Saving a broken world

Address given on Sunday 29th December 2019 at St Mary's Nenagh, the 1st Sunday of Christmas.

What a horrid story St Matthew tells us in the Gospel reading set for today (Matthew 2:13-23)!

The reading is out of order. It comes after the wise men from the East, the Magi, have departed – they are getting closer, but they will not arrive until Epiphany on January 6^th.

The background to the reading is this. The wise men, as we all know, had been following a star to pay homage to a child, born to be king of the Jews. When they reached Jerusalem, King Herod directed them to search for the child in Bethlehem, where the chief priests said the Messiah would be born. Herod slyly asked them to bring word back to him, so that he too could pay homage - but Herod was afraid of a rival king to his dynasty and he had other, murderous ideas. The wise men went on to Bethlehem, where they were overwhelmed by joy to find Jesus with Mary his mother and Joseph. They knelt down, paid homage and presented their gifts. But they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod.

Joseph too is a dreamer, and also a man of action, determined to protect his family. After the wise men leave, Joseph dreams that King Herod will seek to kill the newborn Jesus, so he takes Mary and Jesus and they flee to Egypt as refugees. He is right to be afraid. Herod is infuriated that the wise men had tricked him by not returning - he doesn’t know which child the wise men came to worship, which child to murder. So he orders the massacre of every child two years old and under in and around Bethlehem – every one. Safe in Egypt when Herod dies, Joseph dreams again that it is safe to return, and he does so with Mary and Jesus. But in yet another dream he realises that Herod’s son Archelaus, who is now king of Judea, may harm them, so he settles the family at Nazareth in Galilee.

It is a nasty tale of brutal force and the massacre of innocent children. Why should we be asked to think about it amidst the joy of Christmas? Where is God in this?

The answer is that Christmas is not just about the joyful birth of a child, however special.

There is more to Christmas than the baby Jesus, with his soft skin smelling of milk, nursed by his young mother Mary, with Joseph close at hand. More than the choirs of angels prompting rough shepherds to come to the crib where Jesus lay and to glorify God. More than the Magi, the wise men from the East, led by a star to give homage to Jesus and present symbolic presents.

Christmas is about God incarnate - God made flesh in human form as Jesus Christ, the Son of God. St John calls him the true light, the ‘Word’: ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’. But he is born of Mary into a world in which great beauty is mixed with hideous ugliness. God’s purpose in the incarnation is to save this world, and us with it.

The massacre of the innocents reminds us that Jesus Christ was born into our world, a world that is horribly broken. A world where deadly force is used to kill the innocent. A world where families are forced to flee as refugees, where they must rely on the kindness of strangers. A world where the greed of the rich and powerful impoverishes the poor and ravishes creation. A world in which Christ is crucified.

Jesus Christ comes into this broken world to save it and us. By his life and ministry, death and resurrection, he shows us how to confront and overcome evil. He teaches us to listen to his good news. He assures us that if we repent, if we change our bad behaviour, God will forgive us. He shows us signs that the kingdom of God has come near. 

In the kingdom of God the broken world will be put back together to reflect the glory of the love of God. It is not fully with us yet, but it is near - we can see signs of it if we look with the eyes of faith, just as the shepherds and the wise men did.

Our task as Christians is to follow Jesus and work to make God’s kingdom, Jesus’s kingdom, a reality. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit will be with us to help us and guide us. Like Joseph we must dream dreams to understand what must be done. And like Joseph we must act on those dreams.

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Almighty God,

you have shed upon us the light of your incarnate Word:

may this light, kindled in our hearts, shine forth in our lives;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

Shepherds glorifying God

An address given on Sunday 28th December 2008 at Shinrone

“Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing which has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us”.

So say the shepherds who were keeping watch over the flock in fields close to the town, as St Luke tells us in the Gospel reading (Luke 2:15-21).

Luke’s is the only Gospel to tell us about the shepherds who visited Mary and Joseph and their new-born son Jesus. His beautiful story, so familiar to us, still resonates today. So let’s try to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the shepherds that night 2000 years ago.

