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Earlier this evening I was at a world premiere of a Nativity Play called Santa’s Bedtime Story. You may not yet know the authors though I expect Rachel and Rosie will go far. Watch this space! In their imagination they have already travelled a long way – from Lapland in the North to Bethlehem further South, with a quick visit to Epping in between.
Those who came to our crib service will already know the story but for those who couldn’t make it – basically, Santa Claus is in his North Pole home after a very busy night, with just one last journey with his Elves – to Epping, of course. He sets off with his two elves and they arrive at their destination where two girls are asleep, dreaming of Santa – or rather, of what Santa might bring them! Santa experienced some difficulty getting down the chimney and the commotion woke the children. Now, Santa really needed them to be asleep if he was to leave their presents so he offered to tell them a bedtime story. The story he chose was of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem and the rest of the play took the girls, and the audience into that story. Telling it didn’t have the effect of sending the girls to sleep – quite the opposite – so we don’t get to know what presents Santa gave them for Christmas….mmm, I wonder…. The girls in the play were doing what a lot of children and even adults will be doing this Christmas night. They were waiting – waiting for presents; waiting for the excitement of Christmas morning, Christmas lunch; waiting for the fun to begin.
Advent, the Church season which leads up to Christmas is often described as a time of Waiting. In Old Testament times the Prophets – those who foretold what God would do – prepared the people for a special kind of deliverer who would set the people of Israel free not only from those who oppressed and enslaved them but also free them from themselves, from the sin, the unloving and the hurt they inflicted on themselves and others. So they waited for the Messiah who, according to the Prophet Isaiah would be a:
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace
He would bring in God’s Kingdom of justice and love and peace. It is a beautiful vision that Isaiah paints and hardly surprising, therefore that the people longed for this to come true.
The Old Testament, especially the writings of the Prophets, is shot through with this waiting and longing for the One who would fulfil their hopes, their dreams and even their destiny. But the people had to wait a long time for those prophecies to be fulfilled and when they were – in the event we celebrate tonight – a lot of them failed to see what had really happened, perhaps because it was their hopes and dreams they wanted and not God’s. They expected a Warrior King who would fight the enemies of Israel and restore their earthly Kingdom. What they got instead was a child, a boy and a man who had come not to wage a war to regain a territory but one who would bring to birth a new kind of Kingdom. A Kingdom which sought a throne not in a grand palace or castle but in the human heart. A Kingdom which did not establish a fragile peace which required troops to safeguard it, but a real peace that came from the very heart of God. A Kingdom where Justice, Mercy, Freedom, Love were the qualities, the ruling manifesto, which would endure for ever.
God’s way of thinking and acting is often so different and opposite to our own that we don’t always understand what He’s up to. Sometimes we have to go beyond the seemingly obvious to what is really happening.
Most people in Israel hadn’t a clue that anything significant had happened in Bethlehem that night. A few shepherds on a nearby hillside were the only ones to experience a heavenly and glorious fanfare of angels announcing God’s arrival as a human babe. But why Shepherds? They were not regarded very highly in Israel at the time. Indeed they were considered as rogues, dishonest and untrustworthy.
We really do have to stop trying to think within the box. As Jesus was to prove, God had, and has, lots to do with those whom polite society, the morally righteous and the religious die-hards would have shunned. Which is why they are still waiting for deliverance when tax-gatherers, sinners, the broken, the poor, the despised, the lost, the bereaved were skipping into the Kingdom of God’s love ahead of them.
What the birth of Jesus has to tell us is that the time of waiting is over. Everything humanity longs for – basically that we are valued, that we matter, that life really does really have a purpose and that we truly are loved – is caught up in the birth of the babe at Bethlehem who became the inspiring and revolutionary teacher in Galilee, the worker of miracles which transformed lives and who went on to prove the Love of God for all of us in the ultimate self-giving on the Cross when everything that prevents human love from flourishing was defeated by Love Himself.
Yet, the world and even the Church still seem to be waiting – Waiting for something to happen that will change things for us and make things better – when, all the time, hidden in our midst, God has already changed us and the world – it just needs us to see it and be changed.
