SPEAKER_00: And so, Heavenly Father, as we come now to reflect on the meaning of Christmas, would you reveal to us the glory of your Son?
SPEAKER_00: We pray in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Please do take a seat.
SPEAKER_00: Pleasure to have you with us, and a particular welcome to those people watching online.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it such a privilege that we have uh online uh worship for those people struggling to get through the snow this morning?
SPEAKER_00: The word gospel is a uh Greek comes from a Greek word which means good news.
SPEAKER_00: And so at the center of the Christian faith, we might all be familiar with the idea that the gospel is at the center of the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_00: That center is news, the sort of thing you might read in a newspaper.
SPEAKER_00: You might open up the news and it says, Today such and such has a happened.
SPEAKER_00: And at the center of the Christian tradition is a declaration of something that has taken place.
SPEAKER_00: So often Christianity isn't considered good news, but seems to be full of good advice.
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's really good advice to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
SPEAKER_00: It's really good advice to care for the poor or to honor your mother and father.
SPEAKER_00: It's good advice not to hold on to envy and jealousy and strife, but instead to cultivate the fruit of the spirit in your life: love and joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, and self-control.
SPEAKER_00: All of that is good advice.
SPEAKER_00: It's the sort of thing we say to one another on a Sunday as we share the peace.
SPEAKER_00: The peace is good advice, but that's not the center of the Christian tradition.
SPEAKER_00: The Christian tradition is good news.
SPEAKER_00: A babe has been born in Bethlehem, and that babe is the word of God made flesh.
SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things I really like about the way the cathedral celebrates Advent and Christmas is we prepare ourselves to declare the good news, and then we do it, and then we declare it.
SPEAKER_00: And on Christmas Day we say, a babe has been born.
SPEAKER_00: It's the approach that is taken in three out of the four Gospels in Matthew and Mark and in Luke.
SPEAKER_00: The book spends its time telling you the things that Jesus did, the places that he went, the things that he said.
SPEAKER_00: This is the good news.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus went to Galilee, Jesus healed a man with uh a man who was lame from birth, or Jesus fed the 5,000.
SPEAKER_00: These are this is the news about the things that Jesus has done.
SPEAKER_00: I love that in the Gospels and in the Anglican sensibility.
SPEAKER_00: We are actors telling a story.
SPEAKER_00: But John's Gospel is slightly different as the Gospel we read this morning.
SPEAKER_00: John assumes that you already know the story.
SPEAKER_00: He's probably imagining that you've already read the Gospel of Mark.
SPEAKER_00: That's almost certainly what his community that he was writing to had already read.
SPEAKER_00: And so he says, I know you know the story.
SPEAKER_00: Now I want to tell you what it means.
SPEAKER_00: You know the story.
SPEAKER_00: You've been declaring the good news.
SPEAKER_00: But what does that good news mean?
SPEAKER_00: And if I was going to criticize our worship, I would say we spend a lot of time declaring what has taken place and not enough time reflecting on what it means.
SPEAKER_00: You might well leave a service and go, yes, yes, yes, God has been born, God has taken on human flesh.
SPEAKER_00: But what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean for my life?
SPEAKER_00: Why do we need to know the meaning?
SPEAKER_00: Well, let me suggest this.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder who here is familiar with the idea of Blue Monday.
SPEAKER_00: Blue Monday is approaching.
SPEAKER_00: It's an idea that came about from, I mean, it's a shame because it's slightly tainted by kind of capitalism and the desire to sell.
SPEAKER_00: But let me tell you the story about how this idea came about.
SPEAKER_00: There was a holiday company who was trying to work out what is the most depressing day of the year.
SPEAKER_00: And so they had this algorithm.
SPEAKER_00: You can Google it, it's online.
SPEAKER_00: It's a partly it's a marketing strategy, but it's it's I think it has some truth to it.
SPEAKER_00: They tried to think, okay, what's the longest distance from a celebration until another celebration is coming?
SPEAKER_00: What's the darkest part of the year?
SPEAKER_00: What's the coldest, gloomiest part of the year?
SPEAKER_00: How many days is it likely until you fail all of your New Year's resolutions?
SPEAKER_00: And at what point of the year do you find yourself thinking, oh, give up?
SPEAKER_00: And they decided it was the, I can't remember if it's a second or third Monday in January, is the most depressing day of the year.
SPEAKER_00: And so they labeled it Blue Monday.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the catch.
