Carol Service reflection

 A very brief reflection in the middle of our carol service

So.

It is Christmas again.

We are in the middle of hearing the Christmas story, of how the world went wrong, and what God did to put it right again.
All our readings so far have been optimistic promises –
that Abraham’s descendant will bring blessings to all the nations of the earth;
that the king is coming and will usher in a reign of justice for the poor and peace for all of God’s creation;
that a king will be born to a people in darkness.
And that God is rejoicing over us with singing.

So what, I wonder, has gone wrong?

These last few years have been pretty awful. I believe there is an ancient Chinese curse that reads “May you live in interesting times!”
Seems that someone has invoked that curse,
what with first of all the pandemic,
and then this year, just as things got a bit easier,
the war in Ukraine and its impact on the rest of Europe,
the Queen’s death,
galloping inflation, the energy crisis, strikes….
What has happened, and will there ever be an end?
And where, we wonder, is God in all this?
What of those magnificent promises we have just heard?

You know, desperate as it feels right now, we’ve been here before.
Some of you may remember, as I do, the 1970s,
when it was very similar to now –
an energy crisis, galloping inflation, strikes, a government which appeared not to care…
I missed the worst of it as I was living and working in Paris at the time,
but it was difficult not to know about it from letters and phone calls from family and friends.

And, of course, there have been wars, plagues, storms, all sorts of disasters, both man-made and natural, all down the centuries.
And people have looked around and wondered “Where is God in this?”

One of the earliest efforts to come to terms with it all is the Book of Job.
You remember how Job’s life went totally pear-shaped –
God knew all about it and had given permission for this to happen –
and his friends tried to make it be all his fault.
Which it totally wasn’t, and Job knew this,
so he demanded answers from God.
God eventually answered Job, reminding him of the glories of creation that were all around him, that Job could have done nothing about:

‘Do you give the horse its might?
    Do you clothe its neck with mane?
Do you make it leap like the locust?
    Its majestic snorting is terrible.’

It’s wonderful stuff, and goes on for several chapters.
And at the end, Job has to acknowledge God’s greatness,
and “repents in dust and ashes”, we are told.
It’s one of the earliest attempts to come to terms with the fact that awful things do happen, and we can often do nothing about them.

But then, Jesus himself said they would.
He said there would be wars,
and plague,
and famine,
and all sorts of disasters.
He told his disciples that they would be killed by those who thought they were doing God’s work.
But he also reminded them –
and us –
that the Holy Spirit would come.
And, he said, he has told us this so that we may have peace.
In this world we will have trouble.
“But take courage!
I have overcome the world!”

So as we move into the second half of this service,
and hear once again the ancient story of how God became a human baby in a remote corner of an Empire,
let’s remember that, despite appearances,
God is in charge, and we can know his peace –
shalom, which means so much more than peace.
In the Bible, according to one scholar,

shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight –

a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed,

a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Saviour opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights.

Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

The way things ought to be.
We know full well that right now, things are not right,
and they very seldom are.
But we can know God’s peace, God’s shalom, in our hearts, no matter what.
Emmanuel.
God with us.
Amen.

Wot’s going on ’ere?

Okay, we have all heard this Gospel story many, many, many times. Probably several times every year, depending on how many carol services we’ve been to, or listened to on the radio, or watched on television! It’s part of the great cycle of nine lessons and carols without which no Christmas is complete.

So we let it wash over us. “The birth of Jesus was in this wise….” yadda, yadda, yadda. We knew it all before.

But, you know, it really is a most extraordinary story. We know that Matthew tells his version of the nativity from Joseph’s point of view, while Luke tells his from Mary’s, and that there are several very significant differences between the two versions. In fact, Luke’s version of events is so different you sometimes wonder whether they are talking about the same thing.

In Matthew,

we find the Holy Family living in Bethlehem,

fleeing to Egypt,

and then settling in Nazareth,

well out of reach of Herod’s descendants.

But Luke tells us that the family lived in Nazareth in the first place,

went to Bethlehem for the census,

and, far from avoiding Jerusalem,

called in there on their way back to Nazareth!

And, indeed, went there each year for the festivals –

I wonder, don’t you, whether they stayed with Mary’s cousin Elisabeth

and whether Jesus and John played together as children?

And while Luke has the shepherds visiting the manger, Matthew has eastern astrologers calling in at the house to worship the child.

Not that it matters.

We all rationalise the two stories into one,

and add our own extraneous bits –

the ox and the ass, for instance,

are figments of people’s imaginations, not part of the Luke’s account.

Even the stable – the manger may well have been separating the dwelling-house from the animal-house, rather than in a separate stable as we envisage it.

But from Matthew’s telling of it, the Holy Family lived in Bethlehem anyway and didn’t need to use a stable!

But that doesn’t matter now.

What does matter, is that Joseph was a righteous man. A righteous man, in the Bible, is one who always tries his hardest to do what he believed God wanted. Job is another “righteous man”, and I’m sure there were others in the Bible, but I can’t think of them off-hand right now. Anyway, Joseph always wanted to do what was right in God’s eyes. And now, suddenly, his world is torn apart. Mary, to whom he was betrothed – and a betrothal back then is far more binding than an engagement today – Mary is expecting a child, and it isn’t his.

I do wonder, don’t you, why Mary didn’t go and discuss the angel’s visit to her with Joseph before saying “Yes”. Although, come to think of it, Luke doesn’t mention Joseph at that stage, but has Mary saying that she can’t possibly get pregnant because she doesn’t have a lover. Joseph only appears in the next chapter as her husband.

