“What to do with Christmas at a time like this? A Universal Christmas”

Karen Sloan 25/12/2021

Readings - Luke 2:1-1, Matt 2:1-12, John 1:1-5

When I was thinking about today, another Christmas and another Christmas sermon, I couldn’t help but look at what I have said before.  And I realised that quite a few years ago I told you about my friend Nazar whose was a refugee in Australia for over 7 years, before going back to Pakistan.  So I want to give you a bit of an update as a Segway into today.  He left Pakistan because he converted to Christianity and his life was threatened, but in the time he has been away Covid has decimated his village and the villages around it, his wife has died as have many of his family, and life has become very hard.  Nazar returned to Pakistan because there was really nothing else to do, Australia would not give him permanent residency or even a visa to work so there was no real future.  Yet while here in detention and even when in the community he had a dream of helping his fellow villagers back home to survive and prosper, as did his wife.  And he has followed up on that dream since returning.

As I said, his village and the surrounding villages have been ravished by Covid along with poverty at a level we fail to understand.  Suddenly survival is paramount, and worries about his safety have dissipated.  In fact Nazar is now organising food and preparing a huge meal for as many people as possible, as often as possible, using money supplied by supporters like us here and elsewhere.  You can see from  the pictures, the way they do it. These are from his most recent effort only a few days ago. He and his helpers, his niece and uncle and others, fed 300-400 people, in villages that don’t even have running water. It’s incredible really, the forgiveness he shows, and the compassion he displays even after all this time. 

What Nazar has given me is a gift this Christmas time.  A gift that shows me what we can do, that even when we are so far away we can make a difference in the wider world. And what love can do, even when life has dealt us so many setbacks. Nazar’s open and forgiving heart has been a humbling lesson to me.

Yet this gift also makes me feel a little bit more unsettled.

There are gifts and there are gifts. 

I often feel caught between two worlds at Christmas time.  The secular world with its tinsel, and gifts and family, which I love,  and the religious world, which wants to proclaim Christmas as a holy and sacred time.

What to say and what to do? In 2021!

Well, while Christmas was not celebrated fully until the 18th century and for early Christians only from the 4th century, after adopting a pagan festival called, Sol Invictus, I feel at this moment we all need Christmas,  secular and sacred.  Or more correctly what the birth stories of Jesus of Nazareth bring to us.

For they transmit some very deep and universal truths, not just for those who lived 2000 years ago, but for us today.  They say so much about how we are to live in the world and with each other, and about God if we sit still long enough to listen.  And so much about a man who brings this God alive to us, even in the 21st century.

But we need to really understand the stories and not take them at face value, for they are not meant to be literal. I want to suggest that these stories are so much more than a set of facts, which we regurgitate every year and then forget. Or worse still discount as being unbelievable.

I have spent many a Christmas day sermon, and even recently did a special series on what the Christmas means for progressive Christians,  talking about the birth stories of Jesus.  How they only appear in 2 of the 4 gospels, how they reflect in miniature the world Jesus lived in, how they were written a long time after his death and how they have different accounts, representing both the time they were written and who they were written for.

Someone asked me at the series, why ministers don’t say these sort of things in their sermons on Christmas day and I just about choked.  I come from a long line of ministers who try to look at what lies beneath these stories.  Because that’s what they are, stories, deep and powerful stories.

They are not history, but rather the birth stories are myths, beautiful but actually quite subversive myths.  

As Keith Rowe says, myths are the mirrors in which we see what we might become. They represent a way of human knowing that can be placed alongside scientific knowledge as two complementary pathways into life’s truth. They don’t have to be literally true to be true!

They give us insights we don’t see until we really see!

While both gospel accounts are full of earthly things, and some mystical things who is the child at the centre?  The Gospel of Matthew describes him as Emmanuel, God with us.  Jesus is at the centre of the story, the character extraordinaire.  A revelation to us about where God is to be found and who God is 

This is the essence of the stories. A universal message.

For even in our cynical, secular world, it seems to echo a strange and beautiful and evocative call.  Where is God? Tell us about your God.