Some of you I’m sure know much more than I do about sheep. Perhaps you’ve kept and tended them. But I doubt if any of you would call yourselves shepherds. Shepherds are few and far between in Ireland these days, but they would have been very familiar to Luke’s readers. The rugged Judean uplands were a pastoral country. Flocks of sheep represented wealth. A shepherd was paid to stay out night and day in all weathers to guard the sheep against wild animals and robbers. It was a hard, dangerous job, but very responsible. Jesus likens himself to the Good Shepherd, who would lay down his life for the sheep.

Luke’s shepherds are ordinary people, much like you and me. They are not self-important rulers or highly educated opinion formers, as Herod and the Wise Men were, in Matthew’s alternative Christmas story. Luke chooses to tell us about how ordinary people responded to the miracle of Christmas, not the great and mighty. And I believe we have much to learn from them.

The shepherds had just experienced a miraculous vision, a vision of angels.

‘The glory of the Lord shone around them’ – I imagine shimmering light, like the Aurora, the Northern lights. An angel announces ‘to you is born this day in the city of David’ – that is Bethlehem – ‘a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord.’ They are given a sign; they ‘will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger’. Then the angel is joined by ‘a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours”’

Wow! What an experience! What an exhilarating joy the shepherds must have felt!

Have you ever heard the heavenly host? I have, I think, and you may have too. I can remember my joy and exhilaration after the births of my children. I can remember literally dancing down the wet deserted streets of Guildford at 4am in mid December, on the way back home from the hospital. It was as if the whole universe was laughing and crying and singing with me. And I shared my joy with everyone I met over the following days. Angel voices – a memory to treasure!

Surely it is an experience of this same kind that Isaiah speaks of in today’s OT reading (Isaiah 61:10-62:3), when he says:

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
my whole being shall exult in my God;
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

Most if not all of us, ordinary people, experience once in a while that sudden sense of exhilarating joy, as both Isaiah and the shepherds did. It is not just poets and the mad who experience visions of angels. We should not be afraid of them, I think. Rather we should see it as God granting us a glimpse, just a fleeting glimpse, of his loving power and majesty. We should treasure such experiences when we return to the world of normality, and ponder them in our hearts, as Mary did.

The shepherds ‘went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in a manger’.

These shepherds are straight-forward, practical people. They don’t stand around debating and philosophising about what their extraordinary experience means. They go with haste to look with their own eyes. And what they find confirms their experience – it is just as the angel had told them. This little child is special, very special - a Saviour, a Messiah, the Lord. And they can’t stop talking about it! Just as I couldn’t stop telling everyone about the birth of my children.

The real miracle of Christmas is that through his grace our loving-Father God makes the first move towards us, to you and to me, to all human beings. He reveals himself to us as Mary and Joseph’s beautiful, helpless baby, their first-born son. This baby grows up to be our Lord Jesus Christ – in John’s mystic vision, the Word of God, the true light that enlightens everyone – through whose life and teaching, and death and resurrection, we are shown the way to God. This is what St Paul is telling us in today’s Epistle reading (Galatians 4:4-7).

But God’s grace is of no use to us unless we respond to it. We should learn from the shepherds how to respond to the miracle of Christmas. They went with haste to find Jesus, and we must too. Like them, we will not be disappointed.

‘The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.’

They don’t hang about. Once they have seen the child Jesus lying in the manger – the Saviour, the Messiah, the Lord – and once they have told their story - they just go back to work, to tend their flocks.

But something has changed - they are changed. They go back ‘glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen.’

And this surely is what we must do too. We are not meant to remain for ever in our visions, no matter how exhilarating they may be. We must come back to earth. Our job is to bring our experience of the love of God back into the everyday world. Let us pray that we too may go about the world as changed people, glorifying and praising God for all we have heard and seen.

So to summarise, we have indeed a great deal to learn from Luke’s shepherds:

• We should treasure the glimpses we are granted of the love and majesty of our loving Father God.
• We should go with haste to find God’s grace in the Christmas miracle of the birth of Jesus.
• And we should return glorifying and praising God as changed people, to bring God’s loving Spirit back with us into the world.