One
of those days – etched on your memory.
Visit
Stevie Thomson, minister in Wick – notion to visit J o G
Knowing
smile – Dunnet Head is – we’ll go to Dunnet Head.
Scotland
at its best, sunny, blue skies, wild moorland, little lochans that were the
colour of the silver foil your Cadbury’s dairy milk used to come wrapped in.
Indigo.
Rising,
til we reached the lighthouse at the top of the cliff, walked down to the
cliffs to take in the view.
No
words of mine, no photograph can do it justice. You had to be there. Spectacular.
Precipitous drop of 300 feet; Vast sweep of the ocean, sense of the curvature
of the earth. Ferry out of Scrabster, all 6000 tonnes, looking like a child’s
toy as it ploughed its way across the
Pentland firth on its way to Stromness; in the middle distance, the sheer red
cliffs of Orkney looming up out of the sea. Felt like we were standing at the
very edge of the world.
I
don’t know where your travels have taken you, but I hope you’ve experienced
that same feeling – whether at Dunnet, Head or Niagara, or the Grand Canyon, or
the Burj Khalifa because it’s that sense of awe I want you to remember this
morning. That sense of your own smallness as you look down on a landscape whose
vastness you struggle to comprehend.
This
morning, as we consider the birth of Jesus, we are in that kind of territory.
Because our faith tells us that as we peer over Joseph’s shoulder to see Mary
cradling her newborn in her arms, we are standing on the edge not of the world,
but of the known universe because we are looking down into the face of God
incarnate.
Our God, contracted
to a span; incomprehensibly made man, as Charles Wesley put it. This is the central truth and mystery of our
faith.
The
only adequate language for that is poetry, and though Matthew and Luke give us
the prose of the incarnation, it’s John who gives us its poetry. John who, it’s
believed, was one of the twelve – brother of James, fisherman, favoured
disciple. Who spent three years in the company of Jesus; who ate and drank and
talked with him, who saw him die an all-too-human death and saw him too on the
other side of death, resurrected.
It’s
that John, knowing the flesh-and-blood Jesus better than almost anyone, who
writes of him:
“In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God
in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was
made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all
mankind. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome
it.”
John’s
telling of Christ’s story doesn’t begin in Palestine with Mary’s visit from the
angel. Instead, he takes us right back to the beginning of time, in a
deliberate echoing of the creation story in Genesis 1. He’s telling us that
this Jesus is more than we could possibly imagine. That his origins are from
the dawn of time itself.
And
he’s telling us that God – who created the universe out of nothing – ex nihilo in the Latin – can do exactly
the same when it comes to having his son born into the world. We don’t need to
speculate about whose DNA Jesus carried, or – as some did and still do – cast
aspersions on Mary’s character by suggesting that she’d fallen pregnant by
another man.
When
we say in the Creed that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit,
that’s not a biological description of what happened, as though the Spirit were
somehow the Father and Mary the mother of Jesus. What the creed’s saying is
that the Word became flesh purely by the creative power of God. In a parallel
of the original creation Jesus was created ex nihilo in the dark void of Mary’s
womb. God spoke, and it came to be.
And
it’s crucial to understand that the child who was born of Mary is utterly
unique. We miss the point when we place him alongside Moses, or Mohammed or the
Buddah in the pantheon of great human teachers. He was certainly that, but he
was also far far more.
Jesus
was unique because he was both fully human and fully divine. No-one, before or
since, has been like him – marrying those two natures in one person.
He
wasn’t just God pretending to be human in some way. He really was a human
being. Divine in every way God is divine, but limited in every way that we are
limited.
He
wasn’t David Cameron, making a visit to a housing scheme to reassure us that
we’re all in it together, and then disappearing off home for dinner with his
millionaire pals.
In
Jesus, the divine Son of God, the Word, moved into our neighbourhood. He wasn’t just with us – he became one of us.
Jesus’
birth, his life, and his death were God’s ultimate affirmation of his love for
his people – his desire to be with us and to win us back and there’s no better
summary of that than these words of Paul from his letter to the Philippians:
6 Christ
Jesus, being in very nature God,
Did not consider equality with
God something to be grasped,
taking the very nature of a
servant,
being made in human
likeness.
he humbled himself
and became obedient to
death—
even death on a cross!
and gave him the name that
is above every name,
in heaven and on earth and
under the earth,
to the glory of God the
Father.
