1 Samuel 2.18-20, 26; Colossians 3.12-17; Luke 2.41-52 

Those of you who read my letter last month in The Diary will know that I talked about one of my favourite verses in the Bible from Luke chapter two, words uttered by Mary after the visit of the shepherds to the baby Jesus: Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 

Mary must have had a lot of pondering to do. What an amazing nine months she had had.  

First, she meets an angel - not an everyday experience, even for people in the Bible. The angel has that amazing message for her that she is to have a baby. And that this baby will be great and be called the Son of the Most High, and be a king, reigning over Jacob’s house for ever. 

And, then, she’s told that she’s not the only one to be giving birth in the near future. Her relative Elizabeth, an elderly woman, is also to have a baby; Elizabeth whom everyone believed to be barren - a source of great shame for people in biblical times. Much to ponder.  And the story continues, as we all know. Mary’s baby is born, away from home, and placed in a manger because there was room nowhere else. And this humble girl and her husband and baby were visited by shepherds, who had also been spoken to by angels. It’s not surprising that Mary started pondering and reflecting when so much happened to her in such a short space of time. We don’t know much about what happened over the next decade or so. Matthew tells us that wise men visited the holy family and Luke tells us the stories of Jesus’s naming and circumcision and the meetings with Simeon and Anna, but that is pretty much it, until the story we heard in today’s Gospel reading. Presumably Mary kept pondering and reflecting. Luke tells us that the child Jesus grew and became strong, that he was filled with wisdom and that God’s favour was with him. I’m speculating a little now but I assume that as Jesus was growing Mary and Joseph saw him very much as their child. He lived with them and they cared for him, and, because we are not told anything dramatic about Jesus’s childhood, I think we can assume fairly safely that it was a pretty normal childhood for the child of a Jewish artisan of the period.  Mary probably did ponder the events of Jesus’s birth from time to time as he grew, but I imagine that most of her life was focused on keeping home for Joseph and her small son.  But today we get another snapshot of Mary pondering and reflecting. “His mother treasured all these things in her heart.”  She may well have been reminded of the unusual circumstances of his birth as she reflected on this episode in the temple. Jesus was 12, not far off the age of adulthood for Jewish boys. To our modern ears, it seems shocking that parents of a 12-year-old did not know where he was for four whole days. It was only after a day’s travelling that they realised he wasn’t there, and then it took them another three days to find him.  And then, in typical teenage fashion, some things, it seems, never change, Jesus can’t be bothered with welcoming his anxious parents, but greets them with a gentle rebuke - did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house? 

It seems that, at this point, Jesus has a far better understanding of who he really is than his parents. And Mary continues to store up her experiences and thoughts about who Jesus was. What did she have to ponder after this event? There were Jesus’s strange words about being in his Father’s house - did she recall those words from long ago about his being the Son of the Most High? There was the fact that he was with the religious teachers, clearly holding his own, and doing more than that since all who heard him were amazed at his understanding. He had been asking questions of the rabbis, but also giving answers of his own. At this point, Mary had to begin to rethink who he was. And, to a certain extent, that’s something that all parents have to do. As a child grows and matures and becomes more at ease with his or her own identity, parents have to let go of their ideas about who the child is and allow them to be the people they have been created to be by God. Mary’s pondering must have led her to wonder who this child really was. She realised that he wasn’t exactly the person she had thought he was.  And we too are asked to ponder and reflect on our relationship with the Christ-child. If Mary, who knew Jesus as intimately as any human has ever done, needed time and space to reflect and ponder on who he really was, how much more will we need to do so. 

When we lose something, finding it again may well involve some kind of surprise. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, suggests in his Luke for Everyone that part of what Luke was doing in his Gospel was writing for people who had some idea of who Jesus was, but then find he is more elusive than they had first thought. 

When Mary and Joseph finally found Jesus, he didn’t give them the response they were expecting. He hadn’t been worried by his separation from his parents and he didn’t even seem that pleased to see them when they found him. They thought they knew him and they had to reappraise what they knew.

And our relationship with Jesus is also like that. If we never reappraise who we think Jesus is, our faith will not grow and develop. Jesus will surprise us.  If we ever get to the point when we think we really know him, we may then discover that he’s not where we thought. We may look around and see that we have left him behind or that he has raced on ahead of us. Discipleship is, after all, not about following a strict set of rules and regulations but about following a person, and we cannot control the thoughts and actions of others. 