SPEAKER_00: They decided that was the best day to book a holiday.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm sorry, it's a bit, you know, tainted by the desire to sell.
SPEAKER_00: But I still like the idea nonetheless.
SPEAKER_00: We are heading towards Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe on that day, it's a good day to reflect on what Christmas means.
SPEAKER_00: Not just that Jesus has been born, but what does it mean for you and for me?
SPEAKER_00: So John's Gospel writes this to all who have received Jesus, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of humankind, but of God.
SPEAKER_00: The first thing I think that Christmas means is that you and I get to be children of God.
SPEAKER_00: It's a nostalgic time of year, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: And I've been reflecting on my own Christian faith, on how I became a Christian and the different steps and journeys that led me to this place.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about your story.
SPEAKER_00: I spent a lot of time in my youth going to very chaotic, very amateurish youth groups.
SPEAKER_00: You know, it was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a kind of middle-of-the-road Anglican church.
SPEAKER_00: It was just across the park from where my family lived.
SPEAKER_00: And uh we went to church on Sunday, and I really enjoyed uh singing and playing music, and so I joined the worship band, and it was kind of again middle of the road, janky, uh kind of off-tune, off-beat guitar and piano, uh, tambourines, you know, the sort of thing that happened in the 90s.
SPEAKER_00: And I was part of a youth group, and we would play stupid games.
SPEAKER_00: There was an awful amount of foam involved, and we'd get really dirty and sweaty and run about and have a great time in this church hall.
SPEAKER_00: It was completely chaotic and amateurish.
SPEAKER_00: And my faith was kind of childish at first.
SPEAKER_00: I don't really know what I believed, I just knew that there was something there that kept me going back that I wanted to find out more about.
SPEAKER_00: It was kind of beautiful and enticing.
SPEAKER_00: And then in my teenage years, when I started uh exploring other things and finding things that excited me that I then felt guilty about doing, and I wasn't quite sure if I was doing the right thing, it got very kind of complex and emotional.
SPEAKER_00: You know, there was guilt involved and shame.
SPEAKER_00: And I would do the thing that I didn't want to do, and then I'd say sorry for it, and then I'd go back to church the next morning on Sunday and say my sorry, say my prayers, and then go back and live my life exactly as I was doing, like every other teenager of my age, you know, couldn't find any way of being different.
SPEAKER_00: Now carried on basically into my twenties, and then at some point my misfaith started to mature, and I started deciding no, this is something I'm going to take more seriously than these kind of base desires.
SPEAKER_00: And I found myself in Christian ministry, and the rest is history, I suppose.
SPEAKER_00: Through this chaotic and confusing journey, I came to believe something about God and about myself.
SPEAKER_00: That I was a child of God.
SPEAKER_00: What an incredibly arrogant and incredibly humbling thing to say about yourself.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a child of God.
SPEAKER_00: You are a child of God.
SPEAKER_00: But John's Bospel doesn't just say that Christmas means we're children of God, it means that we have been given power to become children of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, as if I think through the journey of the steps that took me to this place of believing as a Christian, very little of it felt powerful.
SPEAKER_00: There were some moments in prayer and worship that felt really special, like there was a magic to the universe that I was tapping into, but most of it felt completely cringeworthy.
SPEAKER_00: Most of it was a complete mess.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, John's Gospel reminds us that God was at work in my heart and has been at work in your heart.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder what Christmas was like for you, how you reflect on the last week and the times that you've spent with your family, or the times that you spent missing your family who are no longer with you.
SPEAKER_00: In all of that mess, in all of that chaos, I think one of the things that Christmas means is that God is in the work of that chaos and that mess.
SPEAKER_00: And John's Gospel goes on to say, You have been born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of humankind, but of God.
SPEAKER_00: My birth as a child of God was not because, not because of my inheritance, not because of the blood that I have in my veins.
SPEAKER_00: I did not inherit my birth from my faith, from my family.
SPEAKER_00: I did not inherit my birth from the country in which I grew up in or the social class in which I grew up in.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't inherit, I didn't get this faith.
SPEAKER_00: I was not born because of some will of the flesh.
SPEAKER_00: I promise you, I did not discipline myself into becoming a child of God until I was worthy enough of that accolade.
SPEAKER_00: And it was not because of my will power, the will of humankind.
SPEAKER_00: When I look back on my journey, I'm not even sure that I particularly chose.
