On Christmas Eve I offer you this prayer from Nite Blessings:
May you be reminded of the breathtaking love of God. Remember that He reached out to you before you reached out to Him. He found you before you were looking for Him. His embrace will hold you secure through every storm and every season. You are safe in Him always.
A man called J. B. Phillips wrote a book called: 'Your God Is Too Small'. What he addressed within that book was simply the attitude of people toward God. Not simply their attitude, but the imagination that they had about Him - whether it was a 'Father Christmas' figure that sat on a cloud and twanged at a harp, or whether it was a God of wrath who had no love or kindness, but just used us, the human race, as pawns in His big almighty plans.
And he said, “We cannot understand God, and no matter how many schemes or systems or theologies we give birth to, God is beyond our understanding.”
I asked my congregation on Sunday morning whether we have to have Christmas to a script. I recalled with them Christmases growing up which were held at my Auntie Doris’s. Auntie Doris had Christmas dinner scripted. My mother was made to eat a sprout because it was Christmas and she would swallow one whole. If dinner wasn’t perfect, Auntie would burst into tears and it had to be cleared away by half past two so Auntie and mother could go upstairs to change before they saw the monarch at three. As if the Queen could see them!
I just worry this Christmas Eve, unlike children going to sleep later with big dreams of tomorrow, we grown ups have made Christmas small and stressy. There’s another sermon in me called “Ian went to M and S yesterday lunchtime and saw humanity at its worst.” Isn’t it time to rediscover the wonder of the story, the breathtaking love of God, the God who is beyond our understanding and yet chooses to break into his world and share life with all its complexity with us. Wow!
Let’s think for a moment about the initial reaction to Christmas. Mary asks “how can this be?” Joseph’s head spins. Zechariah is made mute. Elizabeth and Mary laugh. The shepherds are “sore afraid.” The magi are compelled to make a long journey. Herod is rattled. Simeon and Anna find peace. All the participants in the story find God suddenly at work in a wonderful and awesome way and life can never be the same again.
May you be reminded of the breathtaking love of God. Remember that He reached out to you before you reached out to Him. He found you before you were looking for Him. His embrace will hold you secure through every storm and every season. You are safe in Him always.
It isn’t Christmas for me until I hear the wonderful prologue to the Gospel of John, which I have included in my services tomorrow and I will read it myself in the glorious King James Version. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory,”. That’s what we’re about to celebrate – a great and mighty wonder.
God chose to humble Godself to the level of a poor, limited, human creature. And more than that—notice that John adds, “And we have seen his glory.” Jesus didn’t just become human for a minute or an hour or a day and then go right back to heaven. He lived among us for thirty-three years, enduring the messiness, the heartbreak, the inconvenience, the joy, and the pain of human life.
And he never walked out on that pain. He could have used his power at so many moments to ease his way. There was no reason for him to suffer the pain he went through, from getting sick, to getting in arguments, to having clueless disciples, to having friends die, all the way up to the excruciating suffering he experienced on the cross. But he did it because he loves us, and he would never abandon us to suffer alone.
Let’s return briefly to those characters we know well. Mary said let it be to be according to your word. Joseph doesn’t have a speaking part but he stands by Mary and fathers the child and sorts things out after hearing angels. The shepherds declare let’s go and see. The magi follow the star. Elizabeth giggles about blessedness, Zechariah talks of the tender compassion of God and the dawn from on high breaking in upon us, Simeon can depart in peace having seen what he’d prayed for years to come and Anna found consolation and Herod – well he went berserk didn’t he threatened by what was occurring around him. And you dear people of Bedale and District Methodist Church this Christmas what is your response to all of this?
I worked out from a week last Sunday to this afternoon I’ve had fourteen carol services or other Christmas worship. Two more in the morning. Every one of those has been special as I’ve watched people get caught up in the story again, from the lady with dementia in the nursing home shouting out one word from every carol we sang, to the whole school at Boroughbridge primary coming into church for their Christmas service which made the place rock, to people sharing a quiet blue Christmas with me at Allhallowgate as we lit candles and shared companionable silence, to the hoards that made their annual pilgrimage in the wind to Dallowgill on Sunday nightto sing their carols to their local wacky tunes and have great fun together.
There’s a lovely verse at the beginning of the book of Joshua where the people of God are about to enter the long hoped for promised land. And they are told “sanctify yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will work wonders among you.” This afternoon we come to quieten ourselves before the event, to remember and take in the wonderful fact that God is coming again. Don’t make your God too small this Christmas Eve.
And remember how and when God comes. I read this this morning:
Night was the time when the shepherds were used to being hounded by Roman soldiers, their lives threatened, chased off hillsides, living constantly with fear of attack, if not from soldiers, then wild animals that would circle their livestock. And it was their night that was pierced with light when the messenger from God came to the ones living on the very margins of society, ridiculed and shut out, and Divine glory shone around! It was night when the shepherds saw the messenger, the angel and heard the invitation.
We too can experience dark nights – even dark nights of the soul. Night.
Sometimes they are crushingly dark. Sometimes we are weary. Sometimes unbelievably empty and lonely. Sometimes we are weary and feel lost in the night. It’s then that we fear the most and feel most isolated. We may wonder if light and day will ever come.
But night is always there just before light and day kicks it firmly into touch.
Day always follows night. The light always comes. And today is no exception.
So - on this Christmas Eve may we look right into our night and know this….
That the day will soon be here. Hope is on its way. The Light of the whole world will pierce the darkness so that it bleeds with astounding, penetrating, inspiring, breath-taking, beautiful, radiant, glorious, eternal light and life.
I don’t know how I ended up coming here this afternoon but I’m glad to be here to say to you find that breathtaking love of God for you, not just tonight or tomorrow but into the year ahead when life is hard and church isn’t joyful and it all feels so difficult. God comes, will come and incarnation is a reality every day – you are not alone.
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