25th December 2011 - Christmas Morning

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

Ask about has anyone brought presents to show ?

Jesus is often called the ‘Best Christmas Present’ and I’ve been trying to think about what that might mean. The best known verse in the Bible says:

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. ‘

The whole of the Christian Year is thanksgiving for the way God gives Himself to us in Jesus Christ but, of course, Christmas Day is a particular commemoration of this.

Let’s think about what it means for Jesus to be a gift.

1.      Well first of all, of course, a gift is chosen with a particular recipient in mind. If you don’t know the recipient very well  you can often choose the wrong thing. I bet there are, on this Christmas morning, lots of people who have opened Jumpers that don’t fit  or toys that far too young for them.  I remember quite a few years ago receiving aftershave as a Christmas present, but at that time I had a beard and had done for several years. Of course, that one may just have been a hint.

But the greater the knowledge you have for a person and the greater the love you feel for them the more you want to try and get the present right for them.

When God chose his Christmas gift for us gave us what we wanted but exactly what we needed. He gave us himself in a way that would meet our need to be set free from sin and death, and to be given eternal life.

2.      The second thing we can think about is that a gift is freely given. Can you imagine being charged for your Christmas gifts. “Here’s your present – that will be Two pounds fifty please.” It’s unthinkable, isn’t it. The more love that there is behind a present the less it can be seen as something that is earned. Father Christmas may only give gifts to good children but mums and dads who love their children give them gifts even if they’ve done something wrong. The one thing you can’t do with a gift is earn it, because if you earn it it is not a gift, it’s wages or a bribe.

And the same is true of God’s gift to us of Jesus. “When the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy”, Jesus is ultimate sign of God’s love for us, and there is nothing we can do earn it. Indeed if we try to earn love or buy it we fail miserably as it says in the Song of Solomon – “If one offered for love all the wealth of one's house, it would be utterly scorned.” Love gives freely or it is not love at all. And God, who is love, gives freely too.

3.      But the third thing we can think about is that gift need to be accepted. I’ve heard about gifts that have been sent back by people. I’ve heard of other people whose first reaction is to give the gift to someone else (and to do that in front of the giver). I’m sure there are packages that will sit around unopened in the days and months ahead.

God has given us his gift in Jesus but we need to accept that gift. At the beginning of John’s Gospel we read:

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

God has a wonderful gift for us, be we need to accept that gift. And like any gift given in love that accepting builds up a relationship: the relationship by which the life of God flows into us. And relationships don’t just happen, they need to be worked at.

But this relationship starts with a gift – God’s gift of himself to us. On this day when we celebrate the giving of that gift say to now, perhaps for the first time, perhaps renewing a commitment made long ago; “Lord, I accept your gift of yourself to me and I freely give myself to you in return.” Amen.

25th December 2011 - Midnight Mass

Some years ago I was able to visit the land where Jesus was born. One of the places that I really wanted to see was the a place called “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre” which covers the place where Jesus died on the cross, where he was laid in the tomb, and where he rose from the dead. I knew from my reading that this was almost certainly the authentic site. That archaeologists and historians were agreed that in the context of first century Jerusalem this place worked better than any other as the place which marked the location of the events it commemorated. But when I got to the church I found it a huge disappointment. The trouble was that two thousand years of history had happened in that place and the things which I wanted to see - the original tomb, the hill on which the cross had stood – had been overlaid by the devotion of centuries. The tomb had been covered with marble, the rocky outcrop in which it had stood had been cleared away. Walls had been built and covered with pictures and the pictures covered with silver and gold. The reality still lay somewhere underneath but centuries of good intentions had buried it.

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Christmas can be a bit like that too. Most people know that it’s got something to do with Jesus, and quite a few know it celebrates his birth but I think we sometimes forget how many of the things we associate with Christmas really have little to do with the original event.

The most recent accretions come from Victorian and Edwardian times. The fellow with the Red clothes comes from this time and owes much of his popularity to an advertising campaign by the Coca Cola company. The importance of Christmas as a religious festival was much undermined during the of the reformation and it is Charles Dickens who is credited with popularising most of the modern customs. The tree, the reindeer and all of that don’t have much to do with the original Christmas.

But then, neither do many of the things that we think really must go back to that first Christmas night. The donkey, for example, who features in so many Christmas songs and poems is nowhere to found in the Bible. He, with the Ox owe their presence to Saint Frances who placed the first Christmas crib in a church as a way of sharing the story with the poor and uneducated. There must have been some animals there, else why have a manger, but just what they were we don’t know

Even the stable at the back of the inn are rather dubious. The Bible does tell us that Jesus was laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn, but that word in Inn could be better translated ‘Guest Room’. In the houses of the poor there was only one room but a slightly more prosperous household would have two, one for the family and one for guests. A night the family animals would be brought inside the house at night for safety and to provide warmth. A platform at one end of the room would provide sleeping space for the family and on the edge of that platform was the manger, the food trough for the animals. One way of reading the story of Jesus birth is that he was born in the family room of the house because the Guest room was full and that Mary laid him in the manger as the safest and softest place for him to be.

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I’m not trying to be a spoilsport. I know that many people have come love the Christmas Card depictions of the stable scene. And like the accretions in the church of the holy sepulchre the accretions which gathered round Christmas have been put there with the best of intentions to make the story more attractive and more interesting. Take them away and it becomes just a story of an ordinary baby born in circumstances not much different from any other. And that, of course, is the point. Jesus was born in circumstances not much different from the general run of humanity. What makes his birth special is not the things we depict on Christmas cards but the one thing we cannot, that this child was God born as a human being, taking on himself our flesh and blood to open the way for us in our flesh and blood to share eternity with him.

