Christmas message - St David's Uniting Church, Albury

We are so caught up in the economics of the season that we lose sight of what the celebration has been about for so long.

Things have taken the place of faith, and excess rather than simplicity has become acceptable.

I remember my surprise when I first experienced Christmas in Tonga.

I grew up in a family with very British roots so Christmas was about special food, lots of it, and gifts.

In Tonga, it was church and singing and celebration first and foremost.

When we sat down to lunch, it consisted of boiled talo and yam, dressed with coconut milk, and that was all.

I wondered what was next and it took a bit of adjusting to realise that this was it. And why not? 

These were people judged poor by western standards but rich in generosity and faith, who included me in the family with kindness and grace.

There did not have to be big gifts or show to make that real.

Christmas was lived in love with what was possible in the context.

This experience picks up themes that I think are important to hold on to at Christmas. 

First, Christmas is about love.

God’s love for all people, a love that is so deep and rich that the one who is other than us – not contained by time or physicality – chose to enter our experience in a child born just like any other.

The child, Jesus, grew to be an obedient, compassionate, merciful and loving man who even embraced death to go where God led him.

Through him we glimpse the character of God and are called by him into a transforming love relationship with God.

Through him, we can see again that human life is sacred and blessed by God. 

We can value being people who live in bodies but who are also conduits of God to others.

The love we find in Jesus, also calls us to love others with generosity and sacrifice.

This is not saccharine sentiment, nor froth and bubble emotion, but the kind of love that works for the best for the other, always, regardless of the cost.

Secondly, the Christmas stories (yes, deliberately plural as there are two) remind us that the love that God wants to share with us and through us, is not confined to the acceptable members of our society.

The shepherds were people on the edges of their communities.

They were seen as ruffians and vagabonds.

To the religious they were unclean because they could not keep the purity laws of the Jewish faith as they tended birth and death among their flocks.

The wise ones were outsiders, gentiles, goi, who probably knew little of the Jewish faith.

We are told they were wise in the ways of creation, which has always witnessed to the same God that Jesus shows us.

They recognised God at work through reading what was in the sky.

Both these groups remind us that God is interested in everyone, whether we think they are right or wrong.

No one is ever out of the reach of God’s love.

I am disappointed not to have been at St Matthew’s a couple of Sundays ago. 

In that short heartbeat of time, I have been told that the carol service lived out the all-encompassing love of God. 

People experienced the passionate, enfolding love of God, in spite of the human differences that were present.

This is part of the Christmas message.

Jesus breaks down the barriers we like to put in place, the barriers of recognising difference rather than seeing our shared humanity. 

This Christmas may we go beyond our comfortable groups and move out looking for God already at work around us; may we take time to consider Jesus as the complete person who, if we will only look, shows us what God is like.