The Rev Roddy Hamilton highlights the importance of creating space in December worship.

THERE is a mystery at the heart of our Christmas worship and, as a church, we invite an encounter with it.

Setting aside the many somersaults we attempt in offering something popular and upbeat, as well as entertaining for all those who come at only this time of year, the church can also offer worship that enables us to sit alongside the world as it is, and our experience of it, and whisper into the headlines: hope.

It can be a tyranny of joy to shape commercial worship in among bolder words and settings that respond to the deeper anxiety we feel for the world. One is popular escapism, the other a minority sport most don’t want.

Yet, listen to the prophets! How might we etch their careful words into our reality? How can we turn the lights down low (literally perhaps) in our worship, and haunt the space with music and promise leaving them without explanation; no ‘but’, no ‘what the prophet means is…’, just silence, and let the words speak for themselves in all their ancient poetry?

Or the meeting of Mary and Gabriel and the question that seeks a ‘Yes!’, but where there is just as much chance of a ‘No!’. How might we create space in our worship to encounter the vulnerability and fragility of God’s idea of incarnation? Can we leave that passage hanging before Mary answers, and invite people to wait in the hesitation, a wait long enough to become restless with the consequence and crisis Mary’s answer, will bring, whatever she decides?

Can we offer space for more of God’s word, literally? Can we create space for people to touch words full of depth and meaning and theology, without interference from us, words that none of us can fully translate anyway, such as ‘Incarnation’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Comfort’, ‘Prince of Peace’? Might we create a manger across which we scribble these sacred words and invite others to weave in their own? Dare we let the words be themselves, in a space that interprets them better than sermons?

And the field of the angels and shepherds; angels full of music, shepherds full of silence. How might we offer that silence for those who have run out of words, or can find no Good News? Can we gather outside, or in the dark of the building, and quietly let the night invite us to lay down and leave there our confusion, pretence, half-truths and certainties? Might we offer a means for folk to write down and discard there, safely, what they feel and do not have the words for, by a burning fire, a waiting manger, an open bible?

“How might we create space in our worship to encounter the vulnerability and fragility of God’s idea of incarnation?”

Then, the utter fear of the world in this time of seemingly limitless conflict, how might we, in this season, create worship? Can we leave the space in shadow, and only through candles that we light might we see each other; those who hope the same as us? There, in that light, might we listen to the words of today’s prophets, the refugees, the displaced, the tired, the women, and honour them by holding them in the great longing of Isaiah 64?

These tried and tested reimaginings sit alongside the popular worship we also offer, but create a sanctuary for many who rather seek the deeper mystery the nativity story was fashioned to tell.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick