The Christmas story

Holy Trinity Carol Service

AJM December 2005

 

Introduction

Good evening. When does Christmas begin for you? I think for me it’s not when the tree goes up, it’s not when we go Christmas shopping – all those things are just getting ready. It’s really today that Christmas begins, with the choir and the carols. So let me start by wishing you a merry Christmas. And I’d like to offer a special welcome to you if you are a visitor, on behalf of all of us who belong here.

 

Now I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t brought up to go to church. My only contact with the church was the monthly church parade I went to as a Brownie. It was all a bit of a mystery. I remember a talk where the vicar did things with washing up liquid, and not being able to find the hymn numbers, but that’s about it. I remember thinking that it must be really odd to be a vicar – what would it be like to have a job that was all about something that didn’t exist, so that you had to talk about washing up liquid? And then there was Christmas itself. I loved the carols and the tinsel and the Christmas tree lights shining in the darkness. My brother and I used to count Christmas trees in people’s windows. It was quite hard, because you had to remember which were new ones and which you’d already seen.

 

So I want to start by asking, what does Christmas mean to you? The word is simple enough – Christ means Christ and mas means festival. Christmas is the festival of Christ. Maybe for you it means the stuff we’ve already heard in the readings. The story of the nativity, the baby in the manger, the shepherds watching their flocks by night. Or, as we used to sing it, washing their socks by night. In my mother’s generation they used to go on, a bar of sunlight soap came down and glory shone around. Then the other reading, a lot deeper and harder to follow, but basically talking about Jesus as the word of God, coming like light into the darkness. My brother and I could have identified with that, as we counted the Christmas trees shining in the darkened windows.

 

Well, we all know the story. Or at least, we all know how it began. Someone called Jesus was born in a stable just over 2000 years ago. His name wasn’t actually Jesus. In Hebrew it was Yeshua, or Joshua as we would say now. It means, he saves. So - we are meeting to celebrate the birthday of a baby called Joshua, who saves. We don’t know much about it, only really this account in the gospel of Luke. But our children act it out each year, wearing tea-towels on their heads and clutching toy lambs and angel wings. Have you ever wondered why?

 

Well, it can only be because of what happened after that. The nativity story is not the whole story. It’s only the beginning.

 

Let me introduce you to someone. Here he is. What does this photo tell you about him? Who is he? What’s he like? What’s his life been about? What would it be like to meet him? It doesn’t tell you any of that, does it.

 

It’s the same with Jesus, this baby whose birthday we celebrate. Who was he? What was he like? What was his life about? What would it have been like to meet him? We are starting off with a baby Jesus. We all agree there was one. We celebrate his birth. That’s why we’re here. But the baby grew up. Tonight we open the first page of the book. But what’s on all the other pages? How does the story go on? What difference does it make that this baby was born? Who is he to you and to me? I can imagine myself in the story, turning up with a present, a bit of gold or frankincense or myrrh. That’s all quite comfortable. But can I imagine myself meeting the man he turned into? Can I do page 270 as well as page one? Because if I can’t, maybe it’s a bit odd to read page one in the first place – and even odder to keep reading it each year.

 

Who was Jesus?

So who was this Jesus? Well, I think we all have our own ideas. Maybe it depends in part on where we come from, or what age we live in. Let me show you some pictures.

 

·         Victorian Jesus – this is a Victorian image of Jesus, I should think drawn for children. Is this your Jesus? He belongs to the carols, I suppose – gentle Jesus meek and mild, friend of sinners, reconciled, that kind of thing.

·         Handsome Jesus – this might not be where you are coming from, but I call this one the Handsome Jesus. It’s Robert Powell, from a TV film of the life of Jesus. Is this your Jesus, a man in a film, not quite real, belonging to a world that doesn’t seem to quite fit with ours?

 

Well, those are two English images. But many of us are not from England. Let me try you on these:

 

·         Dancing Jesus - this picture is called ‘He came down’, and it’s from Bali in SE Asia. It shows Jesus coming into the life of the believer, pictured as a woman praying. You can see the theme of light and darkness here – the sun shines behind Jesus, and he pushes the demons of darkness to one side and the other. Is this your Jesus, dancing down to meet you?

 

·         Laughing Jesus – this one is from Latin America. Jesus said he came to bring good news to the poor, and when you get good news you laugh, don’t you. Does your Jesus laugh?

