Homily for Christmas Day 2011: God with us!

Old High St Stephen's, Inverness
Sunday 25 December 2011: Year B, Christmas Day

SERMON
Texts: Luke 2.1-20
John 1.1-18

God with us!
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

On Monday morning I had a phone call from the Mothers and Toddlers group who meet in the hall here at St Stephen's. They had arrived to find that they had no power.
There was a bit of heating, but it had obviously gone off earlier, and they had no lighting, except what was coming in the windows. But as this was their Christmas party, and children run around and keep themselves warm, they had decided to go ahead anyway. But could I or someone do something about the power?

I went up and had a look at the fuse box- but everything was in order there. As I had now reached the end of my competence and knowledge of these matters, I got Joan Darcy, our property convenor, to call out an electrician. He got to the Church quickly and reported that all was well with the building's electrics. The problem lay beyond the building- we were getting no power from the grid. So Scottish Hydro Electric were called, and their engineer was also quickly on the scene. Soon we heard that to discover the fault, the pavement and Southside Road outside the Church would need to be dug up. While they did that, did we need emergency power? The Brownies were having their Christmas party in the evening, so we accepted the offer of an emergency generator.

Late in the afternoon, I was passing the Church and stopped to find out what was happening- worried about whether what would happen might affect our Christmas services, just a few days away. I found three or four Hydro vans parked the street and in the car park. There was a team of about half-a-dozen men under arc lights, digging up the road outside the church. Barriers had blocked the road in one direction, and there were diversion signs which took traffic down Mayfield Road, along Culduthel Road, and back to the traffic lights by way of Old Edinburgh Road. (You can see a picture on our blog and our Facebook page). A generator was humming away. I asked if the generator would run the heating and not just the lighting and was told. 'This generator would run the street!' And I asked how serious things were, and when we might back to normal. 'Well', said the chief engineer, 'the boys here are going to work through the night and you should be reconnected sometime tomorrow'. And they were true to their word- everything was connected and running this next morning.

To the disgust of Scrooges everywhere, a government survey this week found that most people in Britain seemed to be pretty happy, (7.4 out of 10, if happiness can be measured!)1. Of course we all love to complain about things in this country, and yes, there are serious problems, economic, moral and spiritual, facing our society. This snapshot perhaps hides a significant number of people who are desperately unhappy. Yet perhaps it is a more realistic view of the country than that given by sections of the press. For, after all, are we not really lucky people- especially on a world scale? We live in a country where, even when things do go wrong, we have emergency services and specialists who will fix things quickly for us.

There is so much that we take for granted, and so many people whose contributions to our lives we simply dismiss. When I heard that the Hydro-electric engineers would be working through the night, I thought of some characters in the Christmas story whom we meet as they work through the night. Shepherds were really low status people in ancient Israel. They worked with animals, which is messy, cold work. There was no way that they could keep all the ceremonial handwashing and cleanliness which the full rigours of the Jewish Law required, so they were looked down up by the ultra-religious (even although King David had once been a shepherd). Yet sheep- and their cousins, the goats- were absolutely essential to the economy. They provided wool, meat and milk. And the shepherd's job was not as boring as we might think it might have been, for the shepherd had to find pasture and water for the sheep in a dry, hot country, make sure the animals remained healthy, stop them wandering away and getting lost, and sometimes even protect them from wild animals.

It is the shepherds, watching their flocks through the night, who first hear about the remarkable child of Bethlehem. Overlooked, just doing their job, they are the ones to whom the angels appear. If Jesus was being born today, perhaps the angels would appear to electrical engineers, working overnight to get the power back on, or to one of the many others who work through the night so that our lives run as we expect: the fire, police and ambulance staff, the postal workers, the bakers, the drivers and sailors and pilots and warehouse staff, the night nurses and on-call doctors in hospitals and nursing homes- and even the farmers and shepherds who have to care for their animals 24 hours a day.

The adult Christ would often speak about ordinary people and ordinary things- shepherds and sheep and goats, a woman sweeping her house to find a coin, men looking for work in a marketplace, a woman making sure she has yeast in her dough. Jesus would feed people who were hungry, and go out of his way to heal people. He chose fishermen and tax collectors to be his disciples. He himself worked as a carpenter. When we turn Jesus into a superhuman figure, we miss the point of Christianity. The word became flesh and lived among us- we call this the incarnation- God taking on human flesh. Jesus was God's way of making the ordinary special, of bringing meaning to ordinary tasks, and value to ordinary people. Perhaps the greatest miracle is not that God became a human being, but that God became this particular human being, Jesus of Nazareth.

Ascription of Praise
Glory to God in highest heaven,
and on earth peace to all in whom God delights! Amen.

Luke 2.14

Biblical references from the Good News Bible
© 2011 Peter W Nimmo