Carol service - December 17th. The difference Christmas makes

Jesus was born into a world marred by violence, oppression and terrorism. It was a world with many injustices in which too many were excluded from the good life.

Next week, we celebrate that coming in our world that is marred by violence, oppression and terrorism. Ours is a world with many injustices in which too many are excluded from the good life.

Too often at Christmas, we are seduced by idyllic imagery to take our eyes off the radical nature of God taking flesh in our world. And is there not a danger that Christmas has become increasingly seen through comfortable Victorian aspirations rather than through the cutting edge of the Gospel accounts.

For a start, it is a story that involves pain. Think for a moment of Mary, a young female probably in her early teens. Pregnant without a satisfactory explanation for those who would look at her accusingly. So young yet now in danger of not just losing her dreams of a happy married life with Joseph but confronted also with shame and even the possibility of forfeiting her life. And then there is Joseph. Doubtless he is the object of much scorn and derision. And such mockery will go on doubtless for many years. We do not know how long Joseph lived. After the time when a 12 year old Jesus was accidently left behind in the Temple of Jerusalem, we hear no more of him. We can but assume that he died sometime in the next 20 years. But for Mary, we know that pain was to be a companion for many more years. She would see Jesus mocked and at times find his words to her hard to bear when she sought to rescue him from conflict. Ultimately as Luci Shaw writes in her poem “Mary’s Song” she must see her Son torn.

And yet this story of pain is a sign of God bringing a healing into our world. Too often, the Gospel has been captured by the powerful to reinforce the status quo in our world. But the coming of Christ is far from a message of comfort to the systems of domination in our world. Mary on her visit to cousin Elizabeth, realises this. In her song, the Magnificat, she sees the child in her womb as the one who will continue God’s transforming work in the world. He is the one who will tear down rulers from their thrones whilst lifting up the humble. He is the one who will fill the hungry with good things whilst sending the rich empty away. In the child whom she carries, she sees the signs of a great reversal in our world.

And the evidence of this is found in the people who were the first recorded visitors of Baby Jesus. We need to know that Jesus was born into a society that knew how to exclude. Think of South Africa under appartheid and you will recall how race was a means of exclusion until the miracle of Nelson Mandela. In the time of Jesus, Israel in the name of God, used not just race as a means of exclusion but also gender, religious background, working practices and disabilities.

But those first visitors to Jesus were precisely the outcasts whom the system sought to keep in their place. Shepherds were the ritually unclean who were kept on the fringe of the Temple. But more was to follow. The magi were foreigners, you know the type of people that the Sun so often ruminates against and more than that their religion was back to front for they were probably Zoroastrians coming from what is now Iraq. And then, when Jesus is taken to the Temple for the appropriate rites, we meet the sort of people often thought of as insignificant, Simeon and the the woman Anna. Do you get it? It was the outsiders of the world into which Jesus was born who are to be found in the first celebrations whilst King Herod takes on a part akin to a pantomime villain.

And in the life that follows, Jesus will go on breaking down the barriers. He will give hope and dignity to the poor and powerless whilst many of the politically, economically and religiously powerful, will find his teachings hard to take and some will even plot to kill him.

But it to a world with places of darkness and of animosity that Jesus comes. And in the darkest of places, Jesus with his Kingdom, offers a new vision. One of my favourite Christmas Carols is “Silent Night.” In a powerful song written forty years ago, entitled “Silent Night/7 O’clock News, Simon and Garfunkel illustrated this. It begins with a melodic singing of the Carol before an increasingly loud edition of the 7 O ‘Clock News comes on. It’s News of violence including the Vietnam War becomes a part of an interplay with the message of heavenly peace. And yet it is to such a world that Jesus came. The same carol had also had an impact ninety two years ago during the First World War. On the first Christmas of that bloody conflict, it being one of the few Christmas carols known to both Germans and British, it was sung from opposing trenches, leading to what became known as the Christmas truce which continued in some places for quite a time before the opposing High Commands chose to drown out the message of peace.

But in 2006, the message of Christmas cannot be stifled. It continues to challenge us to seek the ways of peace. It continues to challenge us when our practices and words exclude rather than include. And it does so with the essential message that people of all races, genders and backgrounds are valued by God. And if the stories of Jesus living amongst us do not get that message across to us, the surely the ultimate act of self giving by that Baby of Bethlehem some thirty odd years later should.

For as Mary says in Luci Shaw’s poem;

“For him to see me mended
I must see him torn.”

And to understand his coming to Bethlehem, we need to see his being torn for each and every member of the human race as being a part of the reason for his coming at Christmas.

A tough thought perhaps as we prepare to celebrate but it is an imperfect world that needs the good news that Christ brings.


This sermon was preached at Alwington Methodist Church Carol service