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Maybe we need, this year, to look beyond the accretions to see the reality beneath. 2011 has not been a good year for many people and if the predictions of doomsayers come to pass 2012 will be worse. Pretty stories will not give any help as we face the grim reality that lays before us, only the truth will sustain us. And the truth is this. The child that was born in Bethlehem was God born among us. For most of his life he lived obscurely and unnoticed but at the age of thirty he began to preach, and to teach, and to heal. A band of disciples grew around him and he finally attracted the attention of the authorities who swatted him like an annoying fly. He was crucified – a agonizing death – and buried in a borrowed tomb; and two days later burst out of the tomb and lit a fire which has never been put out. Convinced that he had conquered death and every force which makes us less than human, less than children of God, his followers carried the message about him to every corner of the word; proclaiming that one day he would return and the whole earth would bow before him. That the world would be turned upside down, that the rich and powerful would be cast down before the poor and lowly, and that Justice and Mercy would reign forever. And proclaiming that right now we could live in the light of that future coming by living lives of justice and mercy today.

Now that is a story to sustain us whatever tomorrow may bring. The story of God with us.

18th December 2011 - Advent 4

“Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to you word.”

The thing I love most about the Christmas story is the way that it focuses down and down to a moment of amazing significance and utter simplicity. It is a moment which has been depicted by artists over and over again. The moment when God becomes man in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

What do we know about Mary.

Firstly, we know that she was a young girl. She is a virgin, not yet married but engaged to be married. Girl’s were normally betrothed between the ages of thirteen and fourteen and married about a year later, so she was – perhaps – somewhere between fourteen and fifteen years old.

Next, we know she is from a humble background but not from absolute poverty. Today, of course, Nazareth is one of the best known  towns in the world but at the time of Jesus conception it was a shanty town. Nazareth was an outlying village to the City of Sepphoris  , a city that is never mentioned in the New Testament. Sepphoris was one of King Herod’s building projects. It was to be a Greco-roman city, built in stone and marble, and housing all the facilities of Greek and Roman life. Around the city were various shanty towns where the skilled and unskilled labourers lived. Nazareth was one of these towns and in it lived the carpenter Joseph. The word carpenter is a broader word in the New Testament than in today’s world. It means a worker in wood and stone. So Joseph would have been a builder who had moved up from his home town of Bethlehem to seek work in the place where work was to be found. Mary would have been from a similar background.

The last thing we know about Mary is her name. In Hebrew the name Mary is Miriam. In the Old Testament Miram was the sister of Moses and was she who watched over the infant Moses after his mother had placed him in a basket of reeds and floated him down the river Nile to the place where Pharaoh’s daughter was bathing. This was, of course, to save him from the command that all boy children should be killed. It is Miriam who shows great initiative by suggesting Moses’ own mother as his wet nurse. Later Miriam would participate with Moses in lead the Exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and is described as a prophet. She dances and plays the tambourine  and sings of the downfall of the Egyptian army, “Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” Miriam was the greatest female hero in the history of the Jewish people and her name must have been given to vast numbers of Jewish girls. In the New Testament there are a number of woman called Mary, and sometimes it is difficult to know which one is being spoken of.

So what do we have? We have a young woman with a very common name, from a background which is poor but absolutely so, engaged to a builder. The outsider, looking in, would have seen nothing special at all.

To this girl there comes a visitor – a messenger, which is what the word ‘angel’ means. This messenger tells her that God has chosen her for a special task. I love the way this is described in Charles Causley’s poem, Ballad of the Bread Man.

Mary stood in the kitchen
Baking a loaf of bread.
An angel flew in through the window.
We’ve got a job for you, he said.

God in his big gold heaven,
Sitting in his big blue chair,
Wanted a mother for his little son.
Suddenly saw you there.

Unsurprisingly is taken aback by this. How can she have a child when she is not yet married and is still a virgin? She is told that the child will be conceived through the power of God’s Holy Spirit and will be the Son of God.

Outside life is going on just as it always has. There is nothing for anyone to see that shows how significant this moment is. As human beings carry on with their ordinary everyday tasks the fate of eternity hangs in the balance, waiting for Mary’s word . And it comes, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”

From now on her life will never be the same. This ordinary girl will walk beside Jesus as he grows in the awareness of his nature and mission, and will stand beside his cross – her agony a reflection of his. He will be '...for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed  so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” and for her “a sword will pierce your ... soul.' 

She will know the joy of his resurrection and will be present on the day when the Holy Spirit is poured out on the Church. She will become, in the vision of John, “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”

And all because, at this point, she said “yes”. A “yes” that holds nothing back.

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“Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide” wrote the hymn writer James R. Lowell. To each one of us there comes appoint when we decide who will sit in the driving seat of our life and steer its course. Mary’s choice place God firmly in control. She didn’t always get it right. I’m glad we are not bound like our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters to hold a view of Mary that places her beyond the realms of normal human beings. The Gospels show her, on at least two occasions, failing to understand what Jesus is about. She didn’t always get it right, but she always followed the path that her ‘Yes’ to God set before her.

And so must we. Outside the busy world is going about its normal business. The frantic rush of preparations for the Christmas holidays goes on unabated. But today God speaks to us. In the words of a song we often sing he asks us,

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown? Will you let my name be known,
will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer in you and you in me?

Will our answer be, like Mary’s, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”