Happy Christmas!

Heaven is a wonderful place. The sun always shines, everything is beautiful, and peaceful and exciting. There are pleasures for evermore! Anything you want you can have!Why would anyone ever want to leave?
Heaven and earth have come togetherAnd life has come to Bethlehem
Some people got thrown out of heaven. Long ago, so the stories say. Well, I say people, but they were angels actually. Angels who turned against God and fought a battle in heaven. They lost the battle and they were thrown out.But I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about someone who left heaven of his own accord.
Heaven and earth have come togetherAnd life has come to Bethlehem
Why would anybody do that? Why leave perfection? Well the problem was where those bad angels went. Where they went, they started mucking things up. They got talking to the locals, and they persuaded them into all sorts of bad habits. Soon, what had been a lovely place to live was completely trashed. Do you know what that place is? The place that ended up trashed, because the people who lived there caught all sorts of bad habits?
It’s earth.
Heaven and earth have come togetherAnd life has come to Bethlehem
Back in heaven, the person who was about to leave felt very sorry about the state of things on earth. He sent them all sorts of messages, trying to get them to stop their bad habits and change back to their old ways of living. But they wouldn’t listen. In the end he said, “There’s nothing for it, I’ll have to go there myself.”
Heaven and earth have come togetherAnd life has come to Bethlehem
But he wasn’t just an ordinary person: just some ordinary humdrum, run of the mill angel. Oh no. This person who felt so sorry for earth was actually the son of God himself. He did an extraordinary thing. In heaven he was huge, and strong and mighty. He was beautiful to look at. But like you pull out the plug when you’ve finished a bath, he opened a little door in himself and let all his strength and power and beauty drain out.

Heaven and earth have come togetherAnd life has come to Bethlehem
He became smaller and smaller and weaker and weaker. In the end there was hardly anything left of him at all. Finally he was small enough to go inside a mother’s womb, and he started growing again, this time into a human baby. And he was born in a stable, in Bethlehem, with animals and strangers and with no one who recognised him or understood who he was.
Heaven and earth have come togetherAnd life has come to Bethlehem
And when he grew up he began to teach the people who he really was, and why he’d come, a d what they needed to do to make earth a beautiful place again. And did they listen?Well, that’s another story, and I’m not telling that one today.Today, it’s all about this:
Heaven and earth have come togetherAnd life has come to Bethlehem
New life. God’s life. Here. Today. For you.

Next year, it's back to the Bible

Christmas is coming, and the goose, apparently, is getting fat.

I've decided it's time for another online Bible reading - athon ... thing. Some years ago, I read through the Bible in a year, blogging every day. Then I tried to do the same with the Apocrypha, but gave up due to boredom.

My plan this time round isn't as ambitious, I'm simply going to read Luke and Isaiah. A little bit of Luke every day will take me up until May, then a slightly bigger bit of Isaiah will take me through the rest of the year.

Why have I chosen those two books? Well, Luke because a vicar colleague and friend was telling me how he spent more than a year preaching his way through the whole of Luke's gospel, and I liked the sound of that. Also, if you know what the word lectionary means, then chances are you'll also know that you'll be hearing some of Luke nearly every Sunday from now until the end of November 2016.

As for Isaiah, it's long been a favourite book, but I only really know it in bits. There are lots of famous bits, some of which we are reading now as Christmas approaches. Others will be brought out at Easter. But I want to try and get a grasp of the book as a whole. Is it one book, or three? And is Isaiah a name, or was it a club, to which certain prophets belonged? I won't reach an answer to these questions, but I'll have fun thinking about them.

So that's my plan. You're welcome to read along with me, starting on January 1st. Or to dip in and out whenever you feel like it. Write me a comment, let me know that you're there - it will be a great encouragement. And please disagree with what I say. I can guarantee that a large chunk of it will be completely wrong.

Trouble is, I don't know which chunk.