Love came down at Christmas,
love, all lovely, love divine,
love was born at Christmas,
star and angels gave the sign.

The first verse of a carol that I remember singing at my primary school, but which is very rarely heard or sung these days. It was written by Christina Rossetti in 1885.

What it reminds us is that at the heart of Christmas, at the heart of the Christian story, is love, God’s love for the world and for its people.

A question that we probably don’t ask ourselves very much is what we mean by love.

A researcher asked a group of 4-8 years olds that very question - what does love mean? Here are some of their responses.

o Rebecca, aged 8 - when my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands have got arthritis too. That’s love.

o Billy, aged 4 - when someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know hat your name is safe in their mouth.

o Chrissy, aged 6 - Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your chips without making them give you any of theirs.

o Terri, aged 4 - love is what makes you smile when you are tired.

o Emily, aged 8 - love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mummy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss.

o Mary Ann - aged 4 - love is when your puppy licks your face even after you’ve left him alone all day.

o Lauren, aged 4 - I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and but new ones.

Quite a mixed bunch of responses.

Two other children gave answers that I want us to reflect on a little more this evening.

Jessica, aged 8 came up with this statement: “You really shouldn’t say ‘I love’ you unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.”

Christmas reminds us how much we often forget the love of God for us. There’s a wonderful verse in John’s Gospel that reminds us about God’s love - God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosever believes in him should not perish but should have eternal life. And that’s a message that God continues to give us day in and day out. Through the Holy Spirit, God dwells with us.

But sometimes we are blind to the messages of love that he gives us. So, it is good to have times such as Christmas, when we focus again on that message of God’s to the world - I love you.

Christmas retells the story of how God showed that love to his world, of how he became a small and vulnerable baby, born to a young girl in a stable away from home, with only a manger for a crib. In order to communicate that love to us, God became human so that we might understand better what his love for us means.

And right back at the beginning, we see people recognising who Jesus is. There are Mary and Joseph, both visited by angels, telling them about the wonderful that thing that was to happen through them. We see their love for the Christ-child.

Then we see the shepherds and later the wise men - shepherds from the lowest end of society, unable because of their life-style to keep the Jewish laws of purification and cleanliness, and the wise men from afar, rich and exotic, brining expensive gifts. The symbolism is clear - right from the start the love of God was recognised by lowly and important people, by Jew and Gentile, and God accepted their love.

God’s message to the world through Jesus is to say to us - I love you. I love you whatever you do, however you feel. I share your joys, and I live with your pain.

It’s so easy to want to blame God for all the ills of the world, but as any parent knows, there are times when you have to let your children go their own way - when the loving thing is to stand back and give them their space and let them make their own mistakes. You don’t stop loving them in that situation, you long for them to come to their senses, but you don’t force them to - you stand back and live with the pain that that gives you because you love them.

And, of course, it’s not only parents and children who experience that sense of pain because another person is hurting. Love is a risky business, because it brings great joy, but can also bring great pain.

And that too is part of the Christmas story, for we cannot celebrate Christmas without remembering the pain of crucifixion and the joy of resurrection, as well as the joy of the birth of a boy.

God’s love is not just for the good people - in fact when Jesus grew up, it was the so-called bad people with whom he spent most time, because they were the ones who needed his love most in one sense, they were the ones who knew they needed loving. The outwardly good and righteous often had no room in their hearts for the love Jesus brought.

When people are faced with the idea of God, all sorts of feelings begin to surface. Some people feel they are not good enough for God’s love, some people feel angry with God, particularly if they have experienced some kind of tragedy in their life. Some people question whether God exists. Others feel blessed by God and thankful for all that God has given them, and manage to rejoice even in the midst of hard times, because for them God is their life.

What Christmas tells us is that God is wanting to do just what the 8-year-old Jessica advised - ” You really shouldn’t say ‘I love’ you unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.”

God does mean it and his saying I love you was something he did by acting not just by speaking. His actions in sending Jesus become in themselves a powerful language, and when Jesus left that message of love continued because God lives in the world even now in the form of the Holy Spirit.

The other child’s response that really struck me was that of Bobby, aged seven. He said: “Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas, if you stop opening presents and listen.”

Of course, presents and treats are lovely and exciting - I’m looking forward to opening mine tomorrow and eating lots of lovely chocolate and other special food, but presents and treats are not the main reason for Christmas, in spite of what the shops have been trying to tell us for months now. When the food is eaten, the drinks drunk, the presents opened and laid aside, what is left.

What is left is God’s love, there with us, wherever we are. We don’t always recognise because we are too busy or we shut it out, but it’s there, and the Christ-child is a reminder of it.

