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Third Sunday in Advent
13th December 2009

Happy Christmas?

A Present for a Good Girl by Nadine Gordimer is a story is set within a decade or so of the end of Second World War. Miss Pierce works in a posh shop selling jewellery, perfume and fancy goods and one day a big shabby woman comes in who doesn't seem to belong there. She has seen the green leather bag priced at ninety-five shillings in the shop window and she wants to buy it for her daughter who loves the colour green. Could Miss Pierce see her way to putting it aside and letting her pay when she can. Ignoring the disapproval of the other staff Miss Pierce puts the bag away and accepts the first instalment.

Inevitably it doesn't work. The woman's payments are irregular. She smells of alcohol. The Manager tells Miss Pierce to return the bag to stock and give back the money. But she doesn't.

Then comes Christmas Eve and the shop is frantically busy; suddenly the woman appears in the shop. She falls drunkenly against the counter and asks for the bag. But she hasn't paid enough. The customers stare at the woman, each - we're told - from the pinnacle of his own self-triumph. The woman leaves the shop.

A moment later she is back, but this time in the wake of a girl with the sparse fair hair of child of the slums. The girl comes to the counter and fixes Miss Pierce with her eye. "What has she done?" she says; "What is it she's paying for?" Miss Pierce fetches the bag and tells her how much is left to be paid. The girl handles it with contempt, "A bag?" she says, "for ninety-five shillings?". "You people; you let her do this. She can't pay." From her own purse she pays what is owing. Then, compelling her cowed mother to follow with the look in her eye, she picks up the bag, and goes out of the shop.

There were many fascinating aspects of that story to discuss with 15 year old young people. In particular, we looked at this phrase describing the people in the shop as they look at the woman each from the pinnacle of his own self-triumph. Quite simply the old woman's failure and inadequacy makes them feel better about themselves. But when the girl comes into the shop something changes: she brings a new authority - that of one with a strong mind and will, born of poverty and negligence and of living with a drunken impoverished mother, and desperately wanting a better life. The girl silences everyone. But then there is the terrible tragedy of it all, the futility of it all: the mother's love, Miss Piece's gesture of compassion, within the constraints of her role; the bag itself, symbol of all this, finally bought with the girl's hard-earned money and becoming a symbol not of love but of everything that drags her down.

It was great too to look at what this story said about one aspect of Christmas; people buying expensive classy things in a posh shop. After the momentary invasion of poverty and despair, life will go on in the shop as always. But what are the tragic stories of Christmas? The stories of people who for one reason or another have no joy in their lives, who feel out of control, who are alienated from their children, whose relationships are going into meltdown, who are up to their eyes in credit with no real means to pay; who have some idea that Christmas might be good, that there be love, that there might be hope, that there might be reconciliation and warmth and for whom it is becomes just another costly disaster.

None of us is untainted by the commercialism, the hijacking of Christmas. We are all partaking of it and we all want to have our good time in it however selective we manage to be. John the Baptist had but one message: be ready; find what it is in yourself that prevents you from being ready and deal with it. His was a sort of tough love, tough compassion, but it was definitely there. Our Christmas will be as shallow as the ethos of that jeweller's shop if it doesn't find its depths in penitence and compassion and kindness and a realisation that God in Jesus is coming into the world to love those who have been crushed by its vanity and cruelty, and to strengthen those who stand up for them. Just as in the fictional story, where the young girl delivers judgement to the shop, so the Lord who is coming will deliver judgement to our world. In the words of John the Baptist, "His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire".

Lord, have mercy. Amen

© PCC St Martin's and St Paul's Canterbury 2008 - 2009