Tuesday 25 December 2012

Christmas Eve sermon : God like a baby (vulnerable but demanding)

The power behind the Christian sacrament we celebrate tonight is the greatest power there is : the power of love.

Love doesn't work like money. If I have love, it doesn't mean that you have less love. If anything, it means you have more. You can't trade love without devaluing it — turning it into something less than love. You could say "I'll love you if you do x, y or z", but that's not love, as Christians understand it.

The Love which is symbolised by this bread and wine is nothing like money or material goods. For a start, there is an infinite resource of this love — there need never be a shortage. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of the love in this world takes the form of communion bread and wine. You can't store love in a bank account or strongbox, to be used later. Love is minted fresh whenever it's being spent. Love :

needs nothing, competes with nothing, compels nothing, exists at nothing's expense

from Francis Spufford "Unapologetic"

If love is perceived as a threat by anyone you have to ask "what's wrong with them?"

But unfortunately love is perceived as a threat, because there is a lot that is wrong with humans and the rules their societies make (often with the best of motives). So it is that the love of God ended up taking this terrible form — symbols of a man's broken body and spilt blood. Because love — real love, God's crazy, forgiving love — is, unfortunately, seen as a threat to the world we live in.

Tonight of all nights we remember that love — infinite love, the love of God — takes the form not just of bread and wine, but of a baby. That is an important story that illustrates God's power. It tells how God comes in weakness, in vulnerability, in powerlessness, in dependence. God doesn't come forcing himself down our throats, forcing us to use his currency.

But ask any parent : a baby does have power all right. A baby makes demands, all the time. It can't feed itself, so it cries. Middle of a phone call, middle of the night, it cries and won't stop till it's satisfied. The world revolves around a baby.

And all creatures are tuned to respond to their babies' cries of distress — it's deep in our nature. It doesn't have to be forced; it's there in our makeup. A baby's cry stirs a response. We can't help it.

And that is how God comes to us — utterly powerless, yet completely demanding. God's like a baby — that's what the Christmas story seems to say. The world revolves around it. This baby is a sacrament of God. And if — if — we could hear God's cries of distress in this world, then if we were fully human (and not hard-hearted) we couldn't help ourselves responding — freely responding, as if to a baby in distress. That's how God's Spirit works. Always drawing us to God, but always leaving us free . . . always drawing us to God, but always leaving us free.

To eat sacramental bread and drink sacramental wine — Jesus's body and blood — is to respond to God's cry of distress which God shares with the world. Like a baby's cry of distress. It is to recognise God's vulnerability (as of a baby). But it is also to be renewed by the great, crazy power of God's love, vulnerable as a baby, stronger than death, always 'on tap'.

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