St Mary Magdalene, Barkway

Midnight Eucharist 2006

Isaiah 52.7-10; Hebrews 1.1-4; John 1.1-14 

How we communicate and interact with one another in this world is so important.

Children often make us laugh with their misunderstandings, many of which come down to adult failure to communicate something in a way that children can understand. 

Here’s some examples I’ve found of things going just slightly wrong. 

At a school in Derby three six-year-olds were playing the wise men in the school nativity play. As they came up to Mary and Joseph at the stable, the first one handed over his present and said, “Gold.” The second presented his gift and said, “Myrrh.”  

The third one then gave them his treasure and said, “And Frank sent this.” 

At another school, a little boy was really disappointed about not being chosen to play Joseph in the school nativity play. He was given the role of the innkeeper instead, and over the weeks leading up to the play he plotted his revenge.

The day of the performance came. Mary and Joseph came to the inn and knocked on the door. The innkeeper opened the door a crack and looked at them coldly. “Can you give us a room for the night?” asked Joseph. Then the innkeeper flung the door open wide, beamed at them and said, “Come in, come in! You can have the best room in the hotel!”There was a pause. But Joseph was a quick thinker. He looked over the innkeeper’s shoulder, then turned to Mary and said, “We’re not staying in a dump like that. Come on, Mary, we’ll sleep in the stable!” 

At an east London nativity play all was going well until the angel appeared and told the little girl playing Mary that she was going to have a baby. “But how can this be?” said Mary, “Since I am a Viking?” And one I heard myself at a play this year, which made me giggle: a small shepherd claiming that they had come to wash up Baby Jesus. 

Sometimes our miscommunications are as a result of different culture.

 A English family sent a Christmas box to a poor family in Romania. They filled the box with presents for the children and lot of Christmas food. They decided that their pièce de résistance would be a Christmas pudding that they had made, with ingredients soaked over weeks in best brandy, with a sprig of holly stuck in the top of it.  

Three months later the family received a letter from the grateful recipients in
Romania. It read:

Dear Friends, Thank you so much for your Christmas box. We loved the tins of food, the chocolates, and the gifts for our children. Thank you also for the plant with the ball of manure underneath. We have been watering it for the last 12 weeks, but sadly it has died.

 Our readings tonight are all, in some way or another, connected with communication, but this time it is not people communicating with each other that we are thinking about but God communicating with humanity. 

God had tried to get his message through to his people before through the prophets but no one had heeded his call to obedience and to follow him.   Our reading from Hebrews pointed this out: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets.” A small boy observed his parents about to destroy an ants’ nest by pouring boiling water over it. He raced down the garden to warn the ants what was going to happen; he motioned with his arms for them to run away, shouting at them to move. Of course, they didn’t understand and were not able to avoid the hot shower that was heading their way. The boy concluded that the only way he could have been understood was if he had become an ant. God is God, and it is right that we cannot understand God since we are human, and the divine would not be divine were it to be wholly understood. But God also has a message that needs communicating to his people, a message of love The boy couldn’t become an ant in order to share his message with the ants. But God could; God became human to share with us the message of love. And God did just that because that message of love is so important for us to hear. The reading from Hebrews continued: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”   

The heart of the Christmas message is that God is here with us. At Christmas, we celebrate God’s coming to dwell among people, ordinary people, people who haven’t had to achieve any special task, or pass any special exam, or make the grade in any other way. God comes to dwell with us as we are.  God longs for us to discover who God really is. There is a message at the heart of our Christmas celebrations, a message for all of us, that God became one of us, to share with us the message of love.  The truth of Christmas is that God chose a humble family to bear his son. In so doing, there is no doubt that Jesus came for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. Those who recognised him at his birth and in his early years came from all layers of society – just think of the contrast between uneducated, probably smelly, shepherds, and rich, wise men. But no one had expected that God’s Messiah would be born in a normal family. No one had expected that he would be born away from home and laid in a manger because the inns were full. So, though the shepherds and wise men recognised Jesus, most people missed him. They didn’t know that the long awaited king had actually turned up.  

John, in our Gospel reading tonight, put it like this: “He was in the world, yet the world did not know him.”  They missed him because he wasn’t what they were expecting. And so often we miss seeing Jesus at work in the world today because it’s not what we are expecting. Our minds tell us that God should be all powerful, that God should not let bad things happen, that God should fit in with what we want God to be like. John begins his story with the words “in the beginning”. To people well versed in the Old Testament, as his first readers would have been that immediately signalled something.   In the beginning were the words that started the story of creation – what we know as Genesis chapter one.

So John is clearly showing that something new is happening, a new form of creation. His story of Jesus’s coming into the world is very different from those of Matthew and Luke who tell us all about Mary and Joseph, about the shepherds and the angels. B

ut what John does in his story, in the way that he tells about Jesus’s coming into the world, is to make us all part of that story too. “To all who received him, to all who believed in his name, he gave the power to become children of God.” 

That includes us. So this Christmas let us think of the child of Bethlehem, but let us reflect too on what his coming means for us: that we too are caught up in the story, we too are children of God.

 God’s message of love was not one of words only, but a message of action. Let us pray that we will grasp the true meaning of that message, and make it part of our lives, not just for Christmas but for our whole lives unto eternity. Amen.

