christmas goes largely unnoticed in Mrs Mander’s household. Not so, of course, in the other houses in the neighbourhood. In particular, one little girl is very excited. Let’s call her Emma – I won’t use her real name to save her blushes, for this happened some years back and she’s a little girl no longer.
Emma delights in everything about Christmas and can hardly wait for the day. The tree is full of decorations she has made at playschool. She wraps presents for her dolls, and sets the dolls around a small table for Christmas dinner. She has made for herself a post round, each door in the house serving as the pretend front door of innumerable houses she as pretend postie delivers to. Various cuddly toys have become Santa’s helpers, and she orders and re-orders a workshop of gifts and toys modelled out of old boxes, cast-off clothes, and shoes taken from the cupboard in the hall.
Everything about Christmas is such fun – and one thing would make it perfect. She’s seen in a local shop a small illuminated tree that plays a carol when you switch the battery on. It’s just the size that would suit her dollies’ Christmas dinner, or her Santa’s workshop. And it would be her very own tree. She longs for it, and asks for it, and goes up to it every single time they pass the shop. You’ve guessed it – eventually her mum and dad caved in and the tree was bought. And it was every bit as special as Emma had thought it would be.
Emma knows Mrs Mander as ‘the lady who smells’ although she has been told upteen times not to call her that. Occasionally Mrs Mander has spoken to her on the street, but Emma has usually then hidden behind her mum.
Emma loves light-spotting in the street – oh and ah’ing at the trees in different people’s front windows. But the window of the house of the ‘lady who smells’ is bare and dark.
On Christmas Eve despite her fury of excitement, Emma concentrated intently at the Crib Service. And the bit that she hears is that this Jesus is for everyone – no one is left out of his love – and that’s when she completes the circle. In her street is one house with no lights and no tree – and with that conviction and determination that only a young child can have she knows exactly what she must do – her beloved little tree finds it way from her dolls dinner and Santa’s workshop to Mrs Mander’s house.
This isn’t a fairytale, so I can’t tell you Mrs Mander’s life changed forever from that moment – all I can say is that every Christmas after that until she died a little illuminated tree would appear in her front window at Christmas time. And that two parents were immensely proud of a little girl who shared the scent of heaven because she understood Jesus is for
everyone.
I wonder what the name Manders means? Could it be related to Latin manducate, from which comes the French mangeoire, which in turn becomes manger? The baby in the manger feeds us all with the love of God - a sweet smell, the smell of Christmas.
The TV suggest other things as Christmas smells –Givenchy, Davidoff, Armani, Calvin Klein, Christian Dior, Clinique, Lancome, Ralph Lauren – or maybe you got one of those fragrances marketed with a celebrity’s name:
"David Beckham's Instinct is a masculine, sexy, exceptional fragrance for the modern
man, which reflects the personality of the celebrity himself. The distinctive scent is a blend of orange, mandarin and Italian Bergamot, with the middle notes of cardamom, pimento and star anise. Finishing off with vetiver, white amber and patchouli. Unique."
The smells of Christmas. Smell is perhaps the most primordial of our senses – something that is deeply rooted in our living as sensate beings, something that communicates with an immediacy and power we cannot control. I was in a tiny one room bookshop in a small Welsh town. Browsing the shelves was a farmer who had obviously brought a cart load of sheep to market – bits of them still hung from his very woolly and very large pullover –there was no escaping the smell of sheep. The air of the shop was drenched in a dense odour of incredible potency – no escape. I noticed other browsers cough and then leave. I breathed shallowly and cowered behind a bookcase. The only one who seemed not to notice was the farmer himself.
The shepherds were living in the fields, Luke tells us. Carrying sheep, untangling sheep, milking sheep, nursing sheep, birthing sheep, and sleeping amongst the droppings of sheep. These good working folk stank of sheep – and probably goats too! A deep and lasting stench that went with them everywhere.
This is where the glory of the Lord shone – amidst the stink and labour of working folk whose lives are absolutely dependent on their closeness to their animals – in every sense. To them the good news comes– this is very specific – to you is born this day a Saviour. Not Givenchy but greasy wool and grime. Not Estee Lauder but essence of muck and mess.
And will the stable be any sweeter? Of course not. You mix together eau de cow, donkey, and horse – don’t forget the camels outside. This is Cawblymie not Armani! And in the middle of it all a baby in trough from which the animals fed. A baby in a manger. Do you get it?
