A Very Human and Very Divine Story - A Short Christmas Day Sermon

I want you to try and imagine that you have never heard the story of the birth of Jesus before, that you have never seen a nativity play or read Matthew’s gospel.  I want us to look together, just for a short while, at Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus as if for the first time.

The first thing we might notice is that it is an account that is very firmly placed in history and in historical context.  Luke tells us that Jesus was born during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, who ruled the Roman Empire from 27BC until 14AD.  He further says that it was during the governorship of Quirinius, who although he was Governor from 6AD was also involved in military functions in Judea in 7BC.  We know that Jesus was born in the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4BC so it seems that Jesus was born in or around 7BC.

The second thing we might notice is that we are told where Jesus was born.  He was born in a specific place, a little town called Bethlehem.  People who have been to the Holy Land have told me that there is a church built on the spot where Jesus was born and that you can visit the site of his birth.

The third thing we might notice is that this is an account of real people.

It is the story of a woman, Mary, who is pregnant before she is married, in a society where you could be stoned to death for having a baby if you weren’t married.  It is the story of a woman who agreed to carry the Son of God, knowing the risks and yet stepping out in faith.

It is the story of a man, Joseph, who trusted Mary, his fiancée and then found out she was going to have a baby that wasn’t his.  It is the story of Joseph’s support for Mary in perhaps the hardest of emotional circumstances and of his faith that Mary was telling the truth and God was in it all.

It is the story of a baby born in circumstances of poverty.  Whether it was a stable, or a common family room shared by animals as some scholars suggest, Jesus was born in less than ideal circumstances, into a family who were probably living around the poverty line.

It is the story of shepherds, men despised by the Jews because they rarely attended Synagogue and were seen as a bit dishonest.  Shepherds who braved the stares and hostility of the people of Nazareth to visit a baby because they had been told it was what God wanted them to do.

The account of the birth of Jesus as told by Luke is a very real story, it is a very human story.

It is also the story of angels: of the angel Gabriel visiting Mary in the tiny Galilean village of Nazareth to tell her that she was favoured by God and had been chosen to be the Mother of God incarnate on earth.  It is the story of angels visiting shepherds on a Judean hillside and telling them that the long awaited Messiah had been born in Bethlehem.

It is also the story of God himself entering into human history and becoming part of his own creation: of something so impossible for us to comprehend that we accept it by faith.  It is the story of God becoming fully human as well as being fully divine.  In the baby Jesus we see, as Charles Wesley put it, “our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.”

There, in an animal feed trough in the obscure little town of Bethlehem, having his nappies changed by a teenage woman, lay God himself; a helpless baby and at the same time love and power beyond our imagining.

Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus.  A very real story of human beings blessed by God.  A very human story!  A very real story of God becoming a part of creation and changing human history forever.  A very holy and divine story!

It is indeed a very real story, a story for each one of us, because we too are human beings, like Mary and Joseph and we too have been touched by God through the Jesus who was born in that stable.  Our lives, our very selves, are very different because of the touch of the babe of Bethlehem; the one who became human on that very special day; taught us and demonstrated to us how to live and love and gave his life that we might live.

So let us take this very real story of human beings and God and make it more and more a part of our story; this day and for all time to come.

"Our God Contracted To a Span" - A Short Christmas Eve Sermon

If I asked you all tonight what your favourite Christmas Carol was, I would probably get a variety of answers.  I know one or two would tell me that their favourite isn’t even in Singing the Faith (The current British Methodist hymn book/resource), as their favourite is “O Holy Night”.  Another carol missing from Singing the Faith, is “The First Nowell.”

My favourite carol is in Singing the Faith, and it’s not one that most people would name as favourite.  We’ve just sung my favourite in fact, “Let Earth and Heaven Combine”.  For me it is a wonderful poem, a meditation on the very heart of the Christmas story; expressed in John’s gospel as “the word became flesh and lived among us” and summed up by Charles Wesley with these words, “our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man”.

This is indeed the heart of the Christmas story, the essential truth and foundation upon which everything else is built.  I’m not saying that Mary and Joseph’s faithfulness to God by taking him at his word isn’t important, I’m not saying that the poverty and homelessness accompanying Jesus’ birth isn’t important nor am I saying that the angels and shepherds and wise men aren’t important; they are, for a number of reasons I’ll be exploring tomorrow morning and on Epiphany Sunday.  What I am saying is that none of this is as important as the central fact that Christmas is about “our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.”

There is no nativity story in John’s gospel.  The traditional stories about the birth of Jesus in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels seem not to have interested him.  What John focuses on is the important truth about that first Christmas, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

So what does John mean when, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he writes of “the Word”?  John’s gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”

The Word is God, specifically the person of God we know as God the Son; the baby born in the manger who is called Jesus.  Jesus is the Word of God, Jesus is “our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.”

John was inspired to tell us some very profound things about Jesus.  He was a partner with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit in creation: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”  Jesus existed before anything other than God existed and was not created himself: he was and is eternal, forever.

The Apostle Paul expressed the same concept in this way in his letter to the Philippians: “Christ Jesus was in the form of God”, meaning that Jesus and God are one and the same being.

This is important and we need to understand why because it is one of the foundation stones of our Christian faith.  Many of the civilisations surrounding Judea had a belief in multiple gods and goddesses.  The gods especially seemed to have a fondness for human women and there were many legends of heroes who were half man and half god.  Hercules is, perhaps, the best known of them.

If we just read the nativity accounts of Matthew and Luke we can be given the impression that Jesus was just the latest of these, born of a human mother but with God as his Father; literally half human and half God.  That is not the nature of Jesus, that is not the truth of who he is and John chapter one is an eloquent corrective to this.

Jesus was and is fully divine and fully human, a concept that is hard for us to get our heads around.  Paul attempts it in Philippians: “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”  We can feel Paul struggling to express in human language the divine truth about Jesus; “our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.”

John, when he writes, “the Word became flesh and lived among us”, is telling us that in Bethlehem in around 6BC, all of history changed; that God himself entered into and became a part of his own creation.  This is an earth shaking and world shattering truth.  This truth sets Christianity apart from all other faiths. This was a visitation like no other—one that leaves nothing the same.

The truth that “the Word became flesh and lived among us” is not something to understand in our heads, but to accept in our hearts by faith.  The Babe of Bethlehem is the Lord God who came to show us the value of human existence, who came to share our human struggle with us; who came to die on the cross in our place so that we can be forgiven and enter into loving relationship with God for eternity.

The baby Jesus is God incarnate.  In Jesus the divine Word of God became human, so that human beings can embrace the divine!