December 24, 2008

       Can you imagine being there? Can you imagine spending the night out under the stars, keeping a watch for wolves and other kinds of threats. Trying to stay awake, and warm. Thinking about whatever it is you think about when you’re left to yourself. And can you imagine your attention suddenly being seized by a different kind of light. A message. An urgent need to go and see, to barge in uninvited on the birth of a baby. 

  Given enough imagination, maybe we can find ourselves there. At the very least, we can picture ourselves crowding into the stable along with animals and shepherds and a tired and worried family. We can imagine ourselves in the story. But tonight, we’re being asked to do turn our imaginations around. Rather than imagine ourselves part of the story, we’re invited to imagine the story being part of us.

  We’re not actually that different from the people who witnessed the Christmas angels. Obviously the world has changed in 2000 years, but people are pretty much the same. We’re still just as preoccupied with ourselves, but still just as capable of being jolted out of our complacency when something appeals to our sense of awe and wonder. We’re still living with same uncertainties, the same anxiety that we’re not really in control of our lives. Empires and governments change, but most of us still feel we don’t have much say. The creation and destruction of wealth still moves us around like pieces on a chessboard. Even something as simple as the weather can demolish our best-laid plans.

  That’s the atmosphere into which the angels sang their song and announced their message. And they still do. What they tell us tonight is the same as what they told the shepherds. Not a solution to all the problems of the world. Not a strategy for revolution or even how to beat the market. No real news at all. Except this: a child is born, a saviour, the messiah, the Lord.

  What difference does that make? From a certain perspective, none at all. Children get born all the time, somewhere one is being born right now. And one child is not going to change the world. Nor do the angels promise that this one will. The world is the way it is, but God is here too, in this child. That changes nothing, yet it makes all the difference.

  God is in the world along with us, buffeted by the same storms, by the weather, by good and bad health, by economic and political forces, by all those powers that make us feel powerless. God, with us, experiences the same uncertainties, the same anxieties, the same lack of control. And he has a plan. You might expect the plan to be - put everything right. Summon the forces of heaven and take control. Make the world work the way it is supposed to. But that’s not the plan.

  Instead, God’s plan is to live through all that human beings experience, in the person of this child who grows up to be a man who dies on a cross. God, in Christ, wins out over all the forces that seem to rule in this world, by living through them all and in the end saying, “There, that’s done.” What an extraordinary, upside-down way of winning. It turns out, you can’t lose if you’re willing to give everything away anyway. And that’s how God is, and it’s how God created us to be. And we see that most clearly tonight, as we peer into a manger and see a human child, capable of holding nothing back, showing us the face of God, who is just the same.

  But this is where it becomes most important for us to imagine the story being part of us. It’s a beautiful story, awesome and wondrous, but it’s not meant to be seen as long-ago and far-away, brought out to be told once a year. It’s a story that happens every day, and it’s the story of our lives.

  We are living this story every time we are faced by any kind of challenge or crisis. The story invites us to see those moments in our lives through the lens of faith. “Faith” meaning, who can I really count on? When we don’t stop to think about that question, the answer is always “myself”. I can only really trust myself, but more than that, I need to know that I can beat the odds, I can be in control. But the story of the birth of Christ bursts that balloon flatter than flat.

  And instead it offers us a different kind of faith. Not faith in a God who is all I wish I could be but know I can’t - the real boss, the real wizard pulling the levers behind the curtain. Something much better than that. Faith in a God who doesn’t need to be in charge. A God who is OK with being even as weak and vulnerable as a baby. Now there’s a God we can trust. There’s a story that takes awe and wonder to the limit.

  And when we let our awe and wonder lead us to trust the saviour born in a manger, to put our hand in the hand of this God - then the story continues. The faith that you live out, however hesitating or unsure or reluctant it may be, shines with a different kind of light. You probably can’t see it, but someone may be looking at you right now and wondering how you can be so strong, or loving, or wise or peaceful or brave in the midst of all that is happening in your life. What they are seeing is the child of Bethlehem being born again in you. The world, your world, my world, is the way it is - but God is here with us too, and that makes all the difference.

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