Sermon for Christmas Day 2019 Year A - All Saints, Fonthill Gifford
Pr
“After that, the Kindness and love of God our Saviour toward us appeared”
The scene is set, Christmas has come once more, the baby Jesus is in our manger and the long build-up of present-buying, house-decorating and family debates over whether to eat Goose, Turkey or a meatless alternative this year may have been resolved in time to bring us here this morning. In our gospel reading too, we just heard the familiar scene-setting of the story of the shepherds. For those of us here regularly, especially if our ‘regularly’ is always at Christmas-time, we know this story inside out, we’ve heard it year on year shrouded by odd Christmas carols about the holy silence of the birth of Christ and the somewhat rose-tinted expectations that Christian children be mild, obedient and as well-behaved as God-incarnate.
Amidst the log-fire aesthetic, however, the more-realistic backstory to our reading goes as follows: Mary is an unmarried, Palestinian girl at the start of her teens. An angel appears to her, she’s understandably terrified, and the angel says ‘Don’t be afraid but you’re going to have a baby’, Joseph, her betrothed, initially wants to divorce her but is persuaded not to by the angel in a dream. Then a census is called, and Mary and Joseph travel the 90-odd miles to Bethlehem (or ‘Royal David’s City’), as Joseph is descended from David. When they get there, no one wants to host the heavily pregnant teenager, so they end up in an animal shelter. Mary delivers her baby in grotty conditions, surrounded by livestock, and they probably aren’t prepared for hosting an assortment of unexpected visitors when our reading kicks in.
So, we might pity Mary just a little when our reading starts up with ‘and there were shepherds on the hill… and the angel of the Lord came upon them...’. We know what’s about to happen, and it’s easy to concentrate on the obedience of the shepherds jumping up and rushing to Bethlehem. But, this tiny part of the great nativity story is completely subversive. The lowest of the low in society, the flea-ridden, unwashed, shepherds, working through the night, are visited by a heavenly host of angels, an assembly more glorious than any of the world’s wealth could assemble, and they, like Mary, are terrified.
The angels proclaim the birth of a King, the long-expected Christ, the person whom all of Israel has waited for, not in a palace in-keeping with his noble Davidic blood, trussed up in silk and surrounded by courtiers, but lying in a feeding trough, dressed in rags, and surrounded by braying animals. Then, as if this is all perfectly normal, they burst into song, proclaiming the glory of God in the highest heaven and peace on earth.
The story is a continuous yo-yo, bouncing up and down from gritty reality to glorious expectation and back again. The irony, of course, is that whilst we might also look forward to the visit of the Magi at Ephiphany in a few weeks, the shepherds are the people who best match the social standing of the infant king, and throughout Jesus’ ministry as an adult he continues that relationship, living and working with the poor, the marginalised and those seen as the untouchables of society.
Jesus, from birth to death, and then to ascension, takes hierarchy and status and up-ends it. God-incarnate fully embraces humanity, from the muckiness of childbirth in a stable, right through to being nailed to a cross. In Christ, our qualifications and social status lose their identity as things that are only temporary and instead, we are seen only by the nature of our relationship to God, through this Christ-child.
That’s a promise that brings hope for some people and challenge for others. For me it’s a challenge. I am not poor, even as a perpetual student supported by the church, nor am I marginalised. Yet somehow, I worship a God whose entire ministry was focussed around those who were. There is, however, hope. Describing salvation, our first reading says: ‘when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Saviour appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy...’
A gift freely given, when we have nothing of worth to offer in return, is the hardest gift to accept (especially for those of us who are used to relying on ourselves). However, in this season of Christmas, when gifts are commonplace, perhaps we can manage it. As we dwell with the young girl in a cattle shed, welcoming the strangers and hearing their story of angels appearing on a hillside, let us, with her, treasure this great gift of the Christ-child, pondering him with open hearts until our hearts and lives are changed and shaped into his likeness, to the glory of God.