At the moment the world is in a troubled place and there is a lot of uncertainty around. In our own society we placed on faith on an ever-growing economy which has been built on consumerism. We are now less a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon once described us disparagingly, as a nation of shoppers. What sort of Society were we trying to build that relied on growing money rather than values? Now we seem to be waiting, like Dickens’ Mr. Micawber, who was always expecting something to turn up. We expect the Government to deliver; we expect bankers to make it right; we are waiting for everything to go back to what it was, assuming that the way of life we had was the right way. Are we perhaps waiting for the wrong thing? Ought we, perhaps, to be examining the values by which we have been living our lives and changing how we think and act – towards each other, towards ourselves and towards God?
We don’t have to wait for an answer – we already have it but it needs a re-think to find it. God has made us in His image; in Jesus the man who is also God, he has shown us what that image looks like; and he invites us to fashion our lives on One who teaches us that goodness, mercy, justice and love of others is the beginning of true wisdom and true society.
The Shepherds waiting on the hillside for dawn suddenly found a different kind of dawn in the babe of Bethlehem and immediately reached out in worship, adoration and praise. That praise was the first response to the dawning of a new age. Perhaps it is time we stopped looking into ourselves and began to be truly concerned for each other.
This applies not only to our economic crisis but to the other big issues in the world. Tonight in Bethlehem everything is all but still as we have just sung. People are hurting because they have been made to live behind a 9 metre high concrete wall by a people who 60 years ago were forced to live in similar ghettoes in Nazi Germany. Muslims and Christians are being held to ransom by a Government frightened by the threat of terrorism within its borders. A real fear but not one that innocent believers in Jesus Christ can do much about unless it is to show by their witness, fortified by our prayers and support, there is a way of casting out fear – and that, as the writer of the 1st Letter of John tells us, is love.
The Israeli Government is, on its own admission practicing apartheid and they are doing this because they are scared, but maybe it is time for them to learn that there is another way – the way of Love. The way of tolerance and acceptance which grows into a sharing of mutual hope and aspiration. One effect of the Bethlehem Ghetto is that it is making people of two distinct world religions, Christianity and Islam, learn how to co-exist together and share what they hold in common. Both Christians and Muslims will be sharing the festivities in Manger Square tonight. That in itself is a lesson that the Israelis might profitably learn. The answer to the problem is not always the obvious one. The babe of Bethlehem has something to teach those who now live in or surround His birth-city and indeed in other troubled areas of our world.
Within the Church too, we have been having our difficulties – which might be described as the difficulty of difference – differing views and opinions, differing interpretations of Scripture; different ideas of what the Church must look like. Exclusivity verses Inclusivity. who’s in, who’s out; who actually decides? Anglican Christianity will not be able to look back on 2008 with any pride but again, the Babe of Bethlehem has a new way to teach us. There is something about the way Jesus deals with people that actually celebrates our uniqueness. Everyone of us is unique and unless we are to be automatons, we are thinking, feeling, loving beings who have a unique contribution to offer to each other. As long as at the heart of our dealings there is love which is born out of knowing we are ultimately, supremely and unconditionally loved by God, then there is glory to be found in valuing and affirming each other and each other’s understanding of God.
What I am trying to say is that there is always another, better way out of our problems than the seemingly obvious. We really do have to look at, and listen to, the Christ of Bethlehem and Calvary and re-evaluate our lives – as human beings and be prepared to live our lives by renewed Christ-given values. These values are part of God’s Christmas present to us.
The girls in our Crib Service story were waiting expectantly for presents – what they got in the end is the only present worth having – Jesus Christ, the babe of Bethlehem. It drew from them awe and amazement and it changed their lives – they couldn’t wait to tell others but it was already written in their hearts. That is certainly a new way of seeing things – and it begins for each of us when we see ourselves, others, God in a new way – with our hearts and not just with our minds and with a love which has been shown to us already from the Christ of Bethlehem. We just have to accept that and it will already change how we think and how we act – because it changes who we are.