And, of course, that love is something that we are all called to be a part, to accept and recognise for ourselves, and then to share it with others. For the work of Christmas is not just for the 24th or 25th December, but for all time, for eternity, because God’s love never ends.

When our lives return to normal, will we take the Christ-child with us, or will we just forget him until next Christmas? Will the words of the carols we have sung be put to one side or will the become part of us?

God doesn’t switch his love on and off like a Christmas light - it is constant and faithful. It reminds me a bit of the Dogs’ Trust slogan - a dog is for life, not just for Christmas. What do we get if we turn the dog around? God is for life, not just for Christmas.

I don’t know who wrote the following words, but they are a lovely reminder of what God wants for the world, of why he sent Jesus, and of the way in which we too can be part of that love in the way that we live.

When the song of the angel is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and the princes are home,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost
to heal the broken
to feed the hungry
to release the prisoner
to rebuild the nations
to bring peace among all people
to make music in the heart.
 

Isaiah 35.1-10; James 5.7-10; Matthew 11.2-11

John is in prison. He’s been put there by King Herod, ostensibly because he had criticised the king for his stealing of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife. No one likes their actions, especially if they know deep down they are wrong, to be shown up by another. But I suspect too that Herod was feeling threatened by John’s outspokenness in other areas too, perhaps particularly John’s proclamations about the coming Messiah.

John is having to face up to doubts about the coming Messiah. He had been proclaiming, as we heard last week, that someone much more powerful than him was to come, someone who would bring judgment and fire, who would protect the righteous but condemn the sinner.

John, tucked away in prison, has time to think. We can understand the sort of questions he might be asking. Was I right? I was so sure about the message I was proclaiming, and, yet, he’s not like that. I expected Jesus to come in power. Why haven’t the religious leaders started recognising him if he really is the Messiah? How could I have been so wrong?

All sorts of questions spinning round his head. And they’re the sort of questions that we too are sometimes faced with. Was I so wrong? I remember a time in my life when all sorts of similar questions were racing round my head. I had been recommended for ordination training and had gone off to college to train full-time for two years. But, during my second term there, everything went wrong. I became ill and had to leave the college, stop my training, and wasn’t able to resume it at that point.

I had all sorts of questions - was I doing the right thing in the first place? Had I got my calling from God so wrong? Was God playing games with me? And so on.

Doubts about what we are doing often surface when the plan that we thought had been set out for our lives failed to come to be in the way we expected it to happen. I had expected to train and then be ordained in 1996. John had expected to herald the way for a great Redeemer, a king, a leader who would bring about such change that it couldn’t be ignored.

John’s questions didn’t remain only with him. He needed to have an answer so he sent some of his disciples to see Jesus to find out from the man himself if he was the one or if John had got it wrong.

Jesus didn’t give a straightforward answer - he didn’t say yes or no. Instead he pointed them towards what he had been doing - restoring the sight of the blind, the mobility of the lame, the cleansing of the leper, the hearing of the deaf, returning life to the dead and preaching good news to the poor.

These too were traditional pictures of the messiah. Change your image of what you are expecting is the underlying message. Forget the great and powerful images, forget the images of a rescuer who would bring down fire, and think back to the images of healing and restoration. There are enough signs of God’s mercy in what Jesus was doing to allay any doubts about who he was. Jesus has brought about the time of restoration and healing foretold in Isaiah.

Jesus answers John’s doubts by pointing to the freedom he has brought. The first part of today’s reading addresses John’s questions: who is Jesus? Is he the one who is to come?

The second part of today’s reading addresses the crowd’s unspoken questions: who is John? What had they traipsed into the wilderness to see? A reed? A person in smart clothing? There is perhaps an irony in Jesus’s use of the word reed - Herod used the reed as a symbol on some of his coins, but he could be seen himself as a reed, not stable in what he did, being blown about by every whim - he moved his capital from Sepphoris to Tiberias; he exchanged one wife for another; he would change his political loyalties to whatever would help his own cause most.

But back to John - the people hadn’t got it wrong when they perceived John to be God’s prophet. That’s what he is, Jesus says. He’s more than all the prophets of the past. But the tension between old and new covenants is also in evidence - though John is greater than all the people of the past, in God’s kingdom, even the least is greater than he is.

Christians can be scared of admitting, like John, that they have doubts. But it is often through acknowledging and addressing doubt that our faith grows. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unanumo said “Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.”

We often see doubt as the opposite of faith, and yet in one way, it is certainty that is the opposite of faith. Without the possibility of doubt, there can be no faith. Faith is about trust, it’s about believing in things you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is about trusting a person, Jesus, and the promises of God.

