Christmas Day sermon : 'A Tale of Two Stories'

A couple of years back there was an atheist bus advert : "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Well, as I've said many times before, the first sentence there is just a pointless statement, anyway. It's as sensible to me as saying "There's probably no reality". But let's pass on that for now. The real problem with this message is the suggestion that if it weren't for this troublesome worry about God's possible existence, you could just get on and enjoy life. If only those bothersome religious people would go away we could all enjoy ourselves. And that is often the message of Christmas : "Happy Christmas! Merry Christmas!" — but finding a Christmas card that has any reference to the Christmas story is quite a job these days.

What is 'enjoyment'? 'Enjoyment' is just one of a thousand human emotions, and a fairly fleeting one at that. Look at the Christmas story and see if you can find 'enjoyment' there. What you'll find is the whole gamut of human emotions : pride, joy, faith/trust, wonder, humility, sense of rejection, hatred, tenderness, anxiety, fear (even terror), resentment, puzzlement, trepidation, pain, hope — the whole gamut of human emotions. Pretty much everything, in fact, except possibly 'enjoyment'.

It seems that anything that gets in the way of 'enjoyment' at Christmas somehow doesn't belong in the story of our secular Christmas. Including religion, which doesn't sound very 'enjoyable'.

Now ask yourself which version of Christmas most reflects real life. The one we're supposed to be living in, in which there is perpetual enjoyment — or the 'mythical' story in the New Testament? The one in which everyone walks around with a perpetual smile on their face, or the one in which, moment by moment, we experience a whole range of feelings?

Seems to me that it's the Merry Christmas that we're supposed to be living in that's the mythical one. In fact, if I were cynical — maybe I am — this Merry Christmas is actually a myth devised to sell us things. After all, the only things in the world that are designed to elicit enjoyment and only enjoyment are products.

I've nothing against enjoyment — bring it on! You know me — the highlight of my month is to be sitting in a pub with a glass of beer on the table, a melodeon on my lap and a bunch of friends around me playing English traditional dance music. I could happily do that eight hours a day. But to say that life is to be enjoyed — just enjoyed — "is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare." (a quotation from Francis Spufford's 'Unapologetic') Life is richer than that, and that richness is all there in the real Christmas story. Everyone finds a place in that story. It's quite remarkable.

People sometimes talk to me about the 'real meaning of Christmas', but to be honest I've no idea what they mean by that. They often seem to think I must know what the 'real meaning of Christmas' is, being a minister, but to be honest I don't think there is a single meaning. It's a story. What that story means depends who, in the story, you identify with.

Maybe you've recently become a mother, in which case you may identify with Mary. What might you learn from her? Maybe you're a step-dad, like Joseph. Or run a fully-booked hotel. Maybe you are a powerful politician, or a political refugee. . . . or a poorly-educated peasant looking for the revolution . . . . perhaps, a foreign intellectual and scholar.

Certainly, at the centre of the story, there's a mystery. The story revolves around that mystery. Who is this child? And (the story suggests) each of us has to ask that question "what does this child mean — for me?"

Some will conclude that the child is the bearer of hope — an eternal hope. Some that he's the leader of the Revolution. Many will conclude that the world would be better off without this child. The story goes on to tell how this child was not wanted, and why. As the old carol says : "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee . . ."

There is light in this Christmas story, but actually you have to dig really deep to find it, because it's a dark story, full of foreboding as well as promise. You have to dig deep into the whole story of God's people in the Old Testament in order to find the light of God's promise being fulfilled, but also being twisted — not being fulfilled in the way people expected or even wanted.

The problem with the story of our secular Christmas is the opposite one. Really, it's just a load of froth with a single empty message : "Be Happy!" And you have to dig down past the froth to find why 'being happy' might not be as easy to achieve as it is to go shopping for stuff. That story, told in a thousand adverts, just doesn't work; it's not true. Underneath the froth, we all know that our emotional life is more complicated than being happy all the time, by magic.

If we believed that modern mythical story we wouldn't need to be looking for the light of hope. But, unless we're living in a fairytale world, we are looking for hope. And although the Christmas story sounds a bit like a fairytale, it really, really isn't. It tells it how it is, and it points us towards the light, the source of that hope.

That hope (says the story) is found in different ways by different people, living in a messy world. But the hope is embodied in this child — a child embedded in a greater story of God's dealings with his people. Look for this child in your world. Look for this child in your own personality. It is a gift of God : treasure it!