The only thing I could liken it to was a rugby scrum. It was at a Tim Horton’s in a shopping centre a very, very few days ago, like Friday. It was one of those coffee shops that is adjacent to the rest of the shopping centre. Clearly, there were people who go there every day, because they are the ones who know how to line up in an orderly fashion to get their coffee. The line-up is on the left. And then there were the rest of us who clearly had never been there before lined up on the right! The people on the left looked at us as if we were an aberration! Who are these people lining up on the wrong side? We looked at them thinking they were just a wee bit haughty for this time of the year. Finally, these two lines collided at one till, and the poor young woman behind it looked mortified as people were pushing and shoving with their bags and their packages and their boxes trying to get their double-double! Finally, peace came. I got my coffee, but the war continued. It was anarchy!
I looked up – there was a big television screen – and on the television screen there was the coverage of the bodies being led out of the Lindt store in Sydney, Australia. No sound; just images. The bodies were going into ambulances. Then, in the mall there was this music, a country song by a singer I don’t know, singing a song that had every single Christmas word stuffed into it. I mean, every word was a Christmas word: it was “snow” it was “sleigh bells” it was “Santa” it was “mistletoe” it was “gifts” it was “smiling children.” I mean, this person had put every word about Christmas into this song, and it made no sense whatsoever. The only thing missing was Jesus, Joseph and Mary! It was Muzak, and no one was listening. Everyone was scurrying around with their coffee in one hand and their cell phone in the other and their boxes under their arms, and it was joyful and it was fun, but it was a bit disconnected.
I felt disconnected when I sat down for a respite with my coffee. I happened to have a few cards in my pocket that I had brought from the Church. One of them was a card from a hospice in the north part of Toronto. This hospice, which is run by a very religious organization, cares for people at the end of their lives. In the card, a message described how they had helped people, and to say to you – Timothy Eaton Memorial Church– thank you for all that you have done. You might not know it, but in some ways you supported it, and they were grateful.
I was overwhelmed by the pathos of it all. There was this profound sadness about that occasion. Yet, there was the joy and the ecstasy, there was the pleasure of seeing people buying gifts, there was the laughter of children, there were Christmas trees. It was a vibrant moment; then it was profoundly sad when you looked at the screen. There seemed to be this frenetic activity, and the world all around us was in turmoil. I thought, “Isn’t that what Christmas is so often like! It is frenetic; it is fantastic; it is fun; it is fantasy; it is joy; it is pathos and profound sadness all rolled into one.
When I look at the first Christmas and today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke, this magnificent story that we have probably heard as many years as we have been on this earth, this incredible story of the birth of Jesus, I started to read it again with fresh eyes, and I realized that there are so many verbs in this. Everybody in this passage it seems is on the move, everyone is going somewhere. It begins with a decree from Caesar saying that all the families must go and register in their home towns for a census in order that there might be Roman control over the area. People went. They moved and left their homes in order to go back to the town of their familial origin. Mary and Joseph, we read, went to Bethlehem. They had been given the dictate: go to Bethlehem. So, they went to Bethlehem in order that they might register and fulfill the census.
The shepherds are told to go to Bethlehem, for there they will find the babe. The shepherds then return to where they were and back to their fields. The angels appear, and they make a great pronouncement, and then the angels disappear. The angels leave the scene. Look at all the verbs: “appear”, “go”, “return”, and “disappear”. It is all frenetic! It is all coming and going! It is an incredible few verses when you think of it. Yet, in the midst of it there is one verse that rises from the text like a phoenix. It is the one that makes sense out of it all: “For unto you is born this day in the City of David the Messiah, the Lord.” There it is! In the midst of all the frenetic comings and goings, when everything is peeled away, there is the reason for it; there is the meaning of it: the Messiah, the Lord.
