This year we have celebrated the centenary of the birth of John Betjeman - who was a very talented and much loved Poet Laureate. He was someone whose poems people could identify with. As well as being a considerable poet he was also quite an expert on architecture. Many of his poems have a strong sense of place and time, which makes his verse more effective. They take us back to a more innocent time - to the pre-war Home Counties - to Metroland and a more ordered world and a more stable society.
Betjeman was also a religious poet, not because he wrote out of a deep Christian conviction, but because he wrote out of uncertainty. He had, in fact, a great fear of death but a great fondness for the certainties of the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Church of England and for the splendours of our great cathedrals and parish churches.
Of all his religious poems - the most famous and oft-quoted, from Archbishops to curates in their Christmas sermons, is the poem entitled Christmas. In it he includes and repeats that haunting rhetorical question
Three question marks are to be found in that single verse which asks that most startling of questions. But the question Betjeman asks - "And is it true?" - is just as relevant in 2006 as it was at the time of the Saviour's birth. Believers and unbelievers alike, enjoy the celebrations, the presents"And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea Become a Child on earth for me?î
We all enjoy singing Christmas carols and the widespread good cheer. But on the whole, wedon't stop to ask, "And is it true?" It's almost as if it would be in bad taste to ask the question so directly. We enjoy the party so don't dispel the magic."Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant."
The fact is however
that the answer to the question - "And is it true?" changes everything.
The words of a popular song state just that - "Love, love changes everything;
how you live
and how you die."
Perhaps the real reason why we don't ask if the story is true or not is that if it is true, then we have to make a positive response to this truth. What if this "baby in an ox's stall" really is "The Maker of the stars and sea become a child on earth for me?"
What difference might it make if it were true? Well, first of all it means we know that God cares infinitely about this planet Earth and about us as individual human beings. The birth of this Child - both human and divine - tells us that we matter infinitely to God, the maker of the stars and sea, and of the entire vastness of the universe. We not only matter to God but He is prepared to do something about what is wrong in the way we relate to each other, in the way we treat each other.
Nowhere is this more true, at the present time, than in the Middle East - the very place where the Incarnation actually happened - at a time 2000 years ago. Instead of being somehow aloof from the human condition, God enters into it without reserve. "He becomes a child on earth for me." God chooses to live among us - to teach us by word and example, and to die upon the cross in order to save us. For in the end, there is no escape from the significance of this child whose redeeming birth we so often celebrate without thinking also about his redeeming death.
Betjeman concludes his poem with this verse:-
The poet brings us back to the Eucharist which we celebrate with much glory and splendour at the Midnight Mass and in which we receive Jesus Christ in bread and wine. For if "this most tremendous tale of all" really is true, then it isn't just a tale of long, long ago, but a story which has an impact today - on "how we live and how we die". As Christians we are not just "people of the book" - we are "people of the person" - and that person is Jesus Christ, the"No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in the frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine."
God who was made Man in Palestine
"And lives today in Bread and Wine."