Lord Jesus on this Holy night may we hear your Word speak in our hearts, enlighten us with the light of your love and fill us with your peace and joy. In the name…
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation.
Your God reigns!
Your saviour is coming!
How thrilling all this sounds! Like a film, like the moment of transformation in a battle, when suddenly, the sentinels upon the mountain tops or the watchers on the battlements, see the hero of the hour coming with a great army to save what had all seemed lost. Despair rises into hope and unbelief becomes firm faith – the tide turns, the battle is won, there is relief, delight and joy unbounded!
All that may happen in films but how can we make sense of this now, in our lives, in our world, where bad news seems to be always the order of the day – where we don’t really believe that anyone is coming to save us anymore, where its increasingly hard to trust in any promises made to us by those who lead us.
And yet, those words of the prophet Isaiah, as they have all the way through Advent, seem so full of promise. Our hope and expectation – our yearning and longing – is about to be turned into the joy of fulfilment – that’s what Isaiah is saying.
And tonight, here, in the dark, with the words of the carols and the light of the candles, and the sense that the mystery of Christmas is so close now – we catch a glimpse of this, a glimmer of glory, a sliver of starlight – and we find ourselves thinking…..perhaps it can be true after all?
That wondrous story that once touched our hearts, that made us tingle with excitement, when we were children, before we grew up and became disillusioned, before the pain and struggle, the hopes and fears of all the years taught us to expect to be disappointed, and so to trust to ourselves – its safer that way.
But there’s nothing safe about the way God comes to save us – to be with us.
A new born baby, a first time mother, barely old enough to bear a child at all, a couple ill at ease with each other and far from home, no suitable place for them to stay, let along to bring to birth a baby.
What could be more risky, more vulnerable, or more foolish?
But that’s what we do for love, isn’t it? We do anything, however mad it seems.
God loves us so much that nothing is too much or too costly.
In the beginning was the Word –
it all begins with the overflowing love of God that breathes into being all life –
in the beginning God said ‘let there be light’ and the light brought life to all the earth.
Now there is another beginning, when the one who created all things, becomes a little child, to come down to earth to live our life and to remind us who gave us life in the beginning. To teach us to trust again and to show us how to really live again.
Each Christmas we find our way back to this – in the tinsel and the twinkle we see a hint of the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.
The magic and mystery of Christmas starts here in the dark of the night as a baby is born and angels sing out the glorious news to the shepherds on the hillside outside Bethlehem and a star burst into glorious light high in the heavens.
All heaven is come down to earth and all earth is drawn to kneel at the manger.
Great little one, whose all embracing birth, brings earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.
How can we make sense of all this – it defies all that we think we understand and yet our hearts seem to know it to be possible, to be true.
When Mary asks the angel how it can be that she will bear a child, who will be the son of God, Gabriel replies – for nothing will be impossible with God.
Your God is coming to save you – he comes as the glorious impossible – the baby Jesus, born to share our lives, our joys, sorrows, even our death, and he comes as our Saviour, the Light of the World, to bring us to new everlasting life – this is the glory that is the Good News, the Mystery of Christmas – God with us, this night, this Christmas and for evermore.
Amen.
Service: Reverend Michelle Dalliston. 24th December 2022.
(St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)
Referenced Scripture: Isaiah 52: 7-10, John 1: 1-14