I cannot help but think that in our era today with what we have made Christmas as a cultural expression with all its frenetic activity and all its joy and expectations, with all the wonderful parts of seeing family and being reunited with children and with parents, with all the comings and goings at Pearson Airport on a Friday, there is still in the midst of it the need to hear the reason for it all. It is easy to become cynical about Christmas. It is easy for people to stand in the wings and point a finger at it and say, “It doesn’t make any difference to my life, apart from the joy and fun that lasts for a couple of days, and then it is over.” Now, I think it is time for us to hear it again.
The world may have a Christmas that says one thing, and the zeitgeist of the era might say one thing, but the Scripture and Luke say something else. It is so easy, is it not, to hear things and to receive them differently? I was sent on Facebook a humorous Church sign, although it is really not that humorous, from a St. Martha’s in Virginia, an Episcopal church, and they know that it is up there, they are aware that it is on Facebook. They put a sign up and they tried to do it to welcome people. It only had four words in it. Listen carefully: “We love hurting people.” Now, you can read this two completely different ways. Either they love<b> hurting</b> people, or they <b>love </b>hurting people. It is a double entendre if ever there was one! And, I think Christmas and the message of Christ has become a double entendre in our society, in our world. People hear it saying one thing when it means something much different. It is not actually frivolous, and it is not actually silly, and it is not just commercialism, and it is not just muzak; it is the depth of the reality of the Messiah. The Lord has been born.
What is this really? When you take this story all apart, what does it mean? Well, it means that through this child, through Christmas, a bridge has been built between God and humanity. It is the moment when heaven breaks into Earth. It is the moment when the human and the ordinary in a child become the sign of the presence of the living God himself. It is that moment when heaven and Earth collide.
Exactly fifty years ago there was an incredible bridge built in the United Kingdom. At the time, it was the largest expansion bridge in the world. It was between the cities of Edinburgh and Dunfermline, and it is the great Forth Bridge. That very Christmas, I was visiting family in Scotland. The bridge had only been open for about a month. So our family decided that after Christmas dinner we should drive to the bridge and walk it. After all, we had so much food and so much Scottish pudding – and Scottish pudding by the way can kill you! We had Scottish food, and we needed to exercise, so everyone goes to the bridge. What better thing to do? We walked along the path of the Forth Bridge. For eight hundred years, there had been a ferry that had crossed over to take pilgrims from Edinburgh to Dunfermline Avenue, and then on to St. Andrews, an area that Reverend McMaster knows well, because he studied there. It is a glorious bridge at the Firth of the Forth, but now it is spanning this huge divide.
So the family walks over the bridge. Finally, we get to the middle and it is time to look down on the mighty Firth of Forth, and I have vertigo! I am holding on to the wire for dear life, and my uncle and my father try to get me to move, and I would not move. I was going nowhere! If any of you have experienced it, you know what it is like. It is paralyzing! There, in the middle of what was then the world’s largest span bridge over water on a foggy Scottish day, I am standing holding on to metal. Finally, my father and my uncle pry me away. They put me on their shoulders, and they carried me the rest of the way. We went from one home in Dunfermline to another home outside of Edinburgh, but they got me home safely.
What an image for Christmas! It seems to me particularly in the time of Jesus that there was a great gulf, this great divide between God and people. In fact, there were religious powers that wanted to maintain the gap and keep God for themselves when the ordinary people and the sinners and those in need had no access to God. So, what does God do? God comes, like my uncle and my father, and in the midst of the divide, picks us up and takes us home. The presence of the Christ Child is to carry us from one place to another, to take us from where we are to where God wants us to be, to bring heaven to Earth, and Earth back to heaven.
There is an incredible book written by a man called John Vernon Taylor, who ended up becoming the Bishop of Winchester. He wrote a book called The Go-Between God, and in it he suggests that Christmas is just that: the go-between God. He makes the point that not only in the incarnation of Jesus do we find God and humanity coming together, but through the Spirit of this Christ Child he brings us and God together. Therefore, if he is correct, Christmas is not a day or a moment in the calendar or a little door that you open on a piece of paper in an Advent calendar. It is not just a day that can be celebrated once within a year, but rather Christmas becomes every day of the year.
