How can you tell the difference between Remembrance Sunday and Christmas?
Well, if you remember your Shakespeare, they differ about as much as "a hawk from a handsaw" (Hamlet).
But what do Remembrance Sunday and Christmas have in common?

Remembrance Sunday is all about delving back into our nation's story (which is our story - yours and mine), back in history to the two great wars of the last century - 1914-18 and 1939-45, and seeing their relevance for the present.  Those who attend Services and Acts of Remembrance are, in a way, not so much reliving the past (1945 is now sixty two years ago and seven years before I - now in my mid-mid fifties - was born) as making the past present again.  When we keep the two minutes silence we not only remember the fallen but realise afresh how the liberties and freedoms, the rights and the privileges, which we enjoy today, were not acquired cheaply.  They were bought at a great price.  They cost tens of thousands of people their lives, their futures.  Who could not be moved by the words of the Kohima Epitaph?

In other words, each Remembrance Sunday, we discover once again that we are not isolated individuals, without a context or an identity or a belonging.  Rather we are part of a great chain of events that has made us what we are and will help to determine what we will be.  We have to take great care to make sure that we are not the weakest link in the chain but ensure that that story is handed down to those who come after.

Christmas, is exactly the same.  It is, in its own way, a reliving of a past event, whether it be hearing the story of salvation through the Bible readings at a Carol service or at a school nativity play.  More important still, it is a making of a past event - the coming of God into our world - a present reality again, not only for one day only but for always.

Similarly, who could fail to be moved by the Carol and Christingle Services, the Crib Service and the Midnight Mass?  Only those with hearts of stone, that's who.

In other words we will discover once again during this coming Advent and Christmas that we are not isolated individuals, without a context or an identity or a belonging.  Rather we are part of a much greater whole, a continuum, a great chain of events that has made us what we are and should determine everything that will be.  Its name is the "Kingdom of God".

Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so we have to take great care not to be the weakest link in the story of salvation, which is God's story and ours.  Instead we must make sure that the story is handed down with enormous care to those who come after us.

So rather than being as different from each other as a hawk is to a handsaw, Remembrance Sunday and Christmas have, in fact, much in common.  I know how much they both matter.  And so, I hope, do you.  If they matter as much to you as they do to me then I look forward to seeing you in church when we both remember and celebrate.
 

Every Blessing,
FATHER DAVID