The news has been filled recently by what we might call small-scale tragedies. Among other sad happenings there were the fishermen who drowned when their boat collided with a ferry off the coast of Jersey and the would-be migrants who died when their dinghy capsized in the English Channel. The island of Jersey itself saw the devastating gas explosion which demolished a block of flats in the early hours of one morning and killed nine people. We heard about that house fire in Pembrokeshire where a husband and wife perished, of the two small boys apparently murdered in east London, and the revellers killed and injured in the concert crush in Brixton. And, of course, we were all shocked by the deaths of the children who fell through the ice on the lake in Solihull – an appalling story, albeit tinged with heroism.

I intend no disrespect when I call these tragedies “small-scale”: every one was awful and involved pain, death, suffering, grief and loss, made all the worse because they occurred without warning and could not be prepared for. Nevertheless they are small-scale when set beside the loss of life in the Ukraine conflict, the deaths being caused by famine in Ethiopia or indeed by the Lockerbie jumbo jet bomb although that was 34 years ago. It does seem that some of these sad events touch us less than others; perhaps that’s because they are distant, or perhaps because they are so unimaginable that our brains go into neutral when we start thinking about them. But of course every apartment destroyed in a Ukrainian city, every child dying in a refugee camp, represents an individual and personal human catastrophe.

It’s in this climate of distressing news that we come to Christmas – and that’s before we start thinking of the state of our nation, with workers striking right, left and centre, folk switching off their heating and wrapping themselves in blankets because their energy bills have skyrocketed, working families going to food banks because it’s the only way they’ll get a half-decent Christmas dinner, sick people waiting not months but years in pain for so-called “elective” surgery, folk who have fallen into dire straits trying to keep warm at night in Queen Street shop doorways (and many other places) … the list goes on, and that’s just in this country! Once we factor in matters such as the widening gap between the super-rich and the poor, the constant assaults on democracy, responsible free speech and common courtesy, and the ever-present climate climate crisis which any number of multinational conferences seem unable to resolve, we might well become totally immersed in gloom and say, “Why on earth should we even bother to celebrate Christmas this year? It would be far more sensible to save the pennies and put them towards the gas bill”.

Yet right at the heart of the Christmas story comes the angel’s clarion call to the shepherds: “I have good news for you, news which will bring great joy to all the people”. In the darkness of the night sky a radiant light suddenly shines out, dispelling the gloom and offering those shepherds, at least, an amazing and totally unexpected hope – not that they really understood what was going on. Now we must remember that the Holy Land at the time of Jesus’ birth was not the happiest of places. Although people went about their daily life and business more-or-less normally they did so under the watchful eyes of the Roman occupying army and under the weight of punitive taxation. I’m not saying that life was especially hard, although of course it took place without any of today’s conveniences that we take for granted. Nevertheless first-century Palestine did need to hear some good news!

But when that news came, it was on a small scale, one so tiny as to be almost unnoticed. The pictures on Christmas cards make us think of a dazzling angelic choir singing God’s glory from the heavens or a blazing star hanging low over the house in Bethlehem; and we say to ourselves, “Why didn’t everyone see that? Why were they so deaf and blind?” But they couldn’t and they weren’t; I’m pretty sure that, if anyone else had looked up into the sky that night, they’d have only seen the usual moon, stars or clouds with not even one angel in view. Later on, sky-watchers might just have been able to make out a star which seemed a bit out of place: but could they be certain, and would they attach any meaning to it? Probably not. What I’m saying is that Jesus’ birth was a domestic event, witnessed by just a few people, and not even meriting an entry in the “Births, Marriages and Deaths” column of the local newspaper! Headline news it was not – but, in retrospect, we can see it as one of the most important things (Christians would say the most important thing) to happen in the history of our world.

I began by giving you a large dose of doom and gloom. Jim Gordon, a retired Church of Scotland minister, puts it like this in a recent article: “There is a joy shortage, a joy deficit, even a joy recession. You hear it relentlessly in the tone of voice of news readers, the angry arguments of politicians, the calls for strikes and the denials there’s any money, and behind all that a cultural anxiety that something has changed for the worse”. He goes on: “When you put it like that, Christians going on about joy seems a bit tone-deaf to people who are struggling with the cost of eating and heating. Not to mention that world out there, where there is so much suffering, loss, anxiety about the future. And the fear that maybe the big problems are running beyond our human capacity to control”.

Those are true words; however Gordon closes his little essay with a triumphant finale: “Earth’s deepest joy is that once in human history, on this green planet, on the ground we stand on, God came to us in the fragility of human birth. Christian joy is not a denial of darkness; it is an affirmation of the light of God in Christ”.

We must come to Christmas in a grown-up way: a way which accepts that the world isn’t right, that life can be very tough, that senseless tragedies occur on a daily basis, that suffering and pain are often part of human existence, that there are no quick-fixes or instant remedies (although I do think that our Government seems to be burying its collective head in the sand and could do more to solve our current problems). But I also want to come to Christmas remembering the hope it can bring through the baby who was born and grew up to be the Saviour of the world, the Saviour who brings “good news to the oppressed, healing to the broken-hearted, freedom to the prisoners, comfort to all who mourn, and a song of praise instead of the wail of sorrow”. That is the hope of Christmas which, even in these troubled times and by God’s grace, we must cling to, through thick and thin.