 

·         Angry Jesus – but some people don’t think of that page of the story, they think of the pages where he storms into the temple and overturns tables, or where he swears at the religious leaders. This one’s called the Angry Jesus, and it comes from the Philippines. It was painted during the Marcos regime, when life for most people was harsh and unjust. Would your Jesus be angry – angry at injustice and oppression, angry at the way people treat one another, angry at human pain, angry at the way we treat our world?

 

Now those last three are a long way from the baby in the manger, aren’t they. They are grown up Jesuses.

So I want to ask you, who does this baby become for you? If today we are rereading the first page of the story, what happens in the story after that, for you? If you had to draw Jesus, would it be the baby in the manger you’d draw, or would he look different from that? Why exactly are we here tonight?

 

The adult Jesus – what was it like to meet him?

 

I think if I could draw (which I can’t!) I wouldn’t draw Jesus any of these ways. I would draw him in words, and the words would mostly look like this: ?? or this !!! or this *** - kind of Asterix and Obelix words. There you go; and I’d call him The Unexpected Jesus. Who was he? Well, as far as I can see he was whatever people weren’t expecting, and deliberately so.

 

Usually people called him teacher, and probably that’s what most of us would say today. Jesus was a great teacher. He was a man who had a gift for making complex truths simple, for explaining things in story form, who cut through the long words and the technical terms and spoke to ordinary people in ordinary language.

 

But actually if you read the story it doesn’t quite come out like that.

 

Replying to questions with questions

 

Teachers give clear explanations in answer to questions. It’s no use if you’re at school and you ask the teacher a question, and you get back an answer you can’t understand, is it.

 

But with Jesus it was even worse than that. If you asked him a question, chances were he’d just ask you one back. Take this question, asked by an earnest man who was meeting Jesus for the first time:

 

 

Another man had a problem he couldn’t solve. He knew Jesus was a wise man with many followers, so he thought he’d ask for a bit of help.

 

 

The teachers themselves asked him questions. This baby had grown up to do things that were a little out of the ordinary, like heal people and free them from evil spirits. So they asked

 

 

Three nil, I think you’d agree.

 

Replying to questions with stories

 

But Jesus didn’t always reply to a question with a question. Sometimes he told a story or made a comparison instead.

 

·         ‘Why don’t your disciples fast?’ Religious leaders weren’t supposed to laugh and take his followers to parties, but this one did just that. What was the answer?

·         No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old. [Lk 5] Uh?

 

·         ‘How should we pray?’ What would you expect the Son of God to say if you asked that? A bit of helpful advice? Not Jesus. He told a story.

·         Suppose one of you has a friend, and he has a visitor in the night, and no food to give him – he goes and bangs and bangs and bangs on his neighbour’s door till he gets up and gives him some… That’s what prayer is like. [Lk 11]

 

·         OK, let’s try this. ‘What’s the kingdom of God like?’  You’re supposed to be a king, you’re talking about a new kingdom. What’s it like, then, this kingdom?

·         ‘It’s like a grain of mustard seed which a man sowed in his garden, and the birds came and built nests in the branches… It’s like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with 3 measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’ [Lk 13]

 

Eventually even the disciples had had enough. Why do you tell these crazy stories? they asked (Mt 13). What did Jesus say – to make it easier for people to understand? No. According to Matthew he said ‘the reason I speak to them in parables is so that seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen’.  It’s not to help people understand, it’s to make sure that they don’t! Some teacher!

 

Personal encounters

 

Well, maybe it was better if you didn’t ask Jesus any questions at all. What was it like if you just let him make the running?

 

Well, there was this woman he met at a well in Samaria. Give me a drink, said Jesus – breaking the rules, because men didn’t speak to women and Jews didn’t speak to Samaritans in public. You’re not supposed to speak to me, she said. If you knew who I was you’d be the one asking me for water, said Jesus. If you drink my water you’ll never be thirsty again. Go and call your husband. I’m single, she says. Too right, he says, you’ve had 5 husbands and you’re now living with a man you aren’t married to. And by the way, I’m the Christ, the one who saves. She drops the bucket and runs.