The
birth of this child, before whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess,
is what the whole of the Story has been building up to.
And
as we’ve watched the Story unfold, we’ve seen these same themes emerge time
after time:
That
God is good and wants to be with his people;
That
sin gets in the way; and we keep messing things up.
That
God’s solution would come through a descendant of Abraham who would bring
blessing to all nations
And
that a just King would rise from the line of David – a Messiah who would turn
the peoples’ hearts back to God.
These,
and more, are realised with the birth of Jesus. Born of the same line as
Abraham and David. Fulfilling scores of Old Testament prophesies, as we’ll see
again shortly. And we can rightly think of his birth as being the focal point
of God’s plans for the world. Everything before tends to it. Everything after
flows from it.
Not
political – flag of our own country serves as a good illustration.
Before After
Jews All
Nations
(Paul – Galatians. No distinction between Jew/Greek, male female, slave, free)
Palestine The World (For God so loved the World)
Sacrifice Christ’s
Sacrifice (once for all)
Temple Body (Paul - Your body
is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you).
Spirit
for some Spirit for All
(Peter @ Pentecost ‘In the last
days, God says, I will pour out
my Spirit on all people)
Trancendent/Separate Immanent/Close (Jesus – I no
longer call you servants. I call you friends. Hebrews – because of what Jesus
has done we can draw near to God without fear. John tells us that perfect love
casts out all fear)
The
life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ is going to achieve all of
this for us, and more. And though his journey’s just beginning as we join the
story this morning, before us are signs and symbols of where that journey is
going to lead him.
Why
did he do it? Why did the eternal son come to earth, and live and suffer and
die for us?
As
I reflected on that this week two lines from a hymn kept coming to mind, and it seems to me that they
say everything that needs to be said on that question.
“he died that we
might be forgiven,
He died to make us
good”.
Jesus
came to restore our relationship with the father, both now and in eternity. He
died that we might be forgiven. And he came to help us live generously and
fairly with others as we make our way through life. He died to make us good.
But
here’s the thing. Those things are offered to us in Christ. But we have to
receive them for ourselves.
We
know the part of Jesus’ birth story, dramatized in countless nativity plays,
where Mary and Joseph get turned away from door after door until finally a
kindly innkeeper takes pity on them and lets them use his stable. He received
Jesus that night. Others didn’t. Others closed the door, said no. Ignored the
knocking until they went away.
And
throughout his life, this happened again and again. Many heard Jesus words. Only
some received them. Many saw him from a distance, only a few invited him in.
Many had the chance to meet him; most were too busy or disinterested to bother.
John
says – “he came to that which was his
own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those
who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God”.
Do
you see what he’s saying there? We have a choice to make. I firmly believe that
Christ’s work was for all humankind; but I also believe that every man and woman
has to choose to receive it for themselves. We don’t become citizens of the
kingdom by birth, custom, practice or osmosis. Each of us has to make a choice.
Each of us has to accept Christ for ourselves.
At
the start of the sermon I showed you those lovely pictures of Dunnet Head, and
waxed lyrical about that wonderful afternoon on the cliffs. But no words of
mine can ever really capture the experience. The only way to understand what
I’m talking about is to go there and experience it for yourself.
And
it’s just the same with faith. You won’t understand until you’ve made the
journey for yourself. Til you yourself have passed through the small, low door
at the foot of the cross.
“Come to me, all
you who are weary and burdened, says the Christ, and I will give you rest. Take
my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and
you will find rest for your souls.”
Once
again, those words of invitation reach our ears. Will they get a hearing? Will
you receive them? Will you receive the Christ who speaks them?
The
voice that’s calling you today comes from the centre of the universe and the
heart of God’s Story – it’s the voice of the Lamb upon the throne, and he says
to you what God has been saying to all humankind from the very beginning of
creation: Come. Be reconciled. Don’t delay. Today is the day of salvation.
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