Christmas Eve

Luke2:1-20

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.

Second Sunday of Advent

Malachi 3:1-4 and Philippians 1:3-11 and Luke 3:1-6

Well here we are in the season of Advent, when, as we prepare to celebrate the salvation of God [that is, Jesus, whose name means ‘God saves!’] coming into the world as a human baby some two thousand years ago, we are reminded that the Spirit of God is at work in us, preparing us to receive that same salvation of God – Jesus Christ – on the day when he comes again.

We might be tempted to think that this work of the Holy Spirit within us is some great divine mystery which goes on without our awareness. After all, God is far beyond our comprehension. And yet, God’s ways are made known to us through self-revelation. Isaiah is given the insight, quoted by Luke, that this preparation goes on in the place where life is most marginal; where the ground falls away beneath our feet into a great depression; or circumstances tower over us like cliff faces crowding out our view of the sky. You see, in Isaiah’s vision, and in John the baptiser’s acting-out Isaiah’s vision, the exterior world mirrors – and so reveals to us – our interior landscape.

What, then, might we say?

Firstly, that the Spirit is found at work where we are most overwhelmed, most aware of our vulnerability and of our dependence both on God and on others (Luke 3:5).

Secondly, that the Spirit is at work through circumstances that are, in themselves, distressing, as is the process of refining silver (a process that involved fire) or of whitening cloth (a process that involved vigorous agitation with minerals and urine) (Malachi 3:2, 3), or painstakingly hard, as is moving earth (Luke 3:5).

Now, I am not saying that God sends us overwhelming circumstances for our own good, never giving us more than we can bear. Those are, in my opinion, misrepresentations of God and abusive to human beings. Life is overwhelming at times – indeed, much of the time – for a complex variety of reasons. What I am saying is that this is where the Spirit seems to have a preference to be at work – as has been true since the very first sentence of the Bible – which ought to be encouraging!

And thirdly, we might say that the Spirit is working in these places in order that together – as a community who need one another – we might journey out from all our grand achievements and self-confident hierarchies to meet Jesus arriving in our midst (Luke 3:1, 2, 6).

We see what it looks like for the Spirit to be at work in such places lived-out in the relationship between Paul, held in prison in Ephesus in Asia Minor, and the house churches in Philippi in Greece. They hold Paul in their heart, and together share in God’s grace. Prisoners did not receive food, or any other care, and were dependent on relatives or friends to visit each day to provide for their needs. Learning of Paul’s circumstances, the Philippians took up a relief fund and sent a few of their number to make sure that Paul had the practical support he needed. Paul responds to their gift with affirming words: not only has he been blessed, but through their choosing to bless the Philippian churches have experienced the kind of transformation Jesus will look for. Moreover, their actions both defend and confirm the gospel, to their neighbours in Philippi and Paul’s captors in Ephesus, who have surely wondered why a group of Greeks would go to such lengths to care for a Jew far away in Asia, who had visited their city for only a couple of weeks.

It turns out that not only do we get to see where and why – that is, to what end – the Spirit is at work; we also get to share in that work. We are empowered to be (at least part of) the how. So if we truly believed this, what difference might it make to how we live?

If the Spirit is habitually at work transforming interior landscapes, then our joining-in also needs to be a matter of cultivating habits, or core practices that help us to live into truth – even if we never see it fully realised. Two Australian friends of mine [Mandy Smith, who lives in the United States; and Michael Frost, who lives in Australia] have reminded me recently of the importance for discipleship of developing sustainable, communal core practices. One belongs to a local church that has adopted five habits, the first of which is to bless. To bless means to speak well of, to build up, to encourage. [In our particular tradition, there are those sacramental blessings declared by priests; but there is also that wider sense in which we are called to be a people through whom the world is blessed.] As a community, they have identified three simple ways to bless others – through speaking affirming words, through offering practical means of lightening their load, and through giving gifts (all of which we see in play in the account of Paul and the Philippians). But it is not enough to do these things haphazardly, or occasionally: if it is not my habit to bless my neighbour, then it is simply all too easy not bless them at all. So in order for blessing to become habitual, they have taken on the discipline of blessing someone three times a week. One of those people must be a member of their church – in this way, building one another up. One must not be a member of their church – in this way, ensuring that they look beyond themselves and blessing is released through the wider community. And the third blessing can be for either. Of course, the idea is not to restrict blessing to three times a week, but to establish a habit rather than an unsustainable goal that remains only an idea.

Everyone I know finds themselves overwhelmed, on a regular basis. Overwhelmed by bereavement, overwhelmed by the responsibility of parenting our children, overwhelmed by the challenges and pressures of work, overwhelmed by impossibly difficult decisions they have been called upon to make. And it is in precisely these places where the Spirit is at work, and invites us to join in – not as an additional burden on us, but as a means of sharing in God’s grace, or, generous gift.

And so I want to set a challenge this morning. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bless three people this week – one, a member of this church; one, not a member of this church; one, your free choice. You might do so through speaking words that affirm them, or by doing something very practical for them that helps to lighten their load, or by giving them a gift for no reason other than to lift their day. And if you take up this challenge with me, let me know how you get on, and I will let you know how I get on.