 

Or there was the religious teacher Nicodemus. He watched Jesus healing people and performing miracles during the day, and came to see him under cover of darkness. You do this because you come from God, don’t you, he said. Yes, said Jesus. And you, you need to be born again. That means, you need to be breathed on by the Spirit of God. You’re dead. Your life is dry. You need to come alive. Well, Nicodemus went away to think about it. But he comes back later in the story - he was one of the 2 men who took Jesus’s body and buried it.

 

Then there was the blind man. All these stories are told by John, the one who said Jesus was like light coming into the darkness. For the blind man the darkness was real. Jesus put mud on his eyes, and when he washed it off he could see. The religious teachers started a great debate. Who did this? Was he really blind? How did he do it? Prove it! Justify it! The man listens to all this, and submits to their questioning. But eventually he loses patience. Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes! If this man were not from God, he could do nothing!

 

And there were the pig farmers. There was this man who was possessed, or mad, or both. He was living rough in the town cemetery. He had no problem recognising Jesus. Son of the Most High God, he shrieked, leave me alone. How many evil spirits are in you, asked Jesus. Hundreds, he shouted. Jesus told them to leave the man. They said, could they go into that herd of pigs then. Jesus said they could. The pigs threw themselves into the lake. Now you can imagine, foot and mouth disease has nothing on this. The farmers knew one thing and one thing only: they wanted Jesus out of the area. As for the man, he went back home completely normal.

 

Meeting Jesus today

 

Well, that was all a long time ago. Too long ago, perhaps, for us to be able really to imagine it. Did it really happen, or is it just a story? In the city centre, alongside the manger and the lambs, we’ve got figures from Alice in Wonderland, and a giant gingerbread house which seems to have Santa in it instead of Hansel and Gretel. That proves it, doesn’t it? The whole thing is a story, and a children’s story at that - and we’re really all here because it reminds us of our childhoods, of nativities and presents, and angels and lambs.

 

But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe we’ve read on beyond the first few pages of this particular story, and we are here because we know what happened next. Or maybe we’re here just because we know, deep down, that there must be more to life than the humdrum existence normally on offer, and perhaps the answer is to be found in this peculiar tale of a baby called Joshua, born in the Middle East 2000 years ago? Everything’s a story, isn’t it, and we just need to find one that will come real for us. We need a story that’s true, a story that works.

 

Well, does it work? Can we actually get into the pages, or do we have to read them and then put the book down, as if it were a good read, a nice idea, comforting perhaps to know there is a God, but not really much we can do about it? Well, I don’t think so. I think the whole thing about this particular story is that it invites us to be part of it. It invites us to walk into its pages and join in – just as the children walked through the back of the cupboard into Narnia, if you like. And I think there are two doorways into this story.

 

1. The first doorway is the simple, unseasonal fact that this baby grew up. He did some amazing things, things which had never been seen before. He said that he would continue to do those things through those who believe in him, when they prayed in his name through the power of that Holy Spirit he told Nicodemus about. And this is our experience as Christians. It actually does happen. Let me share some examples, all from the last few months.

 

In August Mark and I prayed with a man who had eye problems. He said he was unable to see clearly enough to read except in very bright sunlight. We were standing inside a church building in a place which didn’t have electricity. We prayed for him, asking Jesus to heal him. He felt great pain in his eyes, then it went. He opened a Bible and began to read the words, clearly and easily.

 

In October I prayed with a woman who had an infected 7 inch abdominal wound following a hysterectomy. Seven weeks and it hadn’t even started to heal. We prayed. Four days later she emailed me to say the infection had gone and the wound was down to 2 inches, to the astonishment of the district nurse.

 

Earlier this year Roger and I prayed with a woman who had been having strange feelings of oppression, of something being not right in her spirit. As we prayed, she began to behave like the man who shouted at Jesus that he was full of evil spirits. She shouted. Her voice went harsh and growly. She gave a different name. She fell on the floor and her eyes were rolling. The voice said it was a spirit and it wouldn’t leave. We told it to go. It threatened to go into our rabbit. Well, this sounds crazy. But we remembered the story of Jesus and the pigs, which sounds equally crazy. We told it to get out. It did. And the woman got up and calmly sat back on her chair, saying she had seen Jesus standing in the room beside her. She’s been fine ever since.

 

So these things still happen. They are not frequent, but they are normal. It’s not yesterday’s story, it’s not history. It’s today’s story, and we can be part of it.

