All in all

I walked n after a week off to find the Christmas star on the Church tower rather more a harbinger of doom that good news as it swung ominously in the atrocious winds. Our brave Churchwarden and his wife climbed to what must have been a very windy height on the church tower and removed it in case it broke loose and hit someone - starstruck a colleague quipped - I groaned - this was not a good start.

But my mood soon improved when we got to Colossians - not because I always get everything in Colossians 3:1-12 right but because of that last verse in the passage - Christ is our all in all. What better certainty to counter the vagueries (and bad puns) in life - Jesus is all that we are, want or need.

And this is the real magic and message of incarnation - that through this birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus we are restored. The collect for this week brings this into focus - but I like the version in the US Episcopal Book of Common Prayer

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of Him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ...... (2nd Sunday after Christmas, BCP 1982).

Perhaps this is what the writer in Colossians is beginning to say - that these lists of things which Christians should not do, which those whom he addressed used to regard as normal, somehow deface our human dignity. Saying no to things is a choice, just as saying yes is. Those who accuse Christians of being killjoys are simply seeing their own dignity, their own humanity in a different, and I would argue, un-Christlike light.

We all want to be the best we can be - and that means allowing ourselves to reflect God's image as well as we possibly can. We are knit together and held by a divine hand - from that we get our humanity and our worth - our dignity is reflected in God's eyes not in the faded mirrors of the world and that dignity is dependent upon our maintaining and demanding the human dignity of all God's people - that is of all people.

The sort of dignity which is won through a humiliating death on a cross should make us think hard but then so should the sort of incarnation that starts with a woman from Nazareth giving birth in a stable.