As Keith Rowe suggests,

“There are no facts upon which we can say for certain that God is with us or  that God even is, but over the centuries those who have taken the stories of the birth of Jesus and the life of Jesus into their hearts and imaginations have been changed.  And maybe they have glimpsed this God”. 

Not a God in the sky, not a God who intervenes in human affairs every now and again, but a presence hidden in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world, as Frederick Buechner would say.  A presence found in all of life, from the smallest molecule of the universe to the complicated but beautiful creatures we have become. A presence found in Jesus.

The reading today from the Gospel of John speaks of this.  We hear what the early Christians heard. Jesus has come into the world to reveal God’s light and life.

So the birth stories are not really about a baby at all but about a man, called Jesus and about his life in God and in the world. 

They are about finding God in a human Jesus, who lived and died in 1st century Judea, but who more than anyone since has shown a new way to live with one another.  A way of love, grounded in the earthy world that he knew and in the indwelling spirit of God that guided him.  A kingdom of love, compassion, forgiveness and deep joy irrespective of race, religion, class, gender and age.  Where everyone was to be included and no one went without. A kingdom of justice.

The stories of the poor shepherds who were the first to hear of the birth, of a defenceless baby, of parents who were refugees, of a smelly stable, and animals and women and foreigners and angels reflect Jesus’s life and teachings in miniature. An inclusive life. One that so challenged the authorities of the day, the Roman Empire, but also some of the religious leaders that he was ultimately killed. Instead of power and violence and injustice and exclusion, hallmarks particularly of the Empire, we get a Jesus who was a man for others.  He taught and demonstrated that to find meaning in life one must learn to live for others. It is a message that resonates with the lives of all human beings everywhere, not just those in the 1st century.

So what do we do with Christmas in 2021? What do we do with the message the birth stories represent. That Jesus represents.

The Church and the world are at a crossroads today.  Actually has been for quite a while.  We are at a Kairos moment, a crisis hour, when new possibilities need to emerge out of the old.  We could just stay in our protected buildings or reach out knowing that the world is still full of suffering and grief, of injustice and cynicism, of fear and war and death. Perhaps we are being called to take back the voice and way of Jesus, and gather together as one. Because many of us ask, where is the humanity, where is the love and compassion. In our world, in our city.  Where is the hope?

I believe our hope lies in the message of Jesus. And the God we meet in him. Not some otherworldly God confined to the outer reaches of our reality but the life force that surges through all living things, that drives us to be better than we are, more loving, more compassionate and more forgiving.   Our hope lies in people touching and connecting to God’s spirit in ways that make a difference to everyone.  And by doing so, living the way of Jesus in the world. Ordinary, everyday people, like Nazar , a 65 year Pakistani man with health problems, who just wants to feed people.

But not just Nazar. People I have seen this week, this month, this year, here in Australia. Who battle fires, protecting the homes and livelihoods of others, who care for the homeless and those without food and shelter, who care for the sick and dying in our hospitals, who call for action on climate change, real action, who donate money and time for those marginalised and alone, even those they haven’t met, and those who try to change the status quo by advocating, protesting and generally being annoying to our politicians.  Let’s continue to pester them!  

But before you dismiss these acts as too hard, or I’m too old or young, too sick or don’t have enough courage think again.

Even small acts of kindness and compassion make a difference, and I feel sure you have experienced these as well this week.  Kindness from strangers or from friends who support and help us, communities that look outside themselves to others, all of these acts of kindness make a difference to us.  Just maybe you have been the person who has given rather than received, because that is also a gift.. 

Whether people are from a church or not, whether sacred or secular, today our hope lies in the transformation possible in the everyday moments of life by ordinary people.  Moments that reveal God as ever present.  Our hope is not about wishful thinking or false promises, but is about commitment.

As Martin Luther King has said, “hope comes in many forms, mostly not supernatural.  Rather in the shape of people, people helping people. God is found in the midst of this action, not separate from it.”

This is the promise and the provocative challenge of Jesus.

So today let us not push Christmas aside but celebrate the Christmas season, all of us, with renewed vigour, giving ourselves space to be warmed by the light and love of God. For God is still here, working within all of creation and in you and me and in all people everywhere,  in our precarious and complicated world.

The only gift required is ourselves.  

Amen