Mary and Joseph assumed, when they left Jerusalem, that Jesus was with them. They took his presence for granted. Do we do that with Jesus? Do we assume that when we go off and do our own thing, he is there beside us?  When Mary and Joseph realised they had lost Jesus, they turned back from what they were doing and went to look for him.   At those times in our lives, do we care enough about Jesus to do just that? When it seems as if he is far from us, do we search him out or do we just allow ourselves to drift away from his presence?  How do we search him out? Mary and Joseph took a long time to discover that he was in the temple. And yet, to those of us who know the story’s ending, it seems an obvious place for him to be.  Where do we go when we want to renew our acquaintance with Jesus? We have many ways and helps. We have prayer and Scripture. We have worship and fellowship with other Christians. We have the sacraments and music. We have so many things to point us to God and to Christ if we do but look.  And it may well take some time and pondering when we find him again. We may discover that perhaps one of the reasons we took so long to find him is that we were looking in the wrong place or for the wrong sort of Jesus.  

If Mary and Joseph who lived with him day in and day out took four days to find him, it’s not surprising that we too may discover he’s not always where we think he should be or doing what we think he should be doing. 

But the one thing we do know is that, wherever we find him, Jesus will be doing his Father’s work. Our challenge is to join him in that. 

1 Samuel 2.18-20, 26; Colossians 3.12-17; Luke 2.41-52 

Those of you who read my letter last month in The Diary will know that I talked about one of my favourite verses in the Bible from Luke chapter two, words uttered by Mary after the visit of the shepherds to the baby Jesus: Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 

Mary must have had a lot of pondering to do. What an amazing nine months she had had.  

First, she meets an angel - not an everyday experience, even for people in the Bible. The angel has that amazing message for her that she is to have a baby. And that this baby will be great and be called the Son of the Most High, and be a king, reigning over Jacob’s house for ever. 

And, then, she’s told that she’s not the only one to be giving birth in the near future. Her relative Elizabeth, an elderly woman, is also to have a baby; Elizabeth whom everyone believed to be barren - a source of great shame for people in biblical times. 

Much to ponder. 

And the story continues, as we all know. Mary’s baby is born, away from home, and placed in a manger because there was room nowhere else. And this humble girl and her husband and baby were visited by shepherds, who had also been spoken to by angels. 

It’s not surprising that Mary started pondering and reflecting when so much happened to her in such a short space of time. 

We don’t know much about what happened over the next decade or so. Matthew tells us that wise men visited the holy family and Luke tells us the stories of Jesus’s naming and circumcision and the meetings with Simeon and Anna, but that is pretty much it, until the story we heard in today’s Gospel reading. 

Presumably Mary kept pondering and reflecting. Luke tells us that the child Jesus grew and became strong, that he was filled with wisdom and that God’s favour was with him. 

I’m speculating a little now but I assume that as Jesus was growing Mary and Joseph saw him very much as their child. He lived with them and they cared for him, and, because we are not told anything dramatic about Jesus’s childhood, I think we can assume fairly safely that it was a pretty normal childhood for the child of a Jewish artisan of the period. 

Mary probably did ponder the events of Jesus’s birth from time to time as he grew, but I imagine that most of her life was focused on keeping home for Joseph and her small son. 

But today we get another snapshot of Mary pondering and reflecting. “His mother treasured all these things in her heart.”  

She may well have been reminded of the unusual circumstances of his birth as she reflected on this episode in the temple. Jesus was 12, not far off the age of adulthood for Jewish boys. To our modern ears, it seems shocking that parents of a 12-year-old did not know where he was for four whole days. It was only after a day’s travelling that they realised he wasn’t there, and then it took them another three days to find him.  

And then, in typical teenage fashion, some things, it seems, never change, Jesus can’t be bothered with welcoming his anxious parents, but greets them with a gentle rebuke - did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house? 

It seems that, at this point, Jesus has a far better understanding of who he really is than his parents. And Mary continues to store up her experiences and thoughts about who Jesus was. 

What did she have to ponder after this event? There were Jesus’s strange words about being in his Father’s house - did she recall those words from long ago about his being the Son of the Most High? 

There was the fact that he was with the religious teachers, clearly holding his own, and doing more than that since all who heard him were amazed at his understanding. He had been asking questions of the rabbis, but also giving answers of his own. 

At this point, Mary had to begin to rethink who he was. And, to a certain extent, that’s something that all parents have to do. As a child grows and matures and becomes more at ease with his or her own identity, parents have to let go of their ideas about who the child is and allow them to be the people they have been created to be by God. 

Mary’s pondering must have led her to wonder who this child really was. She realised that he wasn’t exactly the person she had thought he was. 

And we too are asked to ponder and reflect on our relationship with the Christ-child. If Mary, who knew Jesus as intimately as any human has ever done, needed time and space to reflect and ponder on who he really was, how much more will we need to do so. 

