A Christmas Message From a Link Diocese
A pregnancy with uncertainty about paternity. A man, his wife and a new baby. A few poor shepherds with nothing much to commend them. An animal stall, complete with hay, but no real bedding. The story is pretty ordinary.
And then there the other bits. A heavenly messenger appears in a dream. The chorus of angels sings in the sky. A star, large and shining, draws others towards the place. The three richly dressed sages, travellers from distant lands. It is all a bit too overwhelming.
The Christmas story is full of contradictions and extremes. There is nothing safe about the story, and yet it is familiar because it reflects something of everyone's real lived experience. Our lives are full of contradictions and ambiguities. The extremes of the first Christmas are still with us. We spend too much money on presents and food that we do not really need. We are consumed with anxiety about family tensions and the amount of wine needed for Christmas dinner. And yet there are moments of sheer joy when a youngster opens a present, when stories are shared about family members who are no longer alive, when something is dropped in the kitchen and everyone bursts into laughter, when a visitor feels really at home in our home.
When St Paul writes that "God was, in Christ, reconciling the whole world to himself' he really means the whole world. It is tempting to think that God is only interested in reconciling us, and people like us. But it is a world full of ambiguity and contradiction that God calls back to himself. A world that he made, and that he loves and that he enters as the Child of Bethlehem. The simplicity, and the amazing world shattering event of the Incarnation go together. The angelic voices and the rough language of the shepherds belong together. The squalid stable and the Wise men from the east are all integral parts of the story, because the juxtaposition of the great and the grotty, the heavenly and the earthly is at the heart of the Christmas event.
Each year as we come again to recall the stable and the star, the baby and the angels, the shepherds and the wise men, we are reminded that all this is God's arena. God comes to the whole mess, to those whose lives seem secure and well ordered, and to the mentally ill and the criminal and the over anxious alike. His invitation to new and whole life is for everyone and, if Paul is right, to the whole Creation.
What is required of us? The central characters give us some clue.
Mary and Joseph, obedient, excited, and loving are also uncertain, perplexed and anxious. But they receive the Child and care for him. They hold him and cherish him and try to respond to his need. They are absorbed in the exhausting needs of the present and attend to the present just like all parents, with a mix of resentment and immense privilege.. There is hardly time for anything else. Their lives are fixed around the baby. Jesus is at the heart of everything they are doing.
"0 Holy Child of Bethlehem, Be born in us today."
The Right Reverend Garry Weatherill, Bishop of Willochra