This
Christmas will likely be a difficult one in parts of Cumbria, in the aftermath
of the floods, and we remember those communities before God. But in Iceland,
tonight is marked by a very different kind of flood, the jólabókaflóð, or ‘Christmas
Book Flood’. There, between eighty and ninety percent of books are published
for Christmas, with almost everyone being given a new book on Christmas Eve and
staying up through the night to read it. A heart-warming, cosy tradition.
Christmas
is a time for stories, including all those Christmas films that are repeated
year after year on tv. We have favourite stories we can read or watch or listen
to again and again, never tiring of them.
My
wife and I have a tradition of watching the film Love, Actually. It is a film about love; but it is really a film about
choices: good choices, poor choices, habitual choices, painful choices, risky
choices, life-changing choices.
In
one scene, a young girl is bursting to tell her mother which role she has been
given in the school nativity. She proudly announces that she will play the part
of the Lobster – indeed, First Lobster. Her mother doesn’t quite know how to
respond, and somehow manages to form the question, ‘There was more than one
lobster present at the birth of Jesus?’ – to which her daughter responds,
‘Duh!’ [lit. of course; everybody knows that!]
The
humour lies in our knowing that there were no lobsters at the nativity
alongside the shepherds and wise men, the angels and star, the cattle and sheep
and donkey, Mary and Joseph and the innkeeper.
Except
there was no innkeeper, and no over-full inn. You see, the phrase on which
every traditional nativity play hangs, there being no room in the inn, is simply
a very poor translation. In Luke’s Gospel, an inn and innkeeper appear in the
parable of the Good Samaritan, but not in the account of Jesus’ birth. The word
translated ‘inn’ in Luke chapter 2 is
in fact ‘guest room’ – the same term Luke uses to describe the room in a house
in Jerusalem where Jesus and his disciples ate the Passover meal we know as the
Last Supper. But that was a sizeable guest room in a home in the capital city.
At the time of Jesus’ birth, Joseph and Mary were guests in a home in
Bethlehem. They were welcome and honoured guests – after all, Joseph could
trace his ancestry to none other than Bethlehem’s most famous son, King David –
but nonetheless they were guests in a smaller, provincial home, where the guest
room was too small for Mary to give birth in, attended by the village midwives
and the women of the household. So Mary gave birth to her son in the main room
that served as bedroom to the family and shelter to their animals at night, and
living room by day. Afterwards, Jesus was washed and wrapped in linen strips
and laid to rest in one of the mangers, a confined and warm space, an ideal
crib. And there the shepherds will find him, and all just as it ought to be.
I
tell you this not to take away the wonder of Christmas, not to pour cold water
on memories of childhood and children and grandchildren, not to throw out the
carols, but because it is the stories we tell over and over that shape us.
We
have told the story of Jesus’ birth as a story of rejection, of God coming
into the world and being largely ignored at best. And the
more we tell that story, the more it shapes us to expect of other people and of
ourselves that they, that we, will reject or ignore God. It becomes something
of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you like.
But
Luke tells us a story of welcome, a story of God’s
long-awaited coming to his people, of God dwelling in the midst of his people,
at the heart of ordinary lives. And when we start to tell this story, and to
tell it again and again, the story shapes us for welcoming - welcoming one
another, welcoming God – and for wonder, shared between us, at God’s sheer
goodness.
So
tonight let us stay up telling stories, as the shepherds did, of good news for
all people. Stories of a God who has not abandoned us but who came to us, and
who comes to us today; who is here in our midst, in the bread and the wine of
this holy night, and in the gift-giving of the morning, and the gathering
around the table for Christmas dinner and then falling asleep in front of the
telly later on. God with us.
That
is a story I never tire of hearing, or telling; of sharing with family and
friends; of shouting from the rooftops. Happy Christmas! May it be filled with
welcome and wonder, more and more, year upon year. And may it shape our
rejoicing and our mourning, our treasured memories and our deepest pain; in joy
and in peace, amen.
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