When we lose something, finding it again may well involve some kind of surprise. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, suggests in his Luke for Everyone that part of what Luke was doing in his Gospel was writing for people who had some idea of who Jesus was, but then find he is more elusive than they had first thought. 

When Mary and Joseph finally found Jesus, he didn’t give them the response they were expecting. He hadn’t been worried by his separation from his parents and he didn’t even seem that pleased to see them when they found him. 

They thought they knew him and they had to reappraise what they knew. And our relationship with Jesus is also like that. If we never reappraise who we think Jesus is, our faith will not grow and develop. Jesus will surprise us.  

If we ever get to the point when we think we really know him, we may then discover that he’s not where we thought. We may look around and see that we have left him behind or that he has raced on ahead of us. Discipleship is, after all, not about following a strict set of rules and regulations but about following a person, and we cannot control the thoughts and actions of others. 

Mary and Joseph assumed, when they left
Jerusalem, that Jesus was with them. They took his presence for granted. Do we do that with Jesus? Do we assume that when we go off and do our own thing, he is there beside us? 

When Mary and Joseph realised they had lost Jesus, they turned back from what they were doing and went to look for him.  

At those times in our lives, do we care enough about Jesus to do just that? When it seems as if he is far from us, do we search him out or do we just allow ourselves to drift away from his presence? 

How do we search him out? Mary and Joseph took a long time to discover that he was in the temple. And yet, to those of us who know the story’s ending, it seems an obvious place for him to be.  

Where do we go when we want to renew our acquaintance with Jesus? We have many ways and helps. We have prayer and Scripture. We have worship and fellowship with other Christians. We have the sacraments and music. We have so many things to point us to God and to Christ if we do but look. 

And it may well take some time and pondering when we find him again. We may discover that perhaps one of the reasons we took so long to find him is that we were looking in the wrong place or for the wrong sort of Jesus.  

If Mary and Joseph who lived with him day in and day out took four days to find him, it’s not surprising that we too may discover he’s not always where we think he should be or doing what we think he should be doing. 

But the one thing we do know is that, wherever we find him, Jesus will be doing his Father’s work. Our challenge is to join him in that. 

Being Creative

I wonder what New Year’s resolutions you are making this year. Mine always seem to be the same: lose weight, get fit, meet up with those friends I’ve not seen for a while and generally live a better life.

This year, I’m going to try something different. I want to make 2007 the year when I found time to be creative. I think we all, whatever our gifts and skills, have something within us that longs to be creative. Often this side of ourselves - unless we are professional artists, musicians, actors, cooks, designers and so on - becomes submerged and trapped within us because we don’t give it free rein.

I think we all have within us something of the creative power of God. To be human means to share many of God’s characteristics. People of all religions see God as creator. There are so many ways in which to be creative: gardening, painting, cooking, acting, making music, dancing, writing, drawing, learning a language, pottery and even praying.  

Many people see prayer as confined to talking to God, usually asking for something - please make Auntie Flo better, please help me to get this new job - but for me prayer is about a relationship with God which has many facets, and I can turn my poetry or dancing, singing or drawing into an expression of what I wish to communicate. It can become an expression of my deepest longings for God.   

But, whether we believe in God or not, I think we can all grow through being creative. It’s not always easy at the start. I remember a counselling-skills course I was on where we were left with a pile of art materials and told to make a picture that told something about the story of our lives. At the outset I found it very difficult. I struggled to begin at all. I was used to reading and writing but not to expressing myself in other ways. But, once I stopped worrying about how difficult it all was, and just got on with making something, it became a liberating experience.   

There is a lot of pain and destruction worldwide, but being creative can bring healing. I think of the youth orchestra founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said which brings together Palestinians and Israelis or Pimlico opera which goes into a prison each year and helps inmates to perform an opera. Both these projects and many others bring amazing results.

So, why don’t you join me this year in picking up your paints or dusting down your cook books - let’s be creative.

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.

St Mary’s, Reed

Christmas Eve 2006

Isaiah 9.2-7; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-14 

How did last Christmas change your life?   We have all come here this evening to sing some carols, say some prayers, to hear the story of the first Christmas and, above all, to celebrate the birth of Christ. 

What does that celebration mean for us? If we are truly celebrating Christmas, our celebrations need to go on beyond Twelfth Night. Carrying the message of Christmas into our lives the rest of the year is one way in showing that our celebrations are real and not just an excuse for a family-get-together, eating and drinking too much and a few days off work.  There’s a story about a young girl who went with a group of her family and friends to see the Christmas lights in London. At one church, they stopped and went inside to look more closely at a beautiful nativity scene.  “Isn’t that beautiful?” said the little girl’s grandmother. “Look at all the animals, Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus.”   “Yes, Grandma,” replied the granddaughter. “It is really nice. But there is only one thing that bothers me. Isn’t baby Jesus ever going to grow up? He’s the same size he was last year.” Is baby Jesus for us the same size as last year or have we allowed our understanding and our love for him to grow over the past year? One of the wonderful messages of Christmas is that of God’s grace. But sadly it’s a message that gets distorted time and time again.