Anyway, she didn’t. She accepted God’s request that she bear “a son, who will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

And there she is, and what is Joseph to do? A righteous man, in those days, would probably go to the rabbis and seek guidance from Scripture, and ask what they thought. Back then, they didn’t have the written guidance that Jews have today, known as the Talmud, because it hadn’t been written down, but the rabbis knew, and remembered, what earlier generations had said about the Law. And in this case it was very clear: if your wife, whether married or betrothed, betrayed you, she was to be stoned to death. The man wasn’t, of course – that sort of law didn’t apply to him! He might have to pay a fine to the husband, and he might be required to marry the girl (assuming she hadn’t been stoned first), but he certainly didn’t face death. That, I’m afraid was and remains the reality for all too many women.

Anyway, Joseph is kind-hearted. He knows he can’t marry Mary, but he really can’t bring himself to agree that she be stoned to death. So he decides – and I expect he sought the rabbis’ approval – to quietly end the betrothal and send her back to her parents. She would just have to cope as best she could. If they threw her out – as well they might – she would have to go on the streets or starve.

But then God intervenes, and tells Joseph to marry Mary anyway, because it was he, God himself, who was the father of the coming child. Did that really make it better? It was God who had betrayed him with his future wife? Seriously? And that was supposed to make it all right? Hmph. Joseph wasn’t impressed. I should think he was very angry with God, and probably said so in no uncertain terms. Fortunately, it’s okay to be angry with God – I’m sure we have all been, at one time or another. And that’s fine. God understands. God knows that we need to express our anger in order to get rid of it, and not let it fester and turn to depression.

Poor Joseph. He is a righteous man, but he has to choose between obeying God’s call and going on being seen as righteous. We may or may not have trouble believing that Mary’s baby was conceived by the Holy Spirit – after all, we say we believe it whenever we say the Creed – but I’m quite sure that nobody in first-century Bethlehem would have believed it. And if Joseph had tried to tell people, it might have been his turn to have been stoned, this time for blasphemy!

God does confound our expectations in this story. You might expect the Messiah to be born to a righteous man – but would you expect him to have to choose between doing God’s will and being righteous? God is continually turning our world upside down like that – or should be!

When I was young, there was a book by a man called J B Phillips, entitled “Your God is too small”. I don’t know whether it’s still in print, but it was excellent, I seem to remember. Phillips showed how most of us tried to keep God small enough that our minds could encompass what it was all about. But, of course, you can’t do that. I mean, you can do that, of course, and we all tend to, but if we do, what we are worshipping isn’t God. Similarly, we tend to put God in boxes, telling each other that God always does thus and so – but that’s not true, either, as this story shows.

God required a righteous man to marry a woman who was pregnant, not by another man, which would have been bad enough, but by God himself! We think that God has laid down rules for sexual morality – but is God bound by those rules? Doesn’t look like it, does it? What if God’s rules are actually less rigid than we think? Of course, Jesus told us that we mustn’t use people just for their bodies, but then, that isn’t applying here. Mary has said “Yes” to God, and trusts God enough to believe he’ll do the right thing by her and she won’t end up on the streets. And Joseph trusted God enough to believe he would enable him to live down the scandal of marrying a woman carrying, so it was thought, another man’s child.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read the genealogies that comprise the first half of this first chapter of Matthew? If you have, you’ll notice that while mostly it was so-and-so was the father of someone else, on a very few occasions the name of the mother is given. And every time, every single time, there is some scandal attached to that woman. Tamar was a daughter-in-law of Judah, who was a childless widow and who should then have married Judah’s youngest son, but Judah refused to arrange this. So Tamar, who was furious, pretended to be a prostitute and made a bargain with Judah for a goat, and his seal and stick as a deposit on the goat. Then she stopped pretending, and nobody could find her to give her the goat. But when Judah heard that Tamar was pregnant, he ordered her to be burnt – but changed his mind sharpish when she sent him back his seal and stick and said that he was the father!

Rahab, the mother of Boaz, really was a prostitute. And Ruth, of course, is a Gentile, an outsider, a Muggle, if you like, who seduces Boaz to get him to marry her. And then there was Bathsheba, who committed adultery with David while she was still married to Uriah, and later marries David and is the mother of Solomon. Nevertheless, she was probably not as virtuous a woman as all that…. David could have had any woman he wanted, so I expect he probably accepted “No” for an answer. But we’ll never know.

The point is, none of these women were the virtuous women whose price, the book of Proverbs tells us, is above rubies. And yet they played a vital part in the genealogy of Jesus. God has confounded our expectations yet again! The virtuous, righteous women are just in the nameless ruck – it is the outsiders who are named and cherished.

Outsiders. I know that the church has an incredibly bad reputation when it comes to welcoming outsiders – you only have to consider what happened when those who had come over on the Empire Windrush appeared in church their first Sunday in London. But that was not of God. God is the one who welcomes the outsider, the outcast. Jesus spoke to the woman at the well when nobody else would – and his disciples were shocked and horrified.

I wonder how good we are today at welcoming outsiders. What if a gay or lesbian couple turned up at church on Christmas Day? What if a Muslim family, seeking somewhere to worship, turned up? What if…. I know I’m not good at coping if someone drunk wanders in, seeking money – and yet God might have sent that person just to confound our expectations.

God confounded our expectations by having the Messiah born of an unmarried woman – well, carried by an unmarried woman, I should say, as she and Joseph appear to have been married before Jesus was actually born. He then proceeded to confound them still further by having outsiders be the first to be told the news, and to come and worship him. The shepherds, in their own way, were as much outsiders as the magi.

And God continues to confound our expectations today. Are you ready for that to happen? When we sing “O holy child of Bethlehem, be born in us today?” are you ready for that to happen. Or when we sing “Fit us for heaven, to live with thee there”, are you ready for God to fit you, indeed for heaven. Because it won’t be in the way you expect! Amen.