On Friday night I visited what is almost certainly the newest member of our Church family here – a delightful Arbella Grace Violet, the newly-born daughter of Richard & Neelam.  (She has already made her debut church visit earlier this evening when she stole the show at the end of our Crib Service and we are very grateful to Neelam for giving birth at the most opportune moment for this purpose).  When I visited her on Friday she looked wonderfully peaceful as she snuggled in her warm blanket making the sort of contented noises that babies tend to make when they are not exercising their lungs at full throttle!

I was told that she had already received a number of visitors and that one of them, sitting not far from me here tonight, discussed and demonstrated the art of ‘swaddling’  Though I have often heard this term – and not least in the part of St Luke’s Gospel that we heard tonight – I was not entirely sure what was involved so on my return home I did a quick internet search.  There I discovered that ‘swaddling’ is a practice of ancient origin which involves wrapping the baby tightly in a swaddling cloth or blanket. What this achieves is calmness for the baby and they sleep better. Perhaps most importantly it  gives warmth and security.

Some of you will already know all this, of course but did you also know, as I learned, that one of my favourite Christmas cakes – the Stollen, first made in Dresden in the 14^th century – is shaped to resemble the Christ-child in his swaddling clothes , the centre, often of marzipan, is encased in a cake exterior. 

Well, I don’t expect you have come here tonight to learn how to care for a baby or for a cookery lesson so what has all this got to do with Christmas?  It was the chance remark of Neelam’s about swaddling that sent me back to St Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus – a story so familiar to all of us that we listen to it and enjoy it because it is as part of Christmas as the pudding and the turkey we shall probably consume later today. Indeed, of course, without Luke’s story of the birth of Christ the rest would have no meaning.  In the familiarity of the story, there is a chance though that we miss this meaning and certainly it had never occurred to me that those few words of St Luke’s:

And she (Mary) gave birth to her first-born Son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths

meant anything more than that Mary did the most natural thing a mother would do, especially given the unpromising circumstances of his birth. In what was a probably dirty and smelly stable it was probably wise that Mary gave her new baby all the protection she could, little though that was.  But Luke is fascinated with the swaddling cloths and it recurs in the next part of his Christmas story when the angels visit the shepherds.

To those frightened hill farmers the angel of the Lord unfolded his message; the good news of great joy for all people. The Good News is of a Saviour who is Christ the Lord  and the Sign of this Saviour is that they will find in Bethlehem a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.  Not for them, then, the star which led the wise men; not even the angels for, having delivered their message, like good angels they disappear from the scene.  All that’s left for those shepherds to know that the Son of God had come among them was a vulnerable baby lying in a manger and wrapped in swaddling cloths.  Yet it was this ordinary thing – this child wrapped in cloths that bound him – which greeted them when they arrived and we are told that it was enough for them to return to their hillside glorifying God.

Throughout the Bible and in the life of the Church ever since, God has left many signs of his presence amongst his people from the burning bush which attracted Moses to blinding light which stopped St. Paul in his tracks and turned him from persecutor of Christians into the greatest New Testament evangelist for Christ.  But nothing compares with this ordinary, everyday thing which met the Shepherds. A babe in swaddling cloths lying in a manger  because there was no room for him in the inn.

Why should this be a more significant sign that any other? How can something so ordinary speak to the Shepherd’s hearts of a Divine action which we call The Incarnation? God coming as one of us to save us from within.  Precisely because it is in its ordinariness that it reveals the extraordinary.

I have told some of you before about my favourite Christmas card of all time: it is a drawing of the baby Jesus lying in his cot with Mary his mother nearby. The caption reads: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’ – words which Mary herself spoke to the angel Gabriel when he announced to her that she would bear God’s Son.  What makes this card so special is that Mary is doing something very ordinary – she is hanging up the nappies on the line to dry.  And what it tells me is that God became human and lived an ordinary human life. In  and through the life of Jesus the man, God claims us for his own and transforms our own ordinariness by promising us something extraordinary. He promises us that we are very special – so special that his Son lived and died for us in order to open a way to extraordinary love. A love which will claim us for His Kingdom of heaven – a love which is eternal and which, if we let it, will change us from within.

And those swaddling cloths are a sign to Shepherds and to each one of us.  They clothe in ordinariness a human baby who is also a Divine King.  And those shepherds recognised something they could understand and reach out to and be part of.  This was no God who lived afar off and who was so remote that he was impossible to reach. This was a God who lived our human life, understood what we go through, shared our joys and our sorrows, our hopes and our fears. A totally approachable God whom we can relate to because he has, in Jesus, related to us at the deepest, most fundamental levels of our ordinary human existence by being born as one of us.  And the sign – the swaddling clothes – tell us this.

We are twenty-first century people living in an increasingly dark world, tired by what humanity has done to itself and uncertain what our future as a human race might be.  Many of us have lived through strange and frightening times when the dark deeds of mankind threaten to overwhelm us.  How can these swaddling clothes and this vulnerable baby have anything to say to us in today’s uncertain world?

As with much bible imagery there is more to it than immediately meets the eye. And that more can be found in the very purpose of swaddling  which, as I have already said brings a sense of security and warmth.  One of the points of God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ is to protect and love us and help us as we grow in love – a love which transforms lives and gives new purpose.  And God does this by swaddling us.

He wraps us around with his love so securely that we are snug and warm – not in some sentimental, mushy kind of way – but as a Father, deeply concerned for his children gathers, them to himself and so reassures us that we are held in love. In one of those paradoxes of the Gospel God mothers us – the child of Bethlehem mothered in Luke’s Christmas story reaches out from his very vulnerability and holds us in his arms.  And he can do this because he knows where we are at. He knows us from within and he knows that within all of us there is a deep longing to be loved and cared for, wanted and accepted.

That’s why this sign shown to the Shepherds is so important. Because God places himself where we are, where we have been - then we can go to where He is and become what He wants us to be and what we need to be – people who are so loved that we have no difficulty in loving not just here and now but for all eternity – and that is what it means to be claimed by God as His own. We are to become love as He is Love and so we are to grow like Him.

In a strange kind of way that was the message those ordinary shepherds took back to the hillside. That is why they were full of joy. That is why they glorified God.  And so may we – for tonight we have been invited to join them – not in some ramshackle outbuilding of an inn in Bethlehem but here in this Church where we shall shortly move towards the altar for a blessing and for Holy Communion.  And there we shall find Jesus wrapped in swaddling cloths and where he will be placed in a manger.

The clothes we shall find wrapped around Jesus is the ordinary bread and the ordinary wine of the Eucharist – in the midst of which Jesus is truly present and the manger in which he will be laid is our hands and our lips  or, in blessing, on our heads - and through these signs he will come into our hearts.  There he will lie secure in the middle of our ordinary selves and there he will love us.

It is then that we might notice how the table has turned. It is our lives which are wrapped around his – we have become the swaddling clothes and we shall find him in the manger – the manger of our hearts.  And it is there, in the centre of our lives that he will work his Christmas magic – loving us from within.

That’s the real sign of Christmas and my prayer is that you will both see and know it for yourselves.