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A Sermon for Christmas Day ‘This shall be a sign to you. You shall find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger’. An atheist was spending quiet day fishing on Loch Ness when suddenly his boat was attacked by the Loch Ness Monster. In one easy flip the great beast tossed him and his boat high into the air and then opened its mouth to swallow them both. As the man fell to his doom even he, an atheist, cried out to God for help ‘Oh my God save me’ he cried. At once the ferocious attack ceased and as the man hung in mid-air, a booming voice came from the clouds: ‘I thought you didn’t believe in me!’ ‘Come on God give me a break’ the man pleaded, ‘Two minutes ago I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster either’. Believing in God or not believing in him has become a hot topic over the past few months. Last year Richard Dawkin’s book entitled the ‘God Delusion’ rose to the top of the best seller lists . A few weeks ago the British Secular Society sponsored an advertising campaign under the heading: ‘There is almost certainly no God so enjoy your life’. The question that I would like to ask of those good folk is this: ‘What kind of a God is it that you don’t believe in?’ If it’s a God whose chief aim is to exert a harsh judgement upon us then I wouldn’t want to believe in him either. There is not much Good News from that kind of God. And yet the message of Christmas is essentially good news about God and its good news about the kind of God in whom we believe. That he is good news for us. In fact the best news for us and for the world.The message of the angels points to the essence of that good news. Do not be afraid; for see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people.’ And the Good News is focused in the birth of a child. ‘To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord’. ‘This will be a sign for you. You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger’. Jesus’ birth is living proof that God is indeed good news for the world. It is what the birth of the child Jesus says to us about God his father that is central to the Christmas message of Good News for all people. If I were to ask you what God said most often to his people I wonder how you would reply? When in the Bible God speaks to his people what four words does God say most often? I’ll give you a clue. Of the four words the first two are ‘Do Not.......’ Now you may have a view of God similar to our atheist friends – a God who is always saying ‘Do not’. ‘Do not do this or that, or Do not say or think that. A God of do not or else! Well God does say that sometimes and rightly so. But actually the four word phrase that God speaks most often is: ‘Do not be afraid’. I understand that those words are found 365 times in the Bible – one for each day. Each day – whatever that day may bring - God says to you: ‘Do not be afraid’. And those four words ‘Do not be afraid’ can have meaning for us because of four other words that God often says to us: ‘I am with you’. ‘Do not be afraid. I am with you’. ‘Do not be afraid a child is born’. Said the angel to the shepherds on the frozen hillside. ‘I am with you’ is the name of the child in the manger. The Prophets said ‘His name shall be called Emmanuel which means ‘God is with us’. You wouldn’t expect to find God in a baby in manger in a stable in the back yard of an inn. But God is with us in that very child in that very manger. God is with us in those strange and fearful circumstances. And if God is there in that child and in that manger and in those circumstances then surely he can be anywhere. And that’s the point. If Our Lord and God is to be found in a vulnerable and helpless child, shut out in the darkness and the cold and the grime of a stable then surly he can be found anywhere. Wherever in whatever circumstances we are he is always saying to us: ‘Do not be afraid. I am with you’. The birth of Jesus , when and where God touches our world and shares our lives, is the proof of that.It’s not been an easy year for anyone. The threat and the fear of terrorism continues. We worry about our troops serving in Afghanistan. We have discovered that our financial institutions and those who run them cannot be relied upon. And in our own personal lives too this year will have been marked as all years are by the usual mix of joy and sorrow of triumph and disaster – and there is every likelihood that next year will bring more of the same. In all the circumstances of our lives the Good News of Christmas is that God is with us. His way of being with us is in this child Jesus. When he is with us he always brings new life and new hope and the promise of a new future. God is with us in Jesus Christ there is no doubt. The poet John Milton expressed this wonderfully in:
A Hymn on the morning of Christ’s Nativity. This is the month and this the happy morn Wherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal king, Of wedded maid and virgin mother born Our great redemption from above did bring, And with his Father work us a perpetual peace. That glorious form, that light unsufferable, And that far beaming blaze of majesty, Wherewith he wont at Heaven’s high council table To sit the midst of Trinal Unity, He laid aside; and here with us to be, Forsook the courts of everlasting day, And chose with us a darksome house of clay.
God is with us. The question for us is: ‘Are we with him?’
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