Thursday 20 December 2018

Blue Christmas

Address for Blue Christmas service 21st December 2018

With many thanks to Pastor Jennie Lee for the kind invitation to preach at this service.


Those of us here tonight all know the feeling. We’ve been invited to a party and we just don’t feel like celebrating. We turn the radio on and it’s blasting out ‘Rudolf the red nosed reindeer’ and we just want to throw it across the room. Our colleagues are wearing silly jumpers and putting tinsel anywhere they can wrap it, and you just want to be quiet, away from the noise and the fuss and what feels this year like very fake jollity. Don’t they know how tired I am? Don’t they know that I don’t want to be merry?
And anyway, all that Victorian Christmas carol nonsense doesn’t help anyone. None of it was cute, Jesus definitely did cry – he was a real baby, and babies cry. Mary and Joseph no doubt had as many sleepless nights as any other parents, not helped by Joseph losing his job and his home when the Roman occupying army forced him to move to Bethlehem from Nazareth where he’d found work. The real story of this child being born was very tough. It involves homelessness, fear, being made a refugee, poverty, rejection, and terrible loss. We don’t tell it that way, because we don’t want to upset people, or to frighten the children, or to put them off. Instead, December is a series of sweet nativities and carol services, mixing folk stories like Santa with a gilded truth, and however lovely that all might be, perhaps in the midst of it the real truth can get lost, and the vital hope of the story is buried under the glitter and the tinsel.
In a time of trouble and confusion for the nation of Judah, the prophet Isaiah told his king that a sign of coming troubles would be the birth of a child, and that child would be called Emmanuel. The word Emmanuel translates as ‘God with us’, and as Isaiah unfolded his words (which we find in Isaiah 8), he makes it clear that God is with us is a real presence of god in the tough times. The times when everything around us seems to be going wrong because of the selfishness of the nation. god won’t prevent us from making the choices we want to make, because he gave us free will. But when our choices lead to war, to hardship, to opposition, he is with us. Right in the middle of it all.
The story of the birth of Jesus is the story of God with us. God with us in poverty. In homelessness. In loss of life. In times of fear and of anxiety. God, present with us in the worst that the world can do to us. Not waving a magic wand and making it alright – because if God kept doing that, we’d just become a bunch of puppets, and our lives would be valueless. God loves us so much that he gave us the choice, the freedom, to live for ourselves – and the big risk God took was that meant he left us free to choose bad things. He left the world free to contain bad things. Choice and control over our own lives, means that it isn’t always good. Mary and Joseph knew that as they ran, horrified, terrified, desperately sad, to escape the soldiers who wanted to kill their son, and who killed other people’s sons – and please understand that in a close-knit society, children would have died who were Jesus’ cousins, or who were born to friends.  God didn’t protect himself from the bad that is in the world, he came into it and lived though it in the same way that we do.
When Jesus was grown, and travelling the country calling people back to his father, asking people to change from their selfish ways to follow God who loves us, he made an invitation. ‘Come to me’, he said, ‘all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’
Remember that the man who offers that invitation is Emmanuel. God with us – God present in the things that make us weary. God offering not to take away the burden – that might not be possible – but to share the weight of it. God who knows what a burden feels like because he has carried them himself. Come to the man who lives right in the midst of our troubles with us – because he does get it. He doesn’t ask us to party when we don’t feel like it, just because it’s Christmas. He offers us a place to stop, and rest. To lean our heads on his shoulder and let the tears out if we need to. He offers to listen. And this is the deep listening of someone who has been there. Someone who has experienced grief and sees ours. Who has experienced pain and loss, and knows what is in our hearts.
And as we rest in Jesus, that is when the miracle of God with us can change us. God has a big purpose in coming to be with us, here, in the middle of the earth’s troubles. Jesus explained it to his friend Nicodemus: God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
This world, with its wonderful love, and beauty and joys, with its heartbreaking losses and meanness and pain, is not the end of the story. Jesus, God with us, lived, and died, and rose again and shows us the way to the place that he came from. Jesus opens the doors of heaven to everyone who believes in him. He offers forgiveness, and shows us how to live well. We have a greater hope, and as we rest in Jesus, that hope can enter our hearts. It is a real, solid hope. It’s not glitzy, not offering a fake promise – it isn’t a folk story like Santa that we’ll grow up to find isn’t true. It’s there, beneath all the packaging, behind all the loud music – Jesus, God with us, sharing our troubles now, and leading us to a real hope. Isaiah tells us, in Isaiah 11 that Emmanuel’s ‘place of rest will be glorious’. He tells us that the people who walk in darkness will see a great light.
If today you feel you are one of those walking in darkness, hold on to that hope. You will see a great light, You do have a real hope. And all the while you wait for it, God is with us, in the midst of us troubles, offering to share the burden, and to give us rest.