getting the rhythms right....

It's been a very Christmassy week this week here at Bloomsbury - for some of us at least. We have been finalising plans for the various events over Christmas, and producing material for the Christmas edition of the magazine. I was sitting at the keyboard doing some of it when I got a text from a friend asking what I was doing. Writing up stuff for Christmas I replied (some soon to appear on Christmas.org - check it out!) And then I commented that it felt very odd to be doing it so early in November. My friend texted back pointing out that Starbucks were advertising their Christmas red cups that week too. I was in good company.
I'm not sure that it made me feel much better, but it was a good reminder that it is not just in church life that the calendar can get dislocated. During my years in pastorate, I have got used to doing most of my thinking, reflecting, creating - and praying - about Christmas at the end of October and the beginning November, beginning to think about Lent on the day after Boxing day, and trying to get my head round Easter Day weeks before I have been able to engage in community with Good Friday. It is ones of the joys and challenges of trying to make sure that we don't hit the major festivals unprepared.
Does it matter? I'm not sure. After all, if the truths these festivals celebrate are the truths in which we live, they are not attached to particular dates. If Jesus is born as a human being, this is not only true in December, and the hope of the resurrection is not only vaild on a variety of dates in March and April.
However, I think there's something important in the rhythms of the year, moving through the story in order, and regularly. It helps us to keep anchored to the story, and not to remove it into some kind of timeless system of principles which are detached form the experience of living in time and space. It stops us from staying only in the safe places of the bits of the story we "like" - if we move through the story in order, we cannot separate the baby in the manger from the fleeing refugees or the slain infants. We cannot isolate the angels proclamation from the pain of the betrayal in the garden, and we can't live in the joy of the resurrection without weeping at the Cross.
And even more fundamentally, by telling the story in order, by tracing it through the year, event by event, we keep it fresh, we don't get bored with it, we meet, with delight and with some trepidation, the promises and challenges that come to us with the various aspects of the gospel.
You see, I think in this, Starbucks has got it right. They produce the red cups once a year. They are anticipated, they are enjoyed, they are missed. But there is no chance just to take the for granted.
If we listen carefully to the rhythms of our faith, let these rhythms shape our lives and responses, we will keep alive to the wonder and the mystery of the life God calls us into.
And if you want to know what we are doing at Christmas, keep an eye on the website calendar. All news will appear there soon.