The hope of new life

Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

25^th December 2020

Christmas Day

Reading: Luke 2:1-20   

The virus that has dominated global affairs this year,

            reminds us of our physicality;

we are born, we live, and we die.

 

And there is a truth in this notion of physicality

            that we often miss or even deny.

We are not disembodied minds, nor are we trapped souls.

            We’re not ‘passing through’ this life

                        on our way from somewhere to somewhere else,

            and neither are we able to transcend the messiness of our mortality

                        by escaping to our higher minds.

 

We are embodied beings, and despite the fantasies of science fiction,

            there is no way to separate us into our component pieces

            of mind, soul, and body.

 

We are holistic beings.

 

The incarnation, the story of God becoming fully human

            in Bethlehem two thousand years ago,

speak to us of a God who enters into the experience

            of what it means to be human;

embracing the fullness of humanity, with nothing held back.

 

This, of course, is why the early explorations in theology

            that came to be labelled ‘heresy’,

            in the end, failed to convince.

 

This is not God pretending to be human, or a human aspiring to divinity;

            the baby-in-the-manger, God-made-flesh,

                        speaks to us of God’s utter, total, and complete commitment to humanity,

                        from birth to death, with all that this entails.

 

So, why does this matter?

            What’s it to you? Or to me?

 

I was talking with David Shapton this week,

            and those of you who remember David will know

            that he has the ability to go deep, and go there quickly.

This is still true, despite him now being 94 years old!

 

And he said to me that, for all the familiarity we have with the Nativity story,

            a lot of people miss an aspect of its significance that gives us hope in our lives,

            and this is the message that there is always new life coming into being.

 

There is always new life coming into being.

 

I’ve said before that my favourite carol is In The Bleak Midwinter,

            and I’m always surprised that some people struggle with it

            on the grounds that it isn’t historically realistic!

Which, of course, it isn’t… but then it’s not supposed to be.

 

I mean, yes, we all know that Jesus wasn’t actually born

            in the middle of a deep snowy winter in Palestine;

for starters it rarely snows in Bethlehem, and when it does, it melts in a few hours.

            Snow doesn’t fall snow on snow in Bethlehem.

 

But this isn’t the point of the Carol.

            Christina Rossetti was using the Victorian ideal

                        of a snowy wintry English December

            as a metaphor for the world into which the Christ-child was born,

                        offering a beautiful and hopeful image

            that even in the depths of winter-darkness,

                        when all life and light seems to have left the world,

            nonetheless God is still at work

                        bringing new life into being.

 

And this God-given gift of new life

            is still at work in our world, in our lives.

 

The second  verse of the carol captures something of this conviction

            that God still comes to our world:

 

‘Heaven cannot hold him’ - God comes to us today, and every day,

            bringing new life to birth in our lives and our world.

 

God may be the almighty,

            attended by angels and archangels,

            serenaded by cherubim and seraphim,

but God is also found in the cry of a tiny baby, in a stable in Bethlehem,

            fully embracing humanity in all its diversity of creed, colour, and status.

 

And, as the carol finishes,

            it asks each of us what our response will be?

 

Our reading gave us the story of the shepherds,

            and how they brought their gifts to the stable,

and it asks us to consider how we will respond

            to the good news of God coming to us,

            bringing the spark of hope and the promise of new life.

 

I’m sure that today isn’t what any of us

            would have planned and hoped for, for this year.

‘Life’ sometimes just gets in the way, doesn’t it?

 

And the image of a dark snowy winter

            may seem particularly appropriate for Christmas 2020,

as we find ourselves confined to our homes

            by our common biology and the forces of nature and evolution.

 

But it is to a world in lockdown that Christ comes,

            again and again and again,

bringing to each of us the hope, the promise, of new life.