SPEAKER_00: It always feels like a choice when it's presented in front of you, but then you look back and you discover God chose me.
SPEAKER_00: All of us, in some sense, chose to be here this morning to trudge through the snow and to dig our cars out of the ice.
SPEAKER_00: But in another, far more real sense, we are here because we have been chosen.
SPEAKER_00: We have been given by grace the power to become children of God.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the first thing that I think Christmas means.
SPEAKER_00: We have become children of God.
SPEAKER_00: And then the second thing, it means that we get to see the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: John goes on in his gospel to say, and the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.
SPEAKER_00: The word became flesh.
SPEAKER_00: When we say the word became flesh, we don't mean that God, and I think I even said this uh in error earlier in this sermon, just a few minutes ago, that God became, that God was born, that God suddenly existed in a way that he didn't before.
SPEAKER_00: John's gospel makes very clear that the word was in the beginning, the word was God and the word is God, and nothing was made except by the word of God, that all of this was created by and through God's word.
SPEAKER_00: And yet God, as an act of communication, sends his word into his creation so that his word himself might be subject to his own creation.
SPEAKER_00: God speaks to us, and this act of creation comes forth from him, reveals itself as a person in its own right, and takes on human flesh.
SPEAKER_00: When Hannah and I, uh, before we got married, uh we spent four years uh long distance dating, and then actually a fifth year long distance as a married couple.
SPEAKER_00: That's a different story.
SPEAKER_00: But throughout that time, I'm not really a card writer.
SPEAKER_00: My family don't send each other really birthday cards or Christmas cards or anything.
SPEAKER_00: Hannah's family is a massive card writer, and she kind of trained me in the art of sending and receiving cards.
SPEAKER_00: And it's amazing when you're long distance with someone, what a card, how a card can feel, becomes a part of the person.
SPEAKER_00: This act of communication that you've received from them is like receiving them themselves in their own way.
SPEAKER_00: And if you imagine that small analogy grown to cosmic proportions, when God speaks his word into creation, when God takes on flesh, it's as if he's sending us a love letter in the form of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: God entered into his creation and became subject to it.
SPEAKER_00: So those words, those powerful words from the Graham Kendrick song, the hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered.
SPEAKER_00: That is truly glorious.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we mean when we say we see the glory of God dwelling among us, drawing near.
SPEAKER_00: That God is not some distance.
SPEAKER_00: I always try to say this semi-regularly.
SPEAKER_00: God is not a distant God, he is not a far-off landlord who one day will come and ask us for the rent for living on his creation.
SPEAKER_00: God draws near to his creation, he dwells with his creation, he dwells among us, and so we get to see his glory.
SPEAKER_00: When I think back to my own story of how I came to faith, as and as I learned how to put my trust in Jesus, as I think about what enticed me during all of those cringe and amateurish attempts at doing church and running a youth group, I think really what captivated me was something behind all of that chaos.
SPEAKER_00: A song that was beautiful, that I could hear, a transcendent beauty, a sublime radius, something glorious that captivated me, that I often couldn't put into words, still to this day, struggle to articulate.
SPEAKER_00: And it kept me coming back, despite all the failures of the church around me.
SPEAKER_00: It kept singing to me, and I kept hearing it in a way that I found utterly compelling, more compelling than anything else I was aware of in the world around me.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's the glory of the word made flesh.
SPEAKER_00: That's the sound that we listen to, the word of God speaking through his creation, a word of love, a word of graciousness, a word of truth.
SPEAKER_00: So, how are you this morning as we edge closer to Blue Monday, as you reflect on the last few weeks, the disappointments and the joys, the celebrations and the sadnesses, the times of excitement and the moments when your family just felt like it was falling apart, or you reflected on the fact that you're not living the life you hoped you were going to live?
SPEAKER_00: Where are you this morning?
SPEAKER_00: And what does Christmas mean to you?
SPEAKER_00: Yes, a babe has been born in Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_00: That's the good news.
SPEAKER_00: But what does it mean for you?
SPEAKER_00: Does it mean that you too are a child of God?
SPEAKER_00: You too have seen the glory of God revealed in human flesh.
SPEAKER_00: I pray for each of us this morning that we would experience anew the balm for the soul, which is the glory of God in Jesus, born anew into the world, and that you might receive the good news that you are a child of God, that you might rest in that good news, the good news of the Prince of Peace.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.