 

2. To find the second doorway we have to go back to Jesus himself, and look again at his life and his teaching. Jesus started off life in a stable, sleeping in a pig trough, surrounded by animals and smelly shepherds and with angels zooming about the place. It was a pretty unconventional beginning. We’ve wrapped it up in ribbon and tamed it into children’s nativities and beautiful Christmas trees, but it wasn’t really like that, it was more like being born under an archway at Charing Cross station with an earthquake going on. And his life carried on that way. We tend to live our lives within the limits imposed on us by circumstance, convention, and law. This man turned out to be bothered by none of that. Life at the time he lived was governed by a set of social norms which made it clear what was expected of you at any time in any place. Who could speak to who, in what way, on what occasion. But Jesus seemed to be totally unaware of these rules. Putting it in today’s terms, he spoke to the wrong people – to prostitutes, to street kids, to muslims. He went to the wrong places – wild parties, houses of AIDS sufferers, loan sharks, single women. He didn’t even stick to the rules of nature, never mind society – he rebuked storms, instructed corpses to come out of tombs, relocated whole shoals of fish, and produced coins out of thin air to pay taxes with. He was totally unqualified and yet he presumed to lecture all the top religious dignitaries. And he was so dangerous politically that they thought he was planning to lead a rebellion. Do I look like a revolutionary, that you need to come out with swords and clubs to catch me? he asked when they interrupted his prayers one night.

 

And then there was his teaching, with all its questions and weird stories. Why was it that this so-called teacher was so wild and confusing? Why did he go on about mustard seeds and runaway sons and living water and people with unexpected guests, when he was just being asked simple questions about God? I think the reason Jesus taught the way he did must be because he didn’t want to explain, to make everything neat and tidy; he wanted to break things open, to find the cracks in your reality, to challenge you to think a different way. He wanted to invite you to walk into the story, and make it your own. And if you think about it, we live in a world which wants to explain everything, to package reality, to tell us what we want and what we need, what the rules are and what will make us happy. We live in a world which wants to write the story, and then tell us what our part in it is. Jesus didn’t do it that way.

 

The world he lived in was one of control, of convention, of keeping the rules. They had an occupying army and a set of religious leaders who resisted change. Tradition was good, individual choice was zero. We don’t do it that way any more, do we – at least in this country. For a long time now we’ve tried to understand and manipulate the world we live in, to ask questions, to disturb things, to bring progress. It’s taken us a long way. We’ve done science and we’ve done economics, and we have transformed the West with our technology and our wealth. We’ve invented a whole approach to life which has been called modernism.

 

And yet the more we’ve worked out how to control the world we live in, the more violent and unsatisfied our society has become. Modernism, with all its science and its economics, has left holes in our souls. And so we’re rebelling against it. We’re looking for a different story now, a much more DIY story, a story with room for manoeuvre, a story which isn’t just about science and automated progress but about spirituality and mystery.  We call it postmodernism. Postmodernism has embraced consumerism, for it’s in buying things that we have learnt to express ourselves – that’s our way of having a DIY story. And Christmas has become the biggest consumer festival of all time. But I think there are signs now that we’re moving on, moving towards post-consumerism if you like, beginning to rebel against the idea you can buy it and own it and that’s what life’s all about. It just seems shallow, when there are still babies being born under arches, half the world is starving or killing each other, and when there are only so many things you can spend your money on anyway.

 

And still standing in the middle of all this after 2000 years is this baby. And we are still telling his story, the story of a baby who grew into a man, a man who said the world is not as you think. Let me tell you a different story. Let me reorganise reality for you. Let me ask you the questions. Let me invite you into my  story, instead of you asking me to explain the one that’s all around you.. Well, are we prepared to allow him to do that?

 

There was once a bishop who said, the church needs to trade its traditions for the dreams of its people. So maybe Jesus is asking us a question too, here, now. Why have we come? Are we here to celebrate tradition, or are we here to dream dreams? What are your dreams? Let’s not get stuck at this manger; let’s move on. Let’s dream Jesus. Who was he, this baby? Who is he, this Jesus, for you? Does he dance, laugh, shout? What does it mean to be part of his story? Do you want to be part of his story – or would you rather add him into yours, somewhere in between the crackers and the Christmas pudding? Because this story, you see, this story which starts today – it goes on.

 

Put another way, do you want a vicar who looks like this?

 

Happy Christmas!