Sermon for the Fouth Sunday of Advent – 24th December 2023

St Paul’s Athens

 

Well done for being in church on Christmas Eve – so many things to do. Sure there are many snowed under with shopping, cooking etc. but you have made it. Usually this is the cue for the preacher to talk about the true meaning of Christmas  being spiritual. I want to say the opposite- Christmas is not about spirituality but about physicality.

I want to avert your gaze from the spiritual to the flesh.

Now I admire and learn from my friends who are Muslims and Jews but find the idea of God becoming man not only nonsensical but blasphemous and I have sympathy with them. How can this thing be? It is too much for our little brains but I hope not for our hearts.

For many the spiritual and the material are at war. There is a permanent divide but not in Christianity. When God created everything he declared it good and at the end with men and women very good. That is why at Christmas the mingling of divine and human is possible. Emmanuel God is with us, God is in us God is one with us.

This is shocking. Jesus was a human as a baby, as he grew, as he died and now after his resurrection and ascension.

1. Christmas celebrates the physical and the bodily.

The Word made flesh who dwelt among us. But let’s not romanticise it. I am glad I was born in the 20th century and live in the 21st century. We live in an age of shampoos and deodorants Jesus was born into a world where there was no remedial surgery or cosmetic dentistry where those disfigured displayed their handicaps to get alms from passers by. The fishermen did not smell of Chanel or Rive Gauche but of an earthier river bank! The animals who were there as an early form of central heating smelt of farmyard. It was a lip-smacking, belching, coughing and crying humanity to which Jesus came. One of our priests at Andover is a woman in her 20s experiencing her first pregnancy and she wrote this week, “I have become struck by…how polished our versions of this story have become…In reality, Jesus’s birth would have been much messier and much more human than we’ve really even allowed ourselves to imagine – a night of noise and discomfort resulting in a baby who emerged into the world naked and wailing. It all seems a little less twinkly when you think of it like that.” No crying he makes was not true.

2 Christmas shows us God values us as embodied human beings.

Not only in creation did God declare it was good when he created Adam and Eve but he gave his only son to rescue the physical.The Word made flesh came as the second Adam. The Word not on the printed page, not in angelic voices but in flesh and blood.

Later on the story will tell us how this physical body was raised from the dead and is ascended into heaven. There is a human who is our high priest in the courts of heaven

This coming week.

Remember how God chose to bring in his kingdom with a weak and helpless child. He continues to use the weak and helpless – that is you and me. Read Mathew 25 and the parable of the sheep and goats. The judgement is not about belief but about behaviour. We are to love as St James tells us not only in word, but in deed and action. Who goes to the bathroom mirror and says I love you, I love you. every morning?

How do we do that as individuals and as a church?

Remember God is not embarrassed by your weakness, the aches and pains you bring to church this morning, the fallibility and forgetfulness, the tiredness and anxiety which is part of our being in a body. Bring them all before God tell your Brother in heaven. He understands. He is not looking for super spiritual beings. As the church fathers said He became human so that we can become divine. Priests use a silent prayer as we prepare the communion cup, By the mystery of this water and wine, May we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.