As a new father I used to get very worried about an elderly lady in one of my congregations who would pick up our first baby and say, “You’re lovely you are, you’re good enough to eat, good enough to eat.”And that’s the point – the new born with their bright eyes, velvet skin, and miniature perfection, are so sublime they seem good enough to eat. The purity, and promise, and perfection, and possibilities of this holy child will indeed be food to the lives of his people. He will feed us all with the love of God –and that certainty is there right at the beginning, in the stable; the child but hours old. Christ loved us, scripture says, and gave himself for us as a fragrant offering [Ephesians 5.2].
And every new child reminds us of that promise, and every Eucharist shared fulfils it. Even the cosmetic manufacturers get it –don’t they sell baby lotion for adults to use? We’ll make you smell like a baby again; make your skin perfect and smooth and wrinkle free; you can start over –physically anyway. Except of course, in reality we can’t – not physically, emotionally, or mentally. But spiritually, that’s different; here we can begin again. The baby in a manger comes ever new to us. The shepherds knew it – just as every lamb born makes real life new, and fresh, and hopeful.
I bet you’ve seen her, or someone very like her. Like the shepherd in the bookshop, a certain atmosphere surrounds her. But unlike him it is not her work that creates the smell, but simply the decline of years and her inability to care for herself properly – her life too isolated for anyone to help her, and her senses too impaired for her to know herself what has happened to her.
She in hunched over the supermarket trolley – it is holding her up as much as she is pushing it. She moves slowly along the shelves, picking things up, examining them carefully and sometimes dropping the occasional item in the trolley. Is she shopping, or is she just passing the time in place much warmer than her squalid home? Other shoppers skirt around her – pretending not to notice the smell but moving rather more quickly than usual. Some youngsters make faces and snigger, but she doesn’t seem to see them. The staff are kindly enough, in a remote kind of way. They neither really engage nor ignore her. A studied kind of letting be, I suppose, born of the fact that on occasions she has taken them to task about an item not on the shelves, or something she has bought that turned out not to be to her liking.
For Mrs Mander the whole of life is like that. People turn away from her not just because of the smell, but also because she has about her an air of criticism and anger that people find hard to deal with. Is it her way of coping with people’s reaction to the state she’s in, or are there deep wounds oflong ago in her experience that weep within her soul as angrily as the ulcers on her legs weep? Who knows? Well no one actually, for no one ever gets that close to her.
As you might imagine, Christmas goes largely unnoticed in Mrs Mander’s household. Not so, of course, in the other houses in the neighbourhood. In particular, one little girl is very excited. Let’s call her Emma – I won’t use her real name to save her blushes, for this happened some years back and she’s a little girl no longer.
Emma delights in everything about Christmas and can hardly wait for the day. The tree is full of decorations she has made at playschool. She wraps presents for her dolls, and sets the dolls around a small table for Christmas dinner. She has made for herself a post round, each door in the house serving as the pretend front door of innumerable houses she as pretend postie delivers to. Various cuddly toys have become Santa’s helpers, and she orders and re-orders a workshop of gifts and toys modelled out of old boxes, cast-off clothes, and shoes taken from the cupboard in the hall.
Everything about Christmas is such fun – and one thing would make it perfect. She’s seen in a local shop a small illuminated tree that plays a carol when you switch the battery on. It’s just the size that would suit her dollies’ Christmas dinner, or her Santa’s workshop. And it would be her very own tree. She longs for it, and asks for it, and goes up to it every single time they pass the shop. You’ve guessed it – eventually her mum and dad caved in and the tree was bought. And it was every bit as special as Emma had thought it would be.
Emma knows Mrs Mander as ‘the lady who smells’ although she has been told upteen times not to call her that. Occasionally Mrs Mander has spoken to her on the street, but Emma has usually then hidden behind her mum.
Emma loves light-spotting in the street – oh and ah’ing at the trees in different people’s front windows. But the window of the house of the ‘lady who smells’ is bare and dark.
On Christmas Eve despite her fury of excitement, Emma concentrated intently at the Crib Service. And the bit that she hears is that this Jesus is for everyone – no one is left out of his love – and that’s when she completes the circle. In her street is one house with no lights and no tree – and with that conviction and determination that only a young child can have she knows exactly what she must do – her beloved little tree finds it way from her dolls dinner and Santa’s workshop to Mrs Mander’s house.
This isn’t a fairytale, so I can’t tell you Mrs Mander’s life changed forever from that moment – all I can say is that every Christmas after that until she died a little illuminated tree would appear in her front window at Christmas time. And that two parents were immensely proud of a little girl who shared the scent of heaven because she understood Jesus is for
everyone.
I wonder what the name Manders means? Could it be related to Latin manducate, from which comes the French mangeoire, which in turn becomes manger? The baby in the manger feeds us all with the love of God - a sweet smell, the smell of Christmas.