The Lord of the Dance

Radio 4's daily prayer and reflection with Father Dermot Preston
Good morning.
Mary was the life-&-soul of any party; Richard, tall and shy, preferred to sit and observe. They were strangers at far sides of a dance hall, packed with hundreds of people.
Spontaneously the Conga started. The three-step dance with an energetic kick, winds-around in a civilised procession, but if led by a drunken dancer who makes a sudden turn, that turn ripples down the line making each dancer move faster-&-faster, until the tail of the snake whiplashes. Mary, characteristically at the tail, catapulted off and slid on her knees along the polished floor, slamming into the wallflower, Richard, who was sitting innocently on his chair.
And that is how my Mum and Dad first met.
The traditional scripture for this day in Advent is the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel… the genealogy of Jesus’ ancestors; the list throws together weird and wonderful characters from all corners of the Old Testament. David was the father of Soloman, Soloman was the father of Rehoboam etc… It tolls like a bell at the beginning of the New Testament. To our ears it seems a strange opening, but for Matthew it is a statement: the list contains not just the good and holy but the incompetents, the power-seekers and the downright embarrassing.
Matthew is signalling that the Babe born in Bethlehem emerges from a history that is not pure; the Christ Child draws even the darkness into a new and greater narrative; the redemption of the fallen has begun and goodness is created from the broken fragments of human existence.
Glory be to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we could ask for or imagine. Amen