We are called to be like children, to trust, to put our faith in God. Yet I don’t think we are called to have a faith about which we never think or reflect. It has been said that unthinking faith is a curious offering to be made to the creator of the human mind. If we take our faith seriously, we should reflect on it. It’s one of the ways in which we can grow closer to God.

There is a tension about living in the now and not yet time in which we live, the time when God’s kingdom has been inaugurated but not yet fully come.

It is natural in this case to ask questions about the fulfilment of God’s kingdom. John was facing in prison the fact that is dreams of a new age seemed to be broken dreams. It is understandable if we look at our world where there is so much suffering and pain to question that, to ask why, to ask how a loving God can allow pain like that to continue. But we have to learn to live without clear answers to those questions. God’s kingdom is not fully realised and until that happens there will be pain and suffering.

Peter Abelard said “The beginning of wisdom is found in doubt; by doubting we come to the question and by seeking we may come upon the truth.” Doubt is not to be feared but to be offered to God.

Look at what John did with his doubts - he went to Jesus. What do we do when we doubt? Do we push our doubts away, trying to ignore them? Or do we turn to God with them?

To ignore doubt is not an honest way forward. It’s not a way of integrity because it’s a way that seeks to cover up the truth of our feelings. To try and ignore doubt rather than to address it is to pretend, to live falsely.

The best way to counteract doubt is to give attention to one’s faith.

When John was doubting, Jesus pointed him towards the work of God. God never turns away an honest doubter.  Part of the Christian life is accepting that we don’t know and understand everything.

John turned to Jesus with his doubts and Jesus in response to the crowd showed how much faith and trust he placed in John. He didn’t turn round and say - that John, he’s useless, because he’s expressing doubt. He told them that John was the greatest of all who had come.

The danger is that when we meet doubt, we give up on God, rather than come before him with our doubts. If we are too sure about God, there is no room for God’s mercy to surprise, no room for new glimpses of God’s glory, no room for greater understanding of God’s ways.

For, if we are too sure, we become in danger of drawing a big black line around God, of attempting to confine God to what we already know, of trying to limit God’s power. We make God too small when we are 100 per cent sure of what God is like.

In talking about doubt, I am not trying to knock faith. I certainly wouldn’t want to do that, since it is faith that has a central part in my life. But I do want us not to be scared of acknowledging doubts.

In acknowledging doubt before God, we are, in a paradoxical way, making a statement of faith. The biggest danger comes when we are not willing to face our doubt; that’s when doubt can grow, unseen and like a cancer. That’s when doubt becomes a destructive force, not an opportunity for God to reveal more of his love and himself.

So, as we watch and wait in what is left of the Advent season, let us be honest about our doubt, that our faith may grow.

Sunday 30th December - Christmas 1
10.30 a.m. United Benefice Holy Communion, St Mary Magdalene, Barkway

Monday 31st December
8.15 a.m. Morning Prayer, St Mary Magdalene, Barkway
12.30 p.m. Funeral of Ted Coxall, Harwood Park Crematorium, Stevenage

Tuesday 1st January 2008
No Morning Prayer

Wednesday 2nd January
8.15 a.m Morning Prayer, St Margaret of Antioch, Barley
10.30 a.m. Holy Comunion, Margaret House, Barley
2.30 p.m. Funeral of Ivy Fuller, East Chapel, Cambridge Crematorium

Thursday 3rd January
8.15 a.m Morning Prayer, St Mary’s, Reed
10.45 a.m. Holy Communion, Wheatsheaf Meadow House, Barkway

Friday 4th January
10.15 a.m. Church Mice, St Margaret of Antioch, Barley

Saturday 5th January
9.00 a.m. Morning Prayer, St Margaret of Antioch, Barley

Sunday 6th January - Epiphany
9.00 a.m. Parish Communion (said), St Mary’s, Reed
10.30 a.m. Parish Communion with Junior Church, St Margaret of Antioch, Barley
6.00 p.m. BCP Evensong, St Mary Magdalene, Barkway

THE COMING MONTH
(Morning Prayer usually takes place each day: Monday and Tuesday in Barkway; Wednesday and Saturday in Barley and Thursday in Reed)

Monday 7th January
8.00 p.m. Deanery Standing/Pastoral Committee, The Vicarage, Great Hormead

Tuesday 8th January
12 noon North Buntingford Group clergy meeting, Therfield Rectory
7.30 p.m. Barley VC First School Governors’ meeting

Thursday 10th January
9.15 a.m. Bell ringers in Barley church
11.00 a.m. Bell ringers in Barkway church
7.45 p.m. for 8 Barkway VCC, Manor Farm

Sunday 13th January - Baptism of Christ
10.30 a.m. United Benefice Sung Eucharist, St Mary’s, Reed, with the Revd Canon Michael Sansom