Last Sunday (29th December 2024) I preached at Sherbourne Community Church in Coventry. I was very pleased to be asked to do so. They made me very welcome. Below is the text of my sermon.
To be clear: this is the text I wrote beforehand but in practice I deviated from the wording at times and added in a couple of extra comments. But the substance is the same.
The sermon followed two Bible readings, and focused particularly on the first one:
At Christmas time, I’m sure many of us tend to think about memories of childhood Christmasses. As a child in primary school, I assumed that large swathes of the Bible were taken up with accounts of the birth of Jesus. Christmas seemed such a dominant event. Later, when I learnt more of the structure of the Bible and became aware that there were four gospels, I still imagined that a sizeable portion of each gospel must be focused on the nativity.
So it was a surprise to me as a teenager to discover that two of the gospels – Mark and John – don’t even mention Jesus’ birth. The other two – Matthew and Luke – give only a small portion of their story to it.
Matthew tells us that Joseph, Mary and Jesus returned from being refugees in Egypt once they heard that Herod had died. Matthew’s gospel then leaps forward to Jesus’ adulthood and his baptism by John the Baptist. Luke almost leaps straight from Jesus’ infancy to his adulthood – but not quite! He gives just a few lines to the story that we heard earlier, about the 12-year-old Jesus disappearing from his parents during a trip to Jerusalem.
Other than the nativity narratives, this is the only story about Jesus’ childhood that has made it into the Bible. In the second and third centuries, a number of writings claimed to tell the stories of Jesus’ childhood, but most of these were written long after the gospels that we have in our Bibles. So this very short story is quite exceptional.
I think it’s quite a strange story. Sometimes, if we’re familiar with a story, we can get so used to it that we forget how strange it would sound to someone hearing it for the first time. I’m not a parent, but I have sometimes had responsibility for children as an uncle and a godfather. I think you’d all be a bit alarmed if I told you that I had lost my goddaughter on a trip to London and had searched for three days before finding her in Westminster Abbey, discussing theology with the Bishop of London.
As we listened to this passage earlier, we heard that Jesus’ parents had been travelling home from Jerusalem for a day before they realised he wasn’t with them. You might find this surprising. Indeed, you might look at it and say, “A day! How did they go a day before noticing he wasn’t there? What extraordinarily unobservant parents!”
If we react like that, it’s because we’re making assumptions based on our own culture. Today, a child is the responsibility of their parents. They need to know where they are. But Jesus’ culture was a culture of extended families. The care of children was much more widely shared than it is now. With members of an extended family travelling together – possibly with other families – it is very likely that Mary and Joseph simply assumed that Jesus was with other relatives as they all travelled together in large groups. It must have been a shock to them to realise he wasn’t with any of them.
We can only imagine their fears, worries and possible panic as they searched for days before finding Jesus in the Temple. It’s understandable if we find ourselves a bit annoyed with Jesus at this point: surely he was old enough to realise his parents would be worried?
I suspect that is not the question that concerned Luke. The gospel-writer is interested in showing us that Jesus prioritised God’s ways over human ways and could discuss important issues. A number of scholars suggest that Luke’s was following a practice common in the life