We often hear parents telling their children how Father Christmas won’t come unless they’re good.  I remember talking to the parent of a two year-old in my last parish, a two year-old with whom there had been lots of dinner-table battles. But Father Christmas had worked wonders this dad said, we just tell her that he won’t come if she doesn’t eat her food. She’s never eaten so well, he said. 

And sometimes this idea gets put on to Jesus too. The idea that Jesus is only for good people. There’s a story about a little boy called Sam. It was coming up to Christmas, and Sam asked his mum if he could have a new bike. She told him that the best idea would be to write to Father Christmas. But Sam, with his school nativity play in mind, said he’d prefer to write to the baby Jesus.  

Sam went to his room and wrote: “Dear Jesus, I have been a very good boy this year and I would like to have a bike for Christmas.”  But he wasn’t very happy when he read it again. Something wasn’t quite right.

So he decided to try again. This time he wrote: “Dear Jesus, I’m a good boy most of the time, and I would like a bike for Christmas.”  He read it but still wasn’t happy.

So, he tried a third version: “Dear Jesus, I could be a good boy if I tried hard, and especially if I had a new bike.”   He read that one too, but he still wasn’t satisfied.So, he decided to go out for a walk while he thought about a better approach. After a short time he passed a house with a small statue of the Virgin Mary in the front garden. He crept in, stuffed the statue under his coat, hurried home and hid it under the bed.  

Then he wrote this letter: “Dear Jesus, if you want to see your mother again, you’d better send me a new bike.” 

It’s so easy to put our human values on God. Sam clearly linked being good with Jesus. But God didn’t say: “I’ll send my Son when the world is good enough or when enough people worship me.” God didn’t say “I’ll start loving them when I see some evidence that they love me.” God saw that people didn’t love so God loved them even more.  

I was talking to a teacher this past week about how different attitudes about learning exist. There was a time when it was important in schools to tell children what they were getting wrong - and there are some people who will always point out the wrong things, either things other people have not got right or they themselves - but not to praise them when they did well, in case they became too big-headed. The theory is that we learn through having our mistakes pointed out to us. Nowadays, schools are much more keen to accentuate the positive in children. Teachers will praise what has been done well before they point out what needs putting right. There is a sense that all children are good at something and that those who are not academically bright can still shine in other ways.  I think we probably need a bit of both - we do learn from our mistakes, but a child who is only castigated for getting things wrong and never encouraged will not grow or learn happily. 

Many people seem to categorise God as being of the first type only - the sort of person, if we can call God a person, who will lay down hard and fast rules and castigate us when we get it wrong.   And over the years the Church has perpetuated this myth that we can only be acceptable to God, if we do the right things and live the right sort of life. 

But, if we look more closely at Christ, we see that God’s love is not confined to those who have got it right. Think of the circumstances of that first Christmas.   Where was Jesus born? Certainly not in a royal palace but in a humble stable. Who were his first visitors? Humble, dirty, probably smelly, shepherds, not the faithful religious people who knew they had it right. 

It’s so easy to impose our human values on God. If we’re honest, we want God to approve of the people of whom we approve and not of the others. We know what God ought to do and then we give up on God when that doesn’t happen. 

A baby in a manger is cute and cuddly but if we leave the baby there, the same size as he was last Christmas, we’re missing something vital about God’s love. We’re missing the fact that God’s love is big enough for us all: rich and poor, good and bad.  I think one good thing to have come out of the tragedy of the murdered women in
Suffolk is that people have had to face the fact that they are not just nameless prostitutes whom we can ignore or write off as bad women, but real people, people who have families and friends, people who have worth.  Yes, perhaps their lives have become rather distorted, often because of the grip of drug addiction, yes, perhaps their values are far removed from our own, but the message of God is that they are not worthless. 

“The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright and godly” - words from our epistle reading.  

But, look where those words start - with the grace of God. It doesn’t say that God’s grace will come once people are pious and self-controlled, but that God’s grace will transform people. 

So, I challenge you - and myself - this Christmas to let our vision of the Christ-child grow that little bit bigger so that next year we can say our Christmas celebrations had an effect on us well beyond Twelfth Night. 

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.

with best wishes

BARKWAY, BUCKLAND, REED AND BARLEY READINGS: JANUARY 2007