Zephaniah 3.14-20; Philippians 4.4-7; Luke 3.7-18 Those of us who were at the (Reed) service last Monday evening were reminded by the bishop that, although the Church often forgets this, Advent and Lent are to very different times. Lent is first and foremost about penitence and Advent about anticipation. 

And yet, as today’s readings show, we can’t totally remove the idea of repentance from Advent, since that was John the Baptist’s message – as we anticipate Christ’s coming, we are called to repentance.  But let’s anticipate for a moment? What will Christ’s coming bring? If we look at the reading from Zephaniah, we see that it is anticipating a time when God will bring us home.  

What, then, does that mean? We all know that a true home is a place of security, a place where we are free to be ourselves, a place of peace and joy.

 Being at home with God according to Zephaniah is about being with God. It’s a place where the lame and the outcast are welcome. That might seem not very relevant for some of us here this morning, if we’re not lame or cast out from society, but it’s about much more than that. Being lame or being outcast are two kinds of vulnerability; we are all, if we are honest, vulnerable in some way. We might not be lame or an outcast, but we will all have our own weaknesses.  

It was Jesus who said that he came not for those who are well, but for those who are sick, and one thing that the Gospel does for us is to help us recognise where we are not right, where we have weaknesses that need God’s forgiveness or infirmities that need God’s healing. That’s part of the good news, that we don’t have to be strong, powerful, rich, in full health, and so on, to be loved by God and to be received into God’s home. God’s home is for all.  

In God’s home will be gathered people from every race and language and nation, people of every shade and colour, people with physical disabilities, with mental-health and emotional problems, old and young, vulnerable and weak, mourning and in pain, and we anticipate that in God’s home all these things will be made new.  Our race and language, our colour, our vulnerabilities – none of these will make a difference because in God the whole of creation will be restored and renewed, the weak will be made strong, the sick well, the grieving will be comforted, the unloved will become lovely, the dead will live. 

And at that time God will rejoice; God will be glad and will celebrate. For God’s home is a place of joy. The concept of home is something that has been important not just for individuals but for groups of people throughout the ages. Protecting one’s homeland has been a matter of life and death for so many.
Jerusalem has become such an important place in Jewish thought, the place of home, the place where God is. 

But I think that the second part of that is far more important than the first.
Jerusalem can only truly be home when God is there. I think most Christians would agree that being at home in God’s terms is not about being in a particular place but being at home is about recognising that we are with God, being at home is being where God is. And that is not limited by time or space. Think of that great prayer of
St Augustine: “You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.” That restlessness is part of the human condition, but when we are truly at home that will disappear. 

God became home-less that we might have a home. That is part of the message of Christmas; that home is what we anticipate during Advent. Of course, we are waiting for Christmas. We are reminded too that not only are we awaiting Christmas but Christ’s coming again, and when Christ comes again, we shall find our true home. But how will we know whether we are fit for that home. What do we need to do? 

That’s the question people also had for John the Baptist. How can escape the wrath of God and find salvation?  And John’s answers differ from group to group. But underlying them – underlying the demands of generosity – give up your second coat; share your food – of honesty – don’t extort money from people, don’t cheat them – of being thankful for what you have – is a call to justice. God’s justice is not about revenge and retribution, which is sometimes what people mean when they refer to justice. God’s justice is about much more than that. It’s about treating the vulnerable with special care, it’s about honesty and fair dealings with everyone, it’s about generosity of spirit, sharing one’s good fortune, it’s about being thankful with what we have and not always grasping for more. It’s about recognising that other people are made in God’s image and in serving them we are serving God.

Does this sound a bit like something else? It sounds to me like being at home with God. John was a peculiar figure. He was the person on the cusp of the old and new covenants. He was always pointing the way not to himself but beyond to Christ.  

In some ways John the Baptist was homeless – he didn’t really belong anywhere for the sake of God. He was a person on the edge, a person whose task was to point to another. 

John the Baptist’s message was one of justice. But justice has to start with repentance. It is only through repentance that we see ourselves as we are. Repentance, of course, is not just about saying sorry. It’s about turning our backs on what is wrong and living according to the ways of God, the ways of justice and love. And, when we have repented, let us follow Paul’s advice too and rejoice. Let us rejoice in the salvation God brings. Let us rejoice as we look forward to the future that God brings, the future when we shall be truly at home with God. 

Christmas, God in Christ leaving home that we might be brought home at last. G. K. Chesterton reflected on this idea of home, and I shall end our thoughts this morning with one of his poems. 

There fared a mother driven forth
out of an inn to roam;
in the place where she was homeless
all men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
with shaking timber and shifting sand,
grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
than the square stones of
Rome.For men are homesick in their homes,
and strangers under the sun,
and they lay their heads in a foreign land
whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
and chance and honour and high surprise,
but our homes are under miraculous skies
where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
where the beasts feed and foam;
only where He was homeless
are you and I at home;
we have hands that fashion and heads that know,
but our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wife’s tale,
and strange the plain things are,
the earth is enough and the air is enough
for our wonder and our war;
but our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
and our peace is put in impossible things
where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
home shall all men come,
to an older place than
Eden
and a taller town than
Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
to the things that cannot be and that are,
to the place where God was homeless
and all men are at home.