Emmanuel - God is with us - Christmas Day

Emmanuel

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us." Matt 1.23

I’ve just moved flat and seriously ‘downsized’. It meant getting rid of about 4,000 books to various good homes, and of course you begin to look at them once you start bidding them farewell.

And so it was that last night I found myself reading The House at Pooh Corner, the Latin version of course, Domus Anguli Puensis.

“Pooh”, said Piglet taking his paw.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just checking that you were there…”

Humans, like piglets, are social animals. We need the sense that someone is ‘there’. We are, for all of our lives, in some way dependent upon others.

God himself is a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal intimacy of the Trinity.

Then in his incarnation which we celebrate at Christmas, God became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk. The little boy, Jesus, needed Mary to be there, to hold his hand.

As a grown man too Jesus needed companionship and had many friends: men, women and children.

He had an inner circle of close friends: James and John, and Peter - there with Jesus through the ups and downs of his ministry.

And there at the end of his short life in the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus wanted them with him in his most agonising hour of decision. He goes off to pray, but keeps returning: “just checking that you are there”.

And some were there at his crucifixion: his best friend John, and his mother Mary, who had bought him into the world in that stable in Bethlehem.

So now, physically, he is with us on this planet no more. No hand to hold. But there is an even profounder reality of God’s continuing companionship. For Mary has conceived and born a son, and his name is Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.

He is with us because he lived here and shared our joys and sorrows; he can empathise with us in all that we go through. He is not distant and unmoved, but he is with us in all the richness and vagaries of our lives.

Sometimes at Christmas, they show that wonderful animated version of Oscar Wilde’s lovely story, The Selfish Giant. The Giant has been taught to share his garden with all the local children by the appearance of a mysterious little boy at a very low ebb in his life.

But although he searches for this child among the children throughout the rest of his long life, he never finds him, until one day he sees him in a tree in his garden.

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?"

For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."

"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love."

"Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."

By being among us Jesus has also taught us that all humans are made in his image, and are to be loved and cared for – another theme of Christmas and our compassion for the poor and needy.
This means that all our kinships and friendships are part of God’s being with us, being there.

We cannot hug God, but we can hold the hand of a friend, to check that they are there. And in our turn we can sit with friends and strangers, and by our physical presence assure them that God is there with them.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder, especially as we get older, of the empty seats around the table.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples are filled with foreboding as they realise that Christ is leaving them, from the manger to the skies.

So the end of Matthew’s Gospel re-echos the beginning. He reassures them in his words of parting: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. (Matt 28.20)

Here is an even deeper spiritual mystery. For it has been the experience of Christians through the ages, that by God’s Holy Spirit, they sense the loving presence of God; Emmanuel; he’s there, here, with us.

It’s of course very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that. Loving our partners and friends is very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that.

We started with the boy Christopher Robin, thought about the boy Jesus, and I end with a lesson from another little boy.

A while back I was in Stockholm with my good friends Stefan and Helena and their little boy Einar. We were in a flat he’d never been in before and at one point his parents left the room with our host.

He looked at me, said something in Swedish, then remembered I was that poor simple man who didn’t understand anything anyone said. So he came over, put his thumb in his mouth, and reached up and held my hand. Just checking I was there.

I hope you have a very happy Christmas, and a deepening sense in your life of the continual and reassuring presence of God.

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us."

Advent Hope (Advent 2)

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope." Romans 15.13 (Readings Is 40.1-11; 2 Peter 3.8-15a; Mark 1.1-8)

As a young boy growing up in the 1950s, Christmas night was always one of the most tantalising and frustrating. It was so near to Christmas day and yet not Christmas Day. The anticipation was amplified by the fact that Christmas Day is my birthday as well.

And although the presents were only going to be a torch and a dinky toy and a Rupert Annual – all labelled ‘for birthday and Christmas’ – the wait was nearly unbearable,

Throughout those dark December Advent days, I felt like the children in CS Lewis’s Narnia, where it was always winter but never Christmas. I would fall asleep on Christmas night, exhausted by hope.

For many children, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day still testify to the truth of the Proverb (13.12)

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
But desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

Of course since the 1950s we’ve moved on. Increased standards of living and credit cards have taken ‘the waiting out of wanting’ – that infamous Access Card slogan of the 1970s.

