I shared these words today - it was good to preach incarnation...
Does your house look like a bomb site when you come
downstairs on Boxing Day? You leave everything where it is late on Christmas
Day and go to bed, perhaps a bit worse for wear. Saucepans and remnants of
dinner, wrapping paper and crackers, all over the place. It is done and dusted
and all that is to be done is to tidy it away.
But
actually this is only the third day of the Christmas season.
Imagine for a while you are just getting
on with life, it is hard, you don’t expect anything exciting to happen. Imagine
today you are a Palestinian shepherd in the hills above Bethlehem.
Sheep were considered dirty, dumb, and stubborn and
the men who herded them were just a notch above. And if they claimed to hear any angel it was
entirely possible because they were either mentally ill or drank a little too
much cheap wine. No one thought very much of shepherds and what happened to
them or what they said. You get the picture:
there are plenty of “shepherds” among us now. They may not be herding sheep but
they’re in front of us every day. Chronically unemployed, mentally ill,
homeless, not clean, and generally people we would not have over to our homes
for dinner. In fact, we often turn away when we see them or maybe even pretend
to we don’t see them at all.
But in Luke’s Gospel, these are just the people the
angels first reveals the birth of Jesus to and it is intentional.
I read this quote which helped me:
“Should we really be surprised, then, that these are
the first people who will hear the message of God’s redemption? Across Luke’s
Gospel one of the dominant themes is that God comes for those who are on the
outside—those who are poor, vulnerable, and of no account to the world. Why?
Perhaps because they are the ones predisposed to listen and rejoice. Angels
could have visited Herod or Augustus or Quirinius or any of the other powerful
characters that have made their cameo appearances in Luke’s story.
But why would they rejoice at the announcement of a
king? . . . What need have they of God’s redemption when, to all outward
appearances, they themselves were like gods?
No, the angels come and sing their news to those for
whom it means something. Outcasts, ne‘er-do-wells, the lonely, poor, and lowly—
unwed teenage mothers and loser shepherds and all the rest—all, that is, who
are in need. For, ultimately, the only requirement to receive God’s love is to need
it.”
Isn’t it true that we know God’s love when things
change for us suddenly? When we need to reach out for help? Doesn’t God come in the dark? To people when
they need him desperately to lift them up? Isn’t Christmas Day about remembering
we are loved, whether through being with family, feeling better watching a
positive film, being affirmed by fantastic friends, or being quiet in prayerful
reflection?
Jesus in his life reached out to the marginalized so
the fact his birth is announced to the shepherds makes sense. It helps set the
tone from the beginning of Luke’s Gospel and proclaims something new is
happening here. God, through Jesus, is coming into the world in a new way and
saying in essence, who I find valuable is very different and much broader than
who the world finds valuable.
Perhaps because life was hard for shepherds but it was
all they knew, and they got on with it, the theophany of angels in the sky blew
them over so powerfully they were able to see and respond in the way we all
should, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place,
which the Lord has made known to us.”
Consciously and with a sense of anticipation, not
necessarily certainty. They didn’t know exactly what they would find but they
went anyway, which may be as good a definition of faith in action as any there
is.
Here is the promise of Christmas: God will reach out
for us often from the most unlikely of circumstances or persons: a shepherd,
even a tiny baby born to an unwed teenage mother but the essence of the message
will always be, “listen to me, come to me, and know you are loved.” Christmas
is an event in which we can rejoice and be glad and full of joy even if life is
routine filled and hard at the moment.
David Adam in his book “The Awesome Journey” tells of
his time as a very shy choirboy in St Michael’s Church in Alnwick. The boys
were practising the anthem for the fourth Sunday in Advent which was based on
the epistle for the day “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say,
rejoice.” David Adam says they practiced the anthem again and again until the
choirmaster felt they had mastered it. At one point the choirmaster came over
to him and put his face close to his which was terrifying enough – before
saying in a loud voice, “Rejoice, boy! Let me see you smile when you sing this.
Show that you are glad that the Lord is with you!” Perhaps that is the response
to incarnation – “Smile, the Lord is with you.” Change has happened. You know
what, God is going anywhere. You can’t tidy him away, not bother with him
anymore and get him out again next year like sprouts. You know what God is in
the change and will continue to surprise us with the manner of his coming. He
comes when we are just getting on with it. He comes in our deepest need and
blubbering tears when we think we cannot go on because the pain is too awful to
bear. He comes to churches and encourages us to see what is happening. To get
up and go rather than remain with today.
I look at the churches I try and help
every day here. We are not where we were because we’ve been open to the Spirit
of God changing us. Messy Church here is a prime example of that as we move to
doing it monthly in my largest church. Ninfield is another example, no longer in
my care, but they have a youth group now as well as Messy Church. I went to the
youth group party and said to one of the older members “if I had told you three
years ago you would have a youth group in your church, you wouldn’t have
believed it would you?” They had 60 – lots of families - there on Christmas Eve.
My St Helens church are
perhaps about to do something interesting as we end our time in our rickety old
building in September. 92 there for Messy Church on Christmas Eve. A group of
people embracing change that is coming, scary change but a deep sense that God
is calling us to something different.
So, let’s try and embrace change. Let’s try and see
God in the changes that come. That way we will have understood what we have
been singing about and listening to in his word in these last weeks.
Let me finish like this. I am so grateful to Sam
Funnell my neighbouring Superintendent to the east in South Kent. Sam turned up on my doorstep yesterday as I was writing this with a
little package for me I might she said “find helpful.” I led a quiet morning in
Advent for our Circuit staff and her Circuit staff and quoted from my favourite
book for this time of year Maria Boulding’s “The Coming of God.” I told them I had lent the book to someone
years ago and never got it back. In the package was a new copy of the book. So
grateful… I end with Maria Boulding’s words about God changing us and being in
change:
“ “Come” is God’s creative word to us. He calls us
into being at our first creation, into the light of life. All our lives we are
creatures of becoming, always incomplete, always pilgrims and discoverers,
finding our way to our destiny by our choices, our orientations, and our
decisions about where to set our love. This is the law of our creation, and
still more the law of our new creation, whereby God calls us out of darkness
into his marvellous light. Revelation and salvation are a love affair in which
God says “Come” to humankind, calling us to come and see him as he is, and
share his life.”
I guess we can pack Christmas away, tidy it up.
But we could perhaps live it. Look around us, see angel
song, and be invited to encounter what God is up to.
We could perhaps recognise even when we don’t get what
life is doing to us that God is in those fragile vulnerable moments and gives
us his peace.
We could perhaps not hope things carry on as we are,
but expect and welcome divine change.
Let’s carry on Christmas for a bit - celebrate the
birth of an infant in whose life lies the hope and great promise of the
world. May all of us say this season
and beyond, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this that that has taken place,
which the Lord has made known to us.”
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