Christmas 2014

I am sure many of you are familiar with the movie “A Christmas Story” – I am also sure many, many sermons have started with that very sentence. It was my husband’s grandmother’s favorite movie, something which I put down to sheer sentimentality until I started thinking about things a little more slowly. There is something in that movie about the gathering up and in of the characters, of their hopes, their fears – of the playing off of the members of the family against each other – and, in the end, the fact that simply being together, even in a slightly unlikely place (and I won’t spoil it if you have not seen it) is good enough. Perfection is not necessary and stupid things happen, we know they are going to happen and people love each other anyway.

During Advent we have been invited to a journey which considers some of those themes of real humanity – the fact that we would often rather wander in circles than in straight lines – or at least dodge off on frustrating tangents. But somehow even with all that distraction which we subject ourselves to, we end up here, with Mary and Joseph and some shepherds and various others who have journeyed alongside us or somewhere nearby and we see something which we are meant to see, which is meant for us, which is God’s great gift, in God’s own time.

St. John Chrysostom, a great early saint of the Church, once said that the purpose of saying thank-you to God was not to change God, but rather to draw ourselves closer to God. By saying thank-you we become more aware of who God really is for us, of who God really is at all. Perhaps the same might be said of these great feasts of the Church – after all, really, what is the point, year after year, of telling the same story, of walking the same path, of singing the same carols. Is it not, year after year, to become ever more aware of who this Christ child really is, of who God really is, of what this wonderful night really means.

And in understanding who God really is, more and more through each cycle of each Church year, we come to understand more and more who we might be. That is why I started with the Christmas Story – the people there are not neat and tidy – they are full of contradictions, of selfish desires, there are pieces of dishonesty, perhaps confusion  but there is also underneath all of that a whole lot of love. People just trying to be people the best way they know how.

And isn’t that all any of us are trying to do – just to be who we are the best way we know how?

You see, sometimes we turn Jesus into a picture postcard sort of savior – we make Bethlehem a sort of snowy gentle place that could not really exist because if it really existed we would have to engage with that child in a manger and that scares us half silly. But what scares us half silly – God? Does God who made us and loves us and wants us to be who we can most be scare us or does another picture scare us – a picture which someone has painted of a God who is frightening – a picture of a God who is, perhaps, frightened of us, of our ability to think, to be different, to walk away – a picture of a God who really does need us to say thank-you – who really does need us to affirm Him or else he withers away into nothingness.

And that sort of God really is not God at all, that sort of God is very small – very easy to box up and put on a shelf, because the scary God has a shelf-life together with all the other monsters and fairies which we grow out of eventually.

But what if this is true? What if the only purpose of this, here and tonight, what if your only reason for being here is adoration? What if all you get out of it is to understand God better, to have more light poured into your life? What if all you get to do is to look at the Christ child and say wow!

Of course if you do that you will find one or two things which you might just want to tweak about the way you are living – you might not want to yell quite so loud at the guy who cuts you up on the way home, you might not want to  simply live for today, you might want to refocus, because if you really look, if you really allow yourself to see Jesus born in Bethlehem, of you can leave the scary God on the shelf and see the God of love who is made human tonight then that is life changing, life challenging.

But it is also life embracing. It allows you to be a person – a whole person who loves life – who is still working on being better – who does not get everything yet. It allows you to return to this place again and again, to ask questions and not need to have all the answers in three word sentences, or any word sentences.

This baby, this evening, this Christmas is real but it is also hidden, it is mysterious – how does God pour all of Godself into a tiny baby – do you know? Do I know? Of course not.

How does God put up with me? Or you? I don’t know that either?

But I know that God does – and God wonders and glories in this amazing cast of characters which God has set for the world in which we live. In this moment of Jesus’ birth we are gathered together with all our hopes, fears, joys and sorrows – all that we are and all that we are becoming and invited just to wonder for a moment – just to ponder that this really is – in the most unlikely and amazing of places – right here and right now.