Sermon Christmas Eve 2009

Christmas Eve 2009

Isaiah 9: 2-7, Titus 3: 4-7, Luke 2: 1-20.

My undergraduate degree comes from the University of Wales - I spent three wonderful years in Bangor, North Wales, enjoying the beautiful scenery, the wonderful people, and - oh yes! - studying!

I discovered that you can learn a lot about a person from the name they've been given. In Wales there are lots of similar family names: Jones, Williams, Price. And there are lots of similar first names: Bronwen, Gareth, Gwendolyn, Meghan, Gwilym, Dafydd, and so on. And that created a real problem. In any small community you could have five or ten men Gareth Jones', or similar numbers of women named Gwen Williams. The Welsh came up with what I thought was an ingenious way of dealing with this. They used a person's first name, and then added their job: Bob the Builder as opposed to Bob the Grocer would be an English example. Often it gets abbreviated, so instead of being Gwen the Postmistress it would be Gwen Post, instead of Gwylim the shopkeeper it would be Gwilym Shop.

Turns out this isn't a new way of doing things - often it's where family names came from: think Blacksmith, Potter, Gardener, and so on.

All of this brings us to this day, and this special person, this special child and, in particular, his name. We've done a lot of preparation for the coming of this child who we know as Jesus Christ. How special is this child? We'd say "very special". But perhaps a better question would be, "what's special about him?"

In the satirical 1979 Movie "The Life of Brian" the wise men come to the wrong stable, to one that containing a child named Brian. His mother protests: "He's not the messiah, he's just a very naughty boy!" Assuming that the word "naughty" is redundant when it comes to young boys the contrast is between a young child and the messiah.

Now there's a word that we all have our own interpretations for! "Messiah". The word comes to us from the Hebrew "ma_šhi_a(h". Specifically it means "anointed" and it referred generally to the act of anointing with oil anyone chosen for a task by Yahweh, and specifically to one, particular person: the long-hoped-for Jewish liberator who would finally free the Chosen People. The Messiah is "The Anointed One."

The Greek used in the New Testament for this Hebrew word "ma_šhi_a(h" is "Christos" - Christ. And that brings us back to those Welsh names: "Christ isn't a family name" - there was no such thing. The Jews did much the same as the Welsh: it would have been Joseph the Tekton (which gets translated as "carpenter" but is more like "sub-contractor").

Jesus also was a "tekton", but the claim of those who came after him was that he was not only a "tekton", a subcontractor, but also "Jesus the Christ", the "ma_šhi_a(h", "the Anointed One", the Liberator. That's what makes this day special.

Most of us find this vision of a new-born baby to be compelling: all wrapped up against the cold, embraced by a mother who has (against all hope and the seeming heartlessness of that ancient Bethlehem community) found a place of warmth to lay him.

The truth is that we find pretty much every story like this compelling - were it any child so born and so nurtured - it's that vision of helplessness and our own innate compassion that draws us to this place at this time.

That is, in part, because a newborn child represents - for all of us - more than just the moment of and circumstances of their birth.

A newborn is about hope. A newborn represents the future, the undisclosed possibilities, the unknown but hopeful "Not-Yet" that has the potential to transform the "Already" into something new and positive for us. But would we come here, faithfully, every year, to remember a child born in similar circumstances, in the dead of winter in, say, Ireland in 1846 during "an Gorta Mór ", the Great Potato Famine, that carried off some of my relatives? Or a child born in Siberia in 1935 during Stalin's Great Purge?

I'd have to say it's not very likely we'd come, is it?.

All children are special for someone. Some children are special for lots of people. This child is special for everyone. We come here both because of the circumstances, and the age of the child, and because of that other word: "ma_šhi_a(h", "Christos". This child is - we Christians believe - The One. The One long promised, and, perhaps more importantly, long-hoped-for. This is The One who, we believe comes to set us free - all of us. We come here because of that promise of freedom.

For that reason this night does not and cannot stand alone. It has to stand in the great stream of history that finds its nexus in a period of about 30 years in ancient Judea, when Rome ruled the world.

This night has to stand with another night when this same person we now celebrate lying helpless in someone else's straw-filled feeding trough lay lifeless on someone else's a cold tomb slab.

And this night has to stand with a new day, when this man's disciples - men and women like all of us - found that tomb empty and, against all hope, its former occupant present with them again,

From that moment these ordinary, fearful women and men discovered that God had given them a gift that could free them, that could transform them - the ultimate gift of love that we all long for.

We come here tonight to celebrate that gift of love, to long for its presence in our hearts and in our lives, and to hope not just for each of us but for all of us that it will become the way we live our lives from this moment forward.

May it be so for us all.      Amen.