And even more recently we have seen how ‘Looting takes the waiting out of wanting’. (Bricolage, 2009)

And all this means that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a good Advent; to defer Christmas till Christmas Day.

Hope is one of the three theological virtues, as they are called: faith, hope and charity.

And hope is of the essence of our Christian faith.

The Sundays of Advent, are all waiting-in-hope Sundays. We have closed the curtain on the annual drama of the liturgical year, and start again, preparing, waiting, hoping, for the long-expected Jesus.

And it is no accident that Advent coincides with the run-up to the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice - in the bleak mid winter.

We live in hope that the winter will pass; the light will come back; spring will return.

This is at the heart of God’s message to Isaiah: ‘Comfort, O comfort my people.’

Isaiah was to give fresh hope to the Israelites in exile in Babylon, weeping by the waters, losing hope that they would ever return to rebuild Jerusalem.

He’s to comfort them, stir them up. The word originally means ‘to give great strength to’.

So you remember in the Bayeux Tapestry, that 230 foot picture which tells of everything leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 – there’s a section with the caption “Harold comforteth his troops” - the picture shows him jabbing a spear into a soldier’s backside.

He is comforting them, giving them great strength, encouraging them.

Similarly in the collect today ‘with your great might succour us’. Again literally, ‘run up to us’.

This is the ministry of comforting, of reviving hope.

John Watson was a great Scottish preacher of the second half of the 19th century. He was the product of a Highland Jacobite, Roman Catholic mother, and a strict Free Church father. Shortly before he died in 1907 he told friends: ‘If I had to begin my ministry again, I would preach more comforting sermons.’

Why do we lose hope and need so much comforting?

Three reasons strike us from today’s readings.

Firstly, our thinking is often too short-term. So Peter has to remind the church in his letter ‘that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.’ Jesus had said he would return again – so where was he? Where is he?

It was the American screenwriter Ben Hecht who said: “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second-hand of a clock.”

Waiting, the weeks of Advent, seem dull and negative. Why can’t we cut to the chase?

I always find that little comparison about the age of the earth a healthy way of keeping my historical perspective.

If the 6 billion years of planet earth’s existence were put on a 24 hour clock, then humankind appeared on the planet less than a second ago.

Hope requires a long-term vision.

Secondly, people lack hope because of their personality. Some of us are optimists and some pessimists.

You probably know the story of the brother who was a pessimist and his sister who was an optimist.

Just to see what would happen, on Christmas Eve their father loaded the boy’s room with every imaginable toy and game while he filled the sisters room with horse manure.

On Christmas morning he found the boy sitting amid his mountain of new gifts, wailing:
“I'll have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff. I'll constantly need batteries. My friends will be jealous and my toys will all eventually get broken."

Next door, the father found his daughter dancing for joy in the pile of manure and shouting, "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"

Most of the prophets were pessimists, and often depressives. When the Lord gives Isaiah this upbeat message, what does Isaiah want to cry?

“All flesh is grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it.”

It’s another reason why we need each other to counterbalance either excessive pessimism, or naïve optimism.

And a third reason why people lack hope is because they don’t know, or won’t see all the facts.

John the Baptist was a prophet and therefore given to pessimism and depression. He recognises Jesus as the Messiah, and yet in the depths of his despair before his own death he sends his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”

We need to understand our world and our personal situation so that we can be realists about life.
The hope that we try to nurture during this waiting period of Advent, is the hope that should comfort us in all the ups and downs of our daily lives.

We know that ‘hope’ does not usually mean getting what you want. The illness doesn’t go away, we do lose our job, the loved one does die. Yet despite what happens, life and hope go on.

Did you hear photographer Giles Dules on Richard Coles’ Saturday Live yesterday? He lost both legs and an arm earlier this year in Afghanistan and said how he felt he was in a better place now than he was a year ago. That’s the product of hope!

And that is why in this Advent season Christ’s first coming as a baby is always set against the backcloth of his second coming in glory. Wars have not yet ceased and we have not beaten our swords into ploughshares. But we live and work in hope, not just of outcomes in this life, but of all that is yet to be in God, now and forever.

There’s a poem by Sheena Pugh which expresses this advent hope of waiting and watching expectantly through all the changing scenes of life. It’s called Sometimes.

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Sheena Pugh (b.1950)

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope." Romans 15.13