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.