Lectionary readings: Isaiah 7:10-16 and Romans
1:1-7 and Matthew 1:18-25
As soon as Halloween is out of the way, Channel 5
starts showing wall-to-wall Christmas Rom-Coms. There is, it tuns out, an
endless supply of forgettable feel-good fare — have we seen this one before? — all
variations on perhaps three storylines. Plot 1: attractive young woman realizes
that she is about to make the mistake of her life marrying her corporate Big
City fiancé, returns home to the small town she grew up in for Christmas, bumps
into her childhood sweetheart, and falls in love again with all she had thought
she wanted to get away from. Plot 2: widowed father with teenage daughter in
need of a new mother and a dog. Plot 3: the protagonist, who may be an
attractive young woman or a ruggedly handsome widower, help a small town to
rediscover what made it special in the first place. Throw in the helping hand
of a matchmaking grandmother, best friend, bookstore owner, or Santa, and maybe
a hardball antagonist awaiting redemption, and you get the drift. The course of
true love never runs smooth, ploughs into the snow a couple of times, but
always gets there in the end, just in time to set up the possibility of a
sequel set next Christmas.
I want to suggest that the story of Mary and Joseph is
a love story. Culturally, it would have been an arranged marriage, but let’s
not make the culturally arrogant mistake of assuming that arranged marriages
are forced marriages or loveless unions. Here is a young couple introduced to
one another by family members, perhaps with wider input, as a likely good
match. It is clear to me that theirs is a love story, which, like all good love
stories, does not run smoothly but has obstacles to overcome, misunderstandings
to get over, the need for help, an angelic advisor for Joseph, wise old cousin
Elizabeth for Mary. All the elements of a Christmas love story are there,
though this one is not so easily forgettable. This one culminates with God-is-with-us,
and sets up the sequel, in which this God-with-us Saves his people from their
sins.
I want to suggest that the story of Mary and Joseph is
a love story. And I want to suggest that the story of Jesus and Paul is a love
story too, not a Rom-Com but perhaps a Bromance. Listen to the way Paul writes
about Jesus to the house churches of Rome, words tumbling over each other, on
and on. This is how we talk about one whom we love. And when Paul does stop to
draw breath, he calls those he is writing to ‘all God’s beloved in Rome,’ God’s
beloved. And then he says, ‘Grace to you,’ that is, God reaching out to you,
giving himself to you. A love story, between Jesus and the Church, the Prince
and his bride.
And the question I want to ask this morning is, what
first attracted you to Jesus?
What first attracted you to Jesus?
For me, it was that we grew up together. I don’t mean
that I was born two-thousand years ago, or that Jesus was born in the early
1970s. But all of time and space bends back to Jesus. That is why when Paul paints
his picture of Jesus, the Old Testament prophets are there, king David is
there, people who lived and died many centuries before Jesus was born. That is
why all the Gentiles are there, people who live across the whole known world.
Time and space, folding back to wherever Jesus, the Son of God, is. And Jesus
and I grew up together. In the home I grew up in, there was Mum and Dad and
Jesus, and me, and, later, my brother and my sister. And Jesus was as real, as
solid, as my parents, even if invisible to the eye or silent to the ear. That
didn’t prevent me from seeing or hearing him, because, well, children have yet
to be limited to such a narrow world. My world was his world, my timeline, my
place, when and where I was folding back to him, my friend. We had adventures,
got into (and out of) scrapes together. From before I have conscious memories,
I have stories from my parents. One time, they were hosting a student house
party, a house full of students due to be sleeping on the floors, and there was
a flood in the neighbourhood. The water level was rising, up the steps, about
to spill over, into the house, onto the floors. We were an inch from disaster.
And, I am told, I stood in the doorway, in my nappy, and told the water to go
down, in the name of Jesus. And it did. At that very moment, some streets away,
some men managed to unblock a storm drain, and the waters ran away. That was
the mechanics of the miracle. But it was a miracle, just one of the scrapes
Jesus and I got into and out of again. Best friend ever.
It’s meant to be a love story. It’s meant to find us
where we are, perhaps a life that hasn’t turned out as we had expected and
sweeps us up in good news. There are plenty such stories around us, just ask
those who have risked their lives to belong to Jesus. What about you? What
first attracted you to Jesus? And, this Christmas, might you rediscover him all
over again?
No comments:
Post a Comment