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.

Resurrection

4th November                    1 Corinthians 15

Resurrection

Faith and hope will one day be unnecessary gifts, for we will see and know what now we believe and trust and hope in. But for now, our faith and our hope are essential, which is why St Paul ranks them among the three most important gifts of the spirit, alongside the one gift that lasts into eternity, love. Our faith and hope are not about what is now, but about what has been – the life and teaching and resurrection of Jesus - and about what is to come – the resurrection of the dead, our own life beyond this one.

People found this difficult even in the first generation, when witnesses were still living who saw Jesus in his lifetime, and who witnessed his return to life after crucifixion. They still find it difficult today. Astonishingly, folk myths take hold and are spoken of as if they were truths, taught to children as if they were more comforting than the truth. But how can it be comforting to be told that Grannie has become a star in the sky, when any child knows that stars are superheated gas balls set massive distances from each other on their lonely orbits. How can it be helpful to tell a child that Old Mr Jones has gone to become an angel? It isn’t true, and so it doesn’t prepare them to handle the actual truth. It seems when it comes to death, people either avoid the truth by indulging in sentimental storytelling, or when imagination and faith fail completely, by insisting that death is the end, that there is nothing beyond it. Because we do not at this time see the resurrection of the dead, many people deny it.

In Corinth there was a powerful group of people within the church who insisted that there was no resurrection. You live, you die, that’s the end of it. Paul, Apollos, Peter and all the others who had led churches in Corinth and taught the stories of Jesus, including of his resurrection from the dead, they were wrong. And so the authority, leadership and teaching of Christian leaders was completely undermined and the faith they taught utterly devalued. And yet these unbelievers continued to consider themselves part of the church, and as they spoke out they damaged the church more and more. Paul wondered why they bothered, because if they were right, and he was wrong, then ‘let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!’

If you don’t believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, or that we can be raised from the dead, then what you do in church is a waste of time. Paul knows, and offers lots of witness statements to back himself up, that Jesus did rise. But if you choose not to believe that Jesus rose, then it follows that his death either wasn’t real or was the end for him. In either case, his teaching, his actions, the miracles, all become meaningless. And if Jesus is meaningless, then so is the rest of the story. If he didn’t rise from the dead, you won’t rise from the dead. And if that’s the case, why are you in church? Go and party, or have a lie in, or go shopping, because nothing in church makes any sense if don’t believe in everything that Jesus is.

Paul was pretty frustrated by this group of effective unbelievers who were exercising a lot of influence within the church and undermining the faith of others. You can see this frustration in the outburst: Come back to your senses! (v34). Paul knew that some of those who denied the resurrection would try to justify themselves by demanding a description of what life after death looks like. They’d see it as a clever question, because of course no one knows what life after death looks like. None of us has seen it, other than those first witnesses of Jesus, which is why it is a matter of faith and hope. Paul’s frustration shows again as he exclaims: ‘Foolish question!’

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

But then Paul offered an answer to the question which has been definitive for Christians ever since. Let’s look at it this way. Imagine for a moment that you’ve never seen a flower seed or bulb before. You know, because you’ve been told, that if you put it in the ground, it will grow. But what might you expect that to mean? Becoming a bigger flower bulb perhaps? But no, the seed or bulb destroys itself. Apparently, the seed no longer exists. In its place there are roots, and a stalk or leaves. Eventually in the place where you buried the seed or bulb you find something quite, quite different. Could you have imagined it? From just seeing a bulb, could you have imagined a bright, golden narcissus? A narcissus is so very different from a bulb, isn’t it? And this is Paul’s point. The life of the resurrected is brighter and bigger, more colourful, more vivid than we can possibly imagine right now. It is as like the lives we currently live as the flower is to the bulb. The one emerges from the other, but the seed must die in order for the plant to emerge. Our current life is a mortal one, as mortal as Adam. Our future life is eternal, everlasting and spiritual – like our risen Lord Jesus. Now we are like Adam, then we will be like Jesus, and it will be indescribably wonderful!

What Paul describes is far more hopeful and far more lovely than the strange stories that people imagine bring comfort to children or even to themselves. He offers us something to hope for, a glorious end to the life of faith. Without this hope, being part of church is a waste of time, but with it, everything that we do when we worship, when we pray, when we spend time reading our Bibles and getting to know God better, is a preparation for the life to come. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory over death and over faithlessness through Jesus Christ our risen Lord!