What should Christians care about Greggs’ advent calendar? Not a sausage

“Buddhists in Bettyhill were beeling. (Actually, I just made that last sentence up. But isn’t everything made up these days? They talk of nothing else in Thrumster.)

Are you sitting comfortably in your pew? Dear friends, as we move towards the holy season of Advent, this morning’s scripture reading consists of verses from the Gospel of St John, reading from the King James Version of the Bible: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.

“All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men … He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

“But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

“And the Word became a sausage roll …” Oh, no it didn’t! Oh yes it did! If you shop at Greggs, that is.

The stooshie over the well-known food firm’s latest advent calendar has created a storm in a bake-off.

Here is how to create such a storm: send out to the media photos promoting the calendar. They show three wise men gathered round a manger in the traditional fashion.

So far, so conventional. The only difference is that the manger is occupied not by the baby Jesus, but by a Greggs sausage roll.

Now, in the unhinged psycho-world we seem to inhabit these days, there may well be people who believe that Jesus has miraculously turned into a sausage roll. If you challenge them, they may accuse you of propagating “fake news”.

Anyway, the photos of three wise men bend- ing the knee before a sausage roll quickly went viral on the internet, as other equally pointless things often do. Not only that, they triggered fury.

Many of those who were raging were Christian believers who denounced the images as sacrilegious. They were in turn denounced as humourless bigots who needed to get a life.

Some Jewish commentators joined the fray, arguing that back in the time of Jesus, it was forbidden to eat pork, never mind to worship it.

A deep-fried Mars bar would have been OK, but not a pork sausage.

Buddhists in Bettyhill were beeling. (Actually, I just made that last sentence up. But isn’t everything made up these days? They talk of nothing else in Thrumster.)

Anyway, back to Bettyhill, I mean Bethlehem. Many people in different parts of the world seemed to have a dog in this particular fight, to use an Americanism.

Normally peaceable Seventh-day Adventists were upset because Quakers annoyed them by keeping on turning the other cheek, and so on. You get the drift.

The only people who weren’t raging were the public relations operators employed by Greggs. They were pleased that so many people were talking about Greggs’ sausage rolls, rather than about the meaning of Advent.

Of course, they issued a somewhat less than heart-felt apology to anyone who’d been offended by the pictures.

The problem with this is that in our increasingly polarised and angry society just about everybody and their granny is offended about something or other.

Everybody, it seems, has a rage-gig. Some of these gigs are more vitriolic than others, but none of them are pleasant.

So should Christians be exercised about all of this? Read my lips. No. Nein. Naw.

Apoplectic Christians going off their heids about such secondary matters are deeply unattractive. I know because I’ve met quite a few in my time.

In fact, some of them have been going off their heids at me – sometimes about things I have written in this very newspaper.

I have even been subjected to grievous bodily harm with rolled-up copies of the P&J by raging people in Wick. (Actually, I just made up that last sentence as well – and why not?)

Here’s the thing: I love the season of Advent in the Christian year. Absolutely love it.

It’s a beautiful time for reflection, a time for silence, a time for real, rather than virtual friends.

Maybe even a time for switching off our omnipresent, persistently intrusive, devices.

Within the rich Christian tradition, Advent is above all a pregnant time – a time for waiting for a child of hope in a dark and ever-darkening world.

With, or without, a sausage roll.