Christmas becomes the bridge between God and humanity in Jesus Christ. Look at it! When we baptize a child right here and we show a child to you and we say, “This child is a child of God”, and we baptize them “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit”, is that not Christmas? When we bury somebody here in this Church, somebody who has been faithful all their lives, and we talk about “the Resurrection” and “the Life Eternal” and “Christ being The Way”, is that not Christmas? When we pray for people who need healing, and a number of you have needed that prayer for healing for sure, and those prayers are answered, is that not Christmas? When the people in the hospice care for those who are dying, those who have infectious diseases, those who are not going to make it, but care for them right to the end, is that not Christmas? Christmas is not just a day; Christmas is a reminder of what God does for us daily. God comes and bridges the gap between us and God with his Son in a manger.
God does not only make a bridge between us and God; he does it between ourselves and each other. There is that wonderful line in the Gospel of Luke: “Peace on Earth and goodwill to all those who he favours.” When I read that and I look at the sentiment behind that, and then I look at the disconnect that often occurs, which makes people cynical when they see that peace seems to be a very distant reality, I am reminded again of something that John Taylor said. He said, “It is as if the presence of Jesus is a like a mathematical equation: When you are a Number 1 and others are a Number 1, by adding them together it becomes 1 plus 1 The plus is the person of Christ.
What this means is that you then see the other through Christ. You see their brokenness through Christ. You see people, as irritating as they can be, through Christ. You see your enemy through Christ. You see your joy in your friend and your loved one through Christ. Christ becomes the One through whom you see the rest of the world. And that is exactly what Luke is getting at! Christ is the Saviour, he is the Messiah, he is the Lord, and he is the One who brings peace and goodwill on Earth to those he favours. It is his activity, not our own! Peace is not about building something; it is about receiving something that God has already planned for our lives and for the world.
Yet, you are saying back to me, “ We are seeing children killed in schools in Pakistan. We are seeing people killed unnecessarily in our streets. We see Sydney in pain and in anguish. We see children die. We see insurrection and beheadings. We see refugees.” We look at the world and we say, “It seems to be an elusive thing.” Of course it is an elusive thing. Humans need care. Humans need something to stand between them and those who they despise or they hate. Who do they need? Christ!
For those of us who believe this, it is not the time for us to claim Him as our own and try and protect ourselves and cuddle ourselves in a cloister and see Him only as our Lord, when in reality he came as The Lord. This is not the time to say to others, “Do not look at Christ for we might offend you.” No! There is no offence in Christ to anyone. He comes to be the mediator between broken hearts and souls. He comes to do what we on our own often cannot do.
A hundred-and-fifty years ago, this very weekend, a very famous poem was written. It was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This poem has become the foundation for so many songs and hymns about bells at Christmas. It means a lot to me because I stayed from months just a few houses from his home. However, the real reason for it is profoundly moving. Longfellow had lost his wife three years earlier in a fire at home in an accident. With a seal and wax on a piece of paper she went on fire. He dived on top of her to try to extinguish the fire and he got burned. He survived, but she died. Three years later, his sixteen year old son Charlie comes to him and says, “I want to fight in the Civil War. I want to join the Union forces.”
His father says, “No! You are too young! No, it is too dangerous!”
The son went anyway and was injured. He came home and he was weakened, but he wanted to go back to the battlefield, and so after Gettysburg he goes back and he is in another fight, and this time he contracts malaria. He cannot fight anymore. He is brought home as a broken and destroyed young teenager.
On Christmas, that wonderful time 150 years ago, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow decided to write a poem, and this is what he wrote:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar, carols play,
And wild and sweet
the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
With unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The canon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on Earth” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then, pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With Peace on Earth, good-will to men.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had lost everything, went to church to accept God. Is that not what Christmas is about? Amen.