From Christmas plays to questions of leadership

If you’re reading this in December, it’s likely that whatever I’m doing right now, I’m thinking about one thing, and one thing only: the Sunday School Christmas play.

In fact, as I write this it’s still October and already I’m a woman consumed. It’s not just the performing and the rehearsing and the hyping (to the children). Part of what makes the obsession so protracted is that I have somehow ended up backing myself into the position of writing the scripts from scratch each year.

Each year’s effort now follows a tried and tested pattern: it’s basically a poem, narrated by some children and acted by others, with a Jesus twist at the end. If that sounds unbearably twee to you, then you may well be right – but it’s surprising what degree of sentimentality you can get away with in the second half of December.

News adjacent themes

At first I tried to include a local flavour – but once I’d covered the theme park down the road and the 71 bus route, I ran out of material and turned to current affairs for inspiration instead. The aim is to be ‘news adjacent’ but not political. (A little like this column really.) So far we’ve riffed off themes of division (aka Brexit, 2019), the unexpected (aka Covid, 2020) and supply shortages (aka fuel panic buying and concerns about turkey shortages, 2021).

And 2022’s offering? As I’ve read and watched the news this year I’ve been struck by our expectation that those in authority should act on our behalf. We saw this with the clamour over the cost of living crisis and energy bills that grew steadily over the summer months while 10 Downing Street was effectively vacant.

Someone should help us

Most people seemed agreed that it was obvious that someone in leadership should definitely do something; that those of us lower down the food chain deserve the protection and intervention of those higher up. But for anyone with a non-Christian worldview, there’s no particular reason why this should be the case. So why does it persist?

Perhaps, as Glen Scrivener argues in his excellent book The Air We Breathe: how we all came to believe in freedom, kindness, progress and equality, our attitudes towards power in the west have been deeply shaped by our Christian heritage. Or maybe it goes even deeper – perhaps our response spoke to a tacit admission of our human creatureliness and frailty, that we are not designed to be left to our own devices. So when trouble comes, we look up the food chain to the centre of power.

Power that disappoints...

And this year, I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that we’ve been repeatedly disappointed by those in leadership. As I write this, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is new in the job and is enjoying a bounce in the polls, and the markets, as the nation waits to see whether he can sort out the mess. As you read this, the bounce may be over and the mess still unsorted.

… and power that delivers

Christmas invites us to look both a little higher and a little lower. It tells us to admit our frailty, not by merely looking to political leaders, but by looking to the ultimate authority who governs the world:

As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a female slave look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD our God, till he shows us his mercy.

(Ps. 123:2)

And yet as we look up, at Christmas we see that that God came down, fixing our sin by entering in. In the face of Jesus, the baby in the manger, we see, as Zechariah’s song puts it:

…the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.

(Luke 1:78-79)

It’s been a rough year. There’s no guarantee that 2023 will be any better. But here is a promise we can count on (and, hopefully, base a Sunday school Christmas play on) .