Written in December 2021 for Oakham Team Ministry weekly message.

Dear friends,

We are now into the final month of the year, with Christmas fast approaching. With all the cold weather we have had this past week, it almost feels as though the bleak midwinter has come a little early. In the bleak midwinter is my favourite carol, probably because Christine Rossi captures so many of the different feelings and emotions surrounding the coming of Jesus into this world. It is the only carol that will pretty much guarantee tears from my eyes. In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan; earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. Doesn’t that description just remind you of the weather we have been experiencing? I think the cold weather can be helpful to us as we enter the season of Advent because, like this carol, it draws us back to the reality of the darkness and bitterness of a world without Jesus, a world in desperate need of his light and the fire of his love. 

I often find that as we get stuck in the Christmas celebrations across December and Advent, we forget that the first Advent and Christmas weren’t like they are now. There wasn’t the buzz and joy of Christmas lights, decorations and Wham! All that was there was a broken world in desperate need of a saviour. As we celebrate and anticipate the coming of Jesus at Christmas, we must remember what the reality of life without God really means. It’s bleak; it’s hard, it’s cold. And it was into this metaphorical bleak mid-winter that God breathed hope and light and salvation from it all.

 It is in this context that we then say that heaven cannot hold nor earth sustain our God when he comes to reign. Yet still, he came. It puts into perspective everything. Our broken world was not fitting nor deserving of Jesus our Lord, yet still, he came in the humblest way. How is it that a stable-place sufficed, that a breastful of milk and a manger full of hay was enough for him whom angels fall down before? The truth is that it doesn’t suffice, not for who God truly is. But this humble entrance does not make less of God’s glory, but I would argue that it speaks more highly of it. How dare God lower himself as he did? He did it simply because he loves us. Nothing more than that. He loves us, and that love overcomes all the brokenness and darkness and coldness of our world. The twentieth-century German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his book The Cost of Discipleship that ‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’ But before that, Love bid God to come and die for us. The love of God overcame all the glory that God’s almightiness rightly demanded and came as a small, powerless, crying babe for us. 

Hold onto this in Advent. Hold onto who God is. Then as we hold it against the Christmas story, we cannot help but feel overcome by how unworthy we and all of creation is unworthy to be graced by God’s majesty, yet still, he came. As the cold and darkness rages on around us, remember that it could never stop the light of the world from being born in the cold and darkness. So what does that mean for us? What does it mean for our Advent? I pray that who God is, equated to whom we are, would shape our Advent and our sense of anticipation of Jesus in this season. And may our hearts be postured accordingly. What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; if I were a wise man, I would do my part; yet what I can I give him, give my heart.

Every blessing, 

Shakeel