Preaching Christmas—without a Stable
Reading the nativity business relationship in Luke 2 carefully highlights the way that the tradition of the stable is nowhere present. That's all very well for scholars, people say, but how does that work in the practice of preaching? The answer is: rather well! This is what I said concluding time I preached on what Luke two actually says!
I love this fourth dimension of year. I know that they can be a brunt at times, but I love the traditions that we associate with Christmas. In that location'due south the reassurance of the familiar every bit we dive into the loft to drag out the box of decorations that we carefully put away last year, and chase for the strings of lights that need to wind round the tree and down along the hall.
Some traditions are more than memorable than others. Information technology seems to take become a tradition in our house that nosotros head to the flower shop at the end of our route, go excited about an oversized tree that has non been sold and and then now is at an irresistible discount, lug information technology up the road puffing and panting, and so find it is too big to fit in our living room. So I get out the saw to cut vi inches off the stop, with more puffing and panting, get distracted, allow the saw to bounciness from the tree and land on my thumb, which leads to a nuance to the kitchen to find the plasters and…well, you go the picture.
Since the inflow of our canis familiaris Barney, iii years ago, nosotros have added another tree tradition, which is to forget to shut the living room door, and then have to work out which of the decorations Barney has jumped upwardly and caught and chewed into an unrecognisable mess.
Traditions don't just persist, they grow and develop. I'm non quite sure why, but the tradition of putting lights in the trees in your garden has taken off in the last few years, then that our street now looks similar a fairground ride with all the flashing and blinking lights. We're not ones to miss out, so I spent most of yesterday morning one-half way up a walnut tree disentangling 400 lights on a 25m wire. The shelves at Band Q take every kind of light—coloured, white, ice white and warm white, long and brusk, indoor and outdoor—all with viii different options for flashing, glowing and pulsating. Information technology'southward what Christmas is all about, apparently.
Traditions, like personal habits, are powerful things. The can requite us a shared sense of participation, so nosotros all have a contribution to make to the turning of the seasons. They connect us with the past—I will never forget when our youngest, Becca, was in a nativity play at her plant nursery school and was (hoorah!) playing the office of Mary, and when the narrator announced the nativity of the infant Jesus, she reached down between her legs for the doll in a strikingly realistic way! Just the connectedness with the past of our traditional annual rituals is what makes Christmas such a painful time for those amongst us who are bereaved, or who take difficult memories.
If we are honest, we need these traditions to give us reassurance. They reassure usa that we are like other people. They reassure u.s. that there are some things that don't alter (at least not likewise much) when we live in a globe where change is faster, more alarming, and more dramatic every year. They offering us certainty in an uncertain globe. With the EU referendum and the United states of america Presidential election, we are ending 2022 in a position that no-one would have predicted. Our former MP, who lost his seat at the last election, just sent a bulletin proverb 'let's promise for a rather less exciting 2017!' Information technology might have been a year of personal challenge and modify for you besides. But for whatever reasons, traditions reassure us of stability, of somewhere still in a turbulent world. Woe betide you if you claiming cherished traditions!
But I wonder if that doesn't requite us a problem. At Christmas time, some of these traditions are so fixed that they contain and constrain the Jesus of the Christmas stories. The traditional nativity scene looks timeless, polished, quite bang-up and rather stock-still. We get it out each year; we set it up; admire it; the we put information technology advisedly away, perhaps wrapping the pieces and putting them back in their box. And life tin can go on as before.
The problem is that that is not what Luke really gives us in our reading. I wonder if you noticed a item of our reading: 'there was no space in the guestroom'. Even though it is firmly lodged in our traditions, Luke doesn't betoken u.s.a. to a 'draughty stable with an open door', because two,000 years ago people kept their animals in their own dwelling house, not an outbuilding—not least considering they couldn't beget one. And Joseph and Mary didn't become first to an 'inn'; they were coming to their ain family, and eastern hospitality wouldn't have dreamed of doing anything only welcome them into the dwelling house, to a minor guestroom built on the roof to accept in visitors and family. Perhaps this guestroom was already occupied, or perhaps Luke is just telling us that the spare room is non big enough for a birthing mother along with those assisting her, so she needed to give birth in the main living area, the centre of the home, aslope the overnighting animals. And so the natural place to lay the newborn is in the recess holding the animals hay—merely as not and then long ago we might have put a baby in a drawer—at the centre of the family's living space and immediately office of their routine of daily life.
A friend of mine commented on this:
When I discovered this a year agone, it opened up a whole new perspective on what it means that Jesus came every bit i of united states. Not hidden away in either that lowly stable or in the advisedly prepared guest room (with it's special "guest room" towels & bedding, in my own modern vision), only came into the world in the midst of the master living infinite with all information technology'south chaos and noise. Considering of that, it'southward easier to imagine him joining me in the chaos and noise of my everyday life, and not needing to have myself off to some totally luxury-denying place away from the world, or even a carefully prepared space (like a church) where everything is "just so" in guild to meet him. He is truly Immanuel, God with the states.
For Luke, Jesus isn't pictured as born 'over there', away from everyday life, inviting us to visit once a year, but at the center of the dwelling, request whether nosotros too will make space for him. He isn't pictured every bit poor and outcast (not here at least) request what nosotros can practice for him, just as a child of hope and promise, request what he might practise for united states of america. He isn't pictured as rejected, inviting us to pity him, simply as welcomed, asking u.s. whether nosotros will welcome him also.
Now you might be feeling nervous about this Jesus driving a coach and horses through this flake of our cherished Christmas tradition—merely information technology won't be the last time that he does it. He goes on to overturn tables at the temple, to tell Bible teachers they don't know their Bibles, and the religious purists that they've got it all wrong. Similar them, we don't want to let go of our traditions too speedily.
Merely as I think almost information technology, I realise that this is just what I demand—what we all need. The traditions and habits that we cling to don't serve us very well, and don't requite us what we hoped they would. As a social club, we take more and ameliorate nutrient than we've ever had, yet we are getting less and less healthy. We have more wealth than before, all the same nosotros tin't overcome the division between rich and poor. We have better medication than ever, simply we don't know how to face death. Albert Einstein once said: 'The definition of foolishness is doing the same thing and expecting a dissimilar consequence.' If nosotros just keep on doing the aforementioned old things—in our nation, in our communities, in our ain lives—life isn't going to get any better. Something needs to alter.
The same is true for us as individuals. Many of us keep to live with pain from the past, and our habits haven't brought us healing. We live with conflict, with others or inside our selves, and we have establish peace elusive. We wonder where our lives our going, and haven't found a existent sense of purpose. Nosotros live with wounds and hurts inflicted on us or that nosotros take inflicted on others, and we long for forgiveness.
But equally 2,000 years ago Jesus burst on the scene and came right into the centre of the lives of those he met, we demand him to practise the same again for usa. In i of his messages, the campaigner Paul says something very odd: 'I am in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you' (Gal 4.19). That idea is picked up in one of our best-known carols, 'O little town of Bethlehem' which ends:
O holy Kid of Bethlehem
Descend to us, nosotros pray
Bandage out our sin and enter in
Be born in us today
The real wonder of Christmas isn't in our traditions or our glittering lights. It isn't simply in the fact that Jesus, son of God, took human being course and was born in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. No, the real wonder is that is can exist 'born in us today'—that he can bring his healing, his peace, his purpose and his forgiveness into our lives—if, just as they did in Bethlehem, we will make infinite to welcome him this Christmas. (Previously published in 2016.)
Boosted notation: there is a fabulous children'southward story book, free online, which does exactly this with the story, at the Lost Sheep website. It is fantastic!
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