Every year, without fail, on the day after the postal deadline for first class deliveries, I get a pile of Christmas cards from people I have either forgotten or to whom I have decided not to send a card.  In some ways, this doesn’t matter because, when it comes to Christmas cards, I am a last minute dot com sort of person (some would say that this does not just apply to Christmas cards).

I start off with good intentions. Usually about mid-November I decide on the card design and by late November it is in full production. By early December the list of recipients is virtually drawn up and then comes a slight stall. Usually to mid-December when the writing of the cards begins in earnest. The task is complete by December 28th or 29th.

The fact that some do not receive a card until after Christmas Day doesn’t matter because I am a great advocate of the Christmas Season beginning on December 25th and not ending until Candlemass (February 2nd). In that belief, I and the Church are one.  I do wish, however, that I was less of a last minute dot com  sort of person.  I am, of course, not alone. There is even a holiday website with that very name to cater for those who prefer to act spontaneously rather than plan for months, even years ahead.  I am also convinced that I keep good company because it seems to me that Mary and Joseph seem like last minute dot com sort of people.

Setting off to fulfil their obligations in a Census of the population you might think that Joseph, with a very pregnant wife, might have telephoned ahead to make arrangements for somewhere they might stay. Given Mary’s condition, it ought to have been pretty close to a hospital or at the very least, the home of a midwife.  But not a bit of it.   The pair of them set out from Nazareth to Bethlehem and arrived at the dead of night in Bethlehem – where Joseph scoured the town’s hostelries for a vacancy sign. By this time things were pretty urgent. Mary wasn’t going to be pregnant for much longer.  In the end they had to make do with an outbuilding (or as some have it, a cave) in which to give birth to the Son of God.

It was all very haphazard, unplanned and, to be honest, not very hygienic. In fact it was very last minute dot com .  Not that this surprises me – because quite often, God himself is a very last minute dot com sort of being.  It often happens that when we are up against it and life is hard – and we cry to God for help – there seems to be a deafening silence. We continue to fling our prayers at the air as if into a black hole, the despair perhaps getting deeper. And then – at the last minute – some kind of answer comes. The situation lightens, the fog begins to clear – or we just perceive that we are no longer standing there alone.

I often wonder why God waits and puts us through it.  Maybe it’s because when all else fails we just know that it is indeed God.  No human intervention could have helped.  It’s a test of faith.

And in the Holy Land, long ago, amongst a proud people who had got things dreadfully wrong, God waited.

The minutes ticked by. The people were cast into exile, living in a foreign land and there they cried out to God – as the Psalmist puts it:

‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’

So the People of God sang in lament for their homeland.  And when it was restored to them, it was occupied by foreign powers.  Still God waited.  The people were under the yoke of oppression – Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans – all took the power the people saw as rightfully theirs.  They cried out to God – the plaintive cry of a sorrowing people – whose prophets fed them with hope.

Messiah is coming! A deliverer will come! God will act!

Stand fast! Be firm and of good courage.

What does Isaiah say in tonight’s first lesson?  The return of the Lord to Zion… all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.  And they waited, and waited and waited.  last minute dot com.

He came at last. In a manger in Bethlehem.  And no one noticed.  You see, that wasn’t how it was supposed to be.  How could a people under oppression be liberated by a baby born to two stragglers from Nazareth in the middle of the cold desert night – wrapped in a bundle of rags and snuffled over by dirty animals? Visited by shuffling shepherds bleary with sleep.  Hardly the way that one who brings good news and announces salvation and proclaims ‘Your God reigns’.

Those inhabitants at Bethlehem, if they stirred at all, soon went back to their slumbers. Thoughts of a deliverer were centred on a triumphant warrior king. A poor family giving birth to a vulnerable baby need not trouble their drink-fuddled sleep.  It wasn’t going to be like that.

Yet our last minute God is also a God of surprise:  This is how it will be.  This is the one I shall one day proclaim as my Son, my Beloved.  This is the one who will teach his people the way of God and turn over the way of men.  This is the one who will defeat the enemies of God by being himself seemingly defeated.  This babe born in a manger of wood to a carpenter whose stock in trade was wood – this God become man was destined to die on wood.  Perversely he would then proclaim that defeat to be a Victory.  Using his last minute dot com powers he would overturn the death with Resurrection life.  And when he did – a few more noticed than did that birth in Bethlehem.

But they didn’t all understand. They didn’t all follow the path of the Lord Christ.  So God waited and God still waits.  That birth in Bethlehem long ago has to be relived – year by year at this Midnight hour when, from wherever we have come and for whatever reason – God is about to be born again in our midst.

Of course, we will notice. We will understand. That is why we are here.  But just to make certain, God puts our faith to the test.  Do you know why this babe has come?  Do you know where he might be born?  Do you know how he will save the world – a world as dark as the one long ago – a world oppressed?  Do you know how he intends to act in 2005?

God waits as He has always waited for just one thing:  for us to understand. 

You see, long ago:

They expected a general
And were given a child.
They expected a coronation
And were given a star.
They expected victory,
They were given Love.         (Richard Fanolio)

Ah that’s it, you see.   That’s what God waits for – to become Love – to be Love re-born. To take our lives over with Love so that we become Love.  That’s how he will save the world. That’s how He will save us. That’s why he was born in Bethlehem and that’s why he must be born again tonight.

So God waits. The last minute dot com God of surprise can’t do it without us – just as, conversely, we can’t do it without Him.  There has to be an impregnation of the Divine spark of love into the human will – or it will be a still-born celebration we have tonight.  He needs a place to be born again if our dark world really can be infused with divine light.

He came into the world he had made but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own and his own people did not accept him – but to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man but of God.

The Word became flesh

But not this time in the form of a baby in Bethlehem but in our own hearts.

And in that topsy-turvy world of God a strange thing happens when we open our hearts to Him to be born as love in our own lives – it is not God who is born but us.  For it is our lives which depend on His.

So God waits for the penny to drop – and he is ready to fill us with Christ-like love.  

It is up to us – you see it’s not we who are waiting for God to act in a last minute dot com sort of way.  It’s quite the other way round.