In mid-October a vicar friend in a country parish phoned. reeling. because he had just completed his sixth harvest festival. He had called the harvest home, he had ploughed the fields and scattered until his gorge was full. "And it's not even true," he moaned, "a lot of the crops are still lying in the fields, sodden and rotting with all the rain and anyway the spring wheat is already coming up. What do people think they are doing in this harvest singalong?" Panned out he was, not exactly in despair but very low about what was going on inside people's hearts and minds as they trundled through the familiar hymns which seem so far removed from the real world in which we all live.
So by the time you read this, will you also be actually reeling from harking to those angels just one more time as you yet again brave the carol onslaught to go your lawful way and try to do a bit of shopping: Father Christmas, a few reindeer and the baby Jesus all hutched up together in a pothery hugger-mugger in your local superstore? It's hardly December even and four more weeks to go jingling our bells in the bleak mid-winter. "God bless us everyone!" indeed. Thank you at least for that Tiny Tim.
Just a minute though. Here's a riddle for your Christmas cracker. What is the gift you would most like to give and yet are least prepared to part with? The clue is in one of those sublimina1 carol-verses as we reach for a packet of stuffing or try to decide whether we should go for another of the 2 for 1 mince pies. It's the grown up bit about Christmas and it goes like this, "Hail the Heaven-born Prince of Peace".
Peace? Well, that's a laugh. We may blur over the picture for a day or two at Christmas, but out there we know that such unpeace is raging that world peace and individual peace seem farther away than ever. Our hearts are rather trembling with the words, "Hail the Terror-Born Prince of Fear". Yet the gift of Peace is in our hands; our responsibility first and foremost, nobody else's. It's not, first and foremost, up to 'them'. Don't be fooled by the Baby, by the goo and sentimentality which so often clings to the ox and the ass and the lowly cattle shed. The gift of Christmas is that Jesus is the man for our time, he is the Prince of Peace, for he comes to show us how to be at peace, keep peace and live peace. However, we push him back into the crib and keep him there because whilst we may spend lots of lovely money giving lovely gifts to lovely people, we do not want to pay that final personal price. The price-tag on this priceless gift which is ours to give away reads - non-violence. This means absorbing the anger and violence of others and not giving it back. Jesus shows the way, that is the essential and particular thing about the Christian faith; the difference. We know that as a world we have reached the brink, we totter on the edge of chaos. We know that violence does not work any more. It's over. The world is starting to thrash around in the last throes of what violence can do. "What makes society unravel is human anger. We are talking about the end of the world as a result of human violence". (Rene Girard)
Practising non-violence has now "become an inescapable task and a practical necessity". (Walter Wink), and is the only way on. This is what the Christ-time Christmas means. We know it, of course, deep in our inmost being, and we are afraid to recognise it because it feels like if we started to give this gift away it would empty our bank account, we would have nothing left. Why? Because we still want to get even, get revenge, take it out on others, retaliate, level the score, make the other feel small in return. We bear grudges, we do little about practising forgiveness.
The versions of 'God' and' Allah ' which are striving to lead world opinion have nothing to do with Jesus, the Prince of Peace, the non-violent way. The dawn broke with the birth of Jesus who eventually dies out of sheer love. Sheer love for every human being he ever met, thought about, heard about, imagined; and for the beauty of the Earth. That's the price tag.

Christianity has known this for long ages but it's as if we want to buy off the Jesus-God by singing a few carols, doing the Christmas thing. Living non-violence does entail risks and real daily courage, but then, what do we really want for our children and our children's children in the years which face them? Surely more than a few Christmas angels, lights in the window and a pretty crib set? Christianity has known this way for long ages and if we do destroy ourselves, Christianity, as it is now practised, will be responsible.
Post-script. Take one non-violent step at a time in making building blocks for peace. In Northern Ireland, behind the headlines, there are still many chilling tales of neighbourhood violence, terror, intimidation. There is also a charity called 'The One Small Step Campaign'. It asks men, women and children to take one small step "out of their comfort zone." It may be a Protestant going to a Gaelic football match, or listening to Irish pipe music on the radio, or as simple as a Catholic going to a cricket or rugby match, visiting a Protestant school, reading a Unionist newspaper; talking to someone not of your tradition. The best gift we can give to others and so to ourselves is to take one small step. What would your first small step be? The sin of good people is to do nothing.