“Hang on, folks – please!” It’s the Wise Men. “You’ve packed us away with your tinsel and crib, and we haven’t even got to Bethlehem yet! Caspar – how long does the SatNav say?” “Just recalculating, Melchior… here it comes, 3 months – that’s on Camel Setting”. “See what I mean, you good people of the future? You hurtle into the Christmas Sales like there’s no tomorrow and barrel into 2022, leaving us for dust (well, desert sand). S-l-o-w d-o-w-n! We didn’t get to our famed place in the Christmas story by rushing. No, we s-l-o-w-e-d, we looked at the sky – and we followed the star.
“Look ahead at your next 12 months. OK, so I’m not a 21st Century guy, but I’m guessing your coming year looks rather like our current journey. Uncertainty – Covid for you, mountains to cross for us, in neither case knowing what’s on the other side nor how we’ll get there. Countless crises cracking off for you – inflation, healthcare, a World Cup in winter (what’s your world coming to!), like the ups and downs of our sand dunes stretching to the horizon. Yet hope in your hearts too (I hope), like in ours. And in need of a star to step our way through it all.
“So you folk in 2022, let us offer you advice across the ages. Set your SatNav to ‘Camel’, S-l-o-w d-o-w-n
once in a while, look up on a still starry night, and sense the presence of the One from above who is our Guiding Star. I don’t know how we’ll make it to our destination, or even when – camels won’t be dictated to by a computer, believe me. But I know we will, and so will you. So go wisely and joyfully, my friends.”
The Guiding Star that forever goes ahead of us – ‘I am… the bright Morning Star’ says Jesus, in almost the closing words of Revelation, the Bible’s book about destinations. To quote from a Mumford & Sons song that’s gone round my head many times this past year,
“Cos even when there is no star in sight You’ll always be my only guiding light”
Epiphany, the festival forgotten in Christmas’s shadow, and yet this celebration of the magi’s (eventual) arrival presents the perfect picture for the start of a year. There may be uncertainty ahead – ‘there may be trouble ahead’ even, to quote another song. But that steady Guiding Light shines, even when shrouded in cloud. Let’s set our SatNavs to ‘Camel’, slow down, and look up
