| It’s Christmas, still. The world outside has cleared the decorations. But here in Church Christmas goes on until the 2nd of February. Copyright St Elisabeths.
It’s Christmas, still.
And what a Christmas this has been. We’ve celebrated the ancient story of the birth of Jesus with the tender old carols. And, almost as we sang, we learned a new word: Tsunami. Tidal Wave. Disaster. 150,000 people dead. Others terribly injured. Entire towns and villages lost.
And yes, we’ve organised appeals and given aid, as Christians should.Copyright St Elisabeths.
But for many, this Christmas has been a time of questioning, a time when the ancient stories have been held up to the cold light of the darkest days. Is this God for real? Can a God, whose nature and name is Love, fail to act, allow this to happen? Can this loving God’s creation be so unsafe and unstable and unreliable and insecure?
I believe we can affirm today that God is real, that the ancient stories are still worth telling, that God is love, and that the world is wonderful.
And how, you ask, and why?Copyright St Elisabeths.
First, because there is nothing new in this. Tectonic plates have always moved, there have always been earthquakes and eruptions and all kinds of natural disasters.
The difference is that today we know about them, and we know about them fast.
Before the discovery of electricity, world events moved on a slower stage. It took weeks, months, for news to be communicated. Now it happens in minutes.
There are disasters. There always have been. But now we know about them through the news.
The trouble is that we have little control over the news we hear. 150,000 people dead is newsworthy. Yet 30,000 people die every day from the effects of poverty. That, it seems, is not newsworthy.
Your closest and dearest dies an horrific death from cancer as you watch at the bedside. That is not newsworthy. But for you it can be a life-changing experience.
It is not, it seems, newsworthy that there is suffering in the world. And there always has been. All the time. Every day. And the way we see God has always had to account for suffering. Always. Yes, everything we have ever said about God or believed about God has, if we’re honest, been about a God who somehow exists whilst suffering continues.
“If we’re honest”. The trouble is we are often not honest. The trouble is that many religious people today lead privileged lives with good jobs and healthy life-styles and wealth enough to immunise themselves from many pressures. And they spin their little tales “Oh, I was on my way to Church and ran out of petrol, so I just prayed, and God got the car running again.”
Yes, I’ve heard that said. And it really is so much rubbish. And I’m rather glad it is. You see, if it was true, if God did this sort of thing, if God performed these little miracles for well-meaning people, and yet didn’t stop the earthquake which caused the tsunami, this God would be a monster and entirely not worth believing in; a most unjust God.
But, hey, it’s Christmas, still.
And the God we believe in has, at Christmas, shown himself to us as a vulnerable child, a baby even. This is the one of whom Isaiah speaks:
“He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.”
God comes to us in Jesus, yes: this is how God is, a weak and defenceless baby, born in poverty to an unmarried mother. This is how God comes to us.
And God comes to us not to fill our tanks with petrol when we’ve forgotten or not bothered to buy any. God comes to us to share with us in our emptiness and fill us with his Spirit. God comes so that God knows, first-hand, what human living is like.
God comes to us as risk.
Yes, God risks loving us and asking us to love in return.
And love can never be forced, demanded, legislated for. Love always, only arises from freedom.Copyright St Elisabeths.
And so the world God made goes its own way, evolves, develops, grows old, moves, changes, is free.
The world is free and we are free, free to make choices to love or hate, to believe or deny, to answer God’s call or ignore it.
Love always, only, arises from freedom.Copyright St Elisabeths.
God comes to us in Jesus; God shares our lives in Jesus, God suffers with us in Jesus.
Yes, this Jesus has been down into the deep waters of death, taking the sin of the world with him. On the third day, at Easter he was raised in triumph.
When we are baptised we go into those waters with him; we are saved through God’s grace in Jesus Christ, by faith.Copyright St Elisabeths.
Symbolically and sacramentally this was first done for us at baptism. But daily we need to renew those vows and promises, surrendering our selfishness and self-centredness to the goodness of God.
So often we privatise out faith; we make it into a little personal game of demands and requests: “O God, please do this.” “O God, please do that.”
Faith is about much more than demands and requests. Faith, adult, grown-up faith is about surrender to the risk that God is real, surrender to God’s will for us and for the world. Faith is about allowing God to use us to build his kingdom here on earth.
No matter how despairing our situation may be, no matter how awful the goings-on in the world, God has already shown how his kingdom can be built.
No matter how despairing our situation may be, no matter how awful the goings-on in the world, God has already shown how that new life is here, available for all, in Jesus Christ.
* * * * *
It’s very easy to become disillusioned and disheartened as we listen to and watch the news in the world around us; and when we experience the unloving actions of others, or as we reflect on our own lack of love and charity.
Our disillusionment could be total but for the fact that God holds out before us all the hope and change and growth made possible because of Jesus.
At Jesus’ baptism the Holy Spirit descended upon him, commissioning him for his ministry. So, too at our baptisms we were commissioned for lives of witness and service as members of one body together. And God gave us his strength, his Holy Spirit, to be our inspiration for our common life together. God gives us this Eucharist, where, in bread and wine, he comes to us and strengthens us to be kingdom-builders, agents of his will in our world.
Today, as we renew our baptismal promises at the font, we can commit ourselves anew to building that kingdom of love and justice.
This is the real job of the Church, the true meaning of our existence, the reason God has put us here: so that his kingdom grows and others are brought to know his love.
At the font, all those years ago, each one of us was baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
We may have let that fire become dull. We may have tried to quench that Spirit and force it into old routines. But God will not let us put it out.
Constantly, through the sacraments, through his living Word, through fellowship with one another, he gives it fuel and fans it to flame until the day when we can contain its heat no longer and it bursts out through our lives into the lives of all we meet.
In a few moments we will stand round the font and renew our baptismal commitment. That renewal, like baptism itself, can be one of two things. It can be a mere routine, the sort of thing we do in Church a couple of times a year, after Christmas, and at Easter.Copyright St Elisabeths.
Or it can be - if we let it - a real encounter with the living God, a time when we allow God to enter our lives anew, to re-energise us with his Spirit.
It’s Christmas, still. A new cycle of birth begins. There’s a very real sense in which today can be the start of a new life for us, if only we give God the space - if you like, the permission - to take our will and make it his own. Amen.
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