Bishop of Monmouth’s Christmas Sermon 2008
There is a scene that always amuses me in the film, The Life of Brian when the Wise Men go to the wrong address! Brian’s mum looks at them and screams, ‘You’re not so wise, are you?’ Well, one of the Christmas themes is about looking for Jesus and learning to look in the right places.
The Christmas story opens in St Luke’s Gospel with the account of shepherds on the hills who were told that they would find the new born Messiah lying in a manger and they went off to Bethlehem in search of the baby. They found the infant Christ and were the first visitors to worship him.
Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus has no mention of shepherds being tipped off by an angel. Matthew has a more devious story. There are wise men, astrologers or magi from the East who follow a star and they go to King Herod to make enquiries saying that they are looking for the new born king of the Jews. Herod himself joins in the search for Jesus also claiming that he wishes to worship him. The wise men go off and find the infant king and present their gifts – symbols of royalty, priesthood and suffering – but they do not return to inform Herod, and so Herod orders the massacre of all the young children in Bethlehem. There is nothing quite like a school nativity play when Herod [usually played by a boy who wants to be the ‘baddie’ in the play] gets boo-ed by the whole school.
After the nativity story, the next time we hear of Jesus he is twelve years old and again people are looking for him – this time it is Mary and Joseph who eventually find him in the temple. They said that they had been looking everywhere for him and Jesus asked them, ‘Why look everywhere, did you not know that I would be in my Father’s house?’
Then the gospels are full of stories of people who come looking for Jesus – the Jewish leader Nicodemus comes looking for him under cover of night. The sick and the spiritually hungry come looking for Jesus to find healing and to hear the message of the kingdom, and eventually the soldiers come looking for him to arrest him and kill him. But that is not the end of the search – because those who came looking for his body after the crucifixion found an empty tomb or the risen Christ walking in the garden - and for two thousand years men, women and children come looking for Jesus – and I hope that is why we are here today.
We come looking for Jesus – for the Jesus who came into a world that was in a mess and who shared in that human mess – Jesus was born in poverty, lived in Egypt as a refugee, ministered to the sad, the possessed, the physically, psychologically and mentally sick. He preached a gospel of love and forgiveness in a world that was hostile, violent and oppressed. He taught freedom to a nation that was occupied, and truth to religious leaders who were concerned with power, prestige and preventing change.
There were those who looked for the Messiah but they were looking in the wrong places or for the wrong kind of leader – they wanted a warrior king not a helpless baby. They wanted someone who would restore them as a great nation; not someone who talked about a kingdom of love, justice and peace. As St John puts it, ‘He came unto his own and his own received him not; but to those who did receive him he gave the right to become the children of God’.
When the world is in a mess, people look for a Messiah. Our American brothers and sisters have great hopes in their new President-elect and even our own Prime Minister is expected by some to save the world, but we all know in our hearts that the mess we are in, is likely to get worse. The credit crunch is likely to worsen and the years of plenty for most of us are over for a while. The lessons of economic history teach us of years of booming economies followed by recession, and recession often hits the poorest the hardest. International debt, bankruptcies, redundancies, pension funds in difficulties and the end of some manufacturing industries are all on the cards but perhaps there is also another side to the mess we are in.
There is a dawning realisation of the need to work together to create global economies and to achieve greater peace and justice. When the economy is booming there can be an attitude of self-centredness that gives little thought for the poor and oppressed. When there is the possibility of us all being a little poorer, it concentrates the mind. World leaders will be talking to one another and maybe it will give a renewed thrust to putting in place the millennium goals to which they have signed up in theory at least. The millennium goals reflect many of the teachings of Jesus about justice, peace and equality. They are to combat poverty and hunger, to have universal education, gender equality, child and maternal health, to combat HIV/AIDS and to have environmental stability and global partnerships.
People look for the Messiah, the saviour, but they look in the wrong places. They will not find him in the White House or even in Number Ten, Downing Street. They will find him in a stable and on a cross and they will find his teachings in the Christian faith. Christianity is a down-to-earth religion because God came down-to-earth at Christmas and in Jesus he enters the mess of our lives and shows us a better way.
We live in a secular society where people feel they have no need of God. Those who live hand-to-mouth have a much greater spiritual awareness. We know that in times of war, recession, natural disasters and national calamity, people wake up to the reality that all that we have and life itself is dependent upon God. Their ears may be open to the message that the world cannot continue as it is – we need to change the way we live. We need to change the way we trade, we need to change the ways we create energy, we need to change the ways we exploit poor people and animals. We need to stop killing one another and proclaim the message of Christmas, ‘Give glory to God in the highest and on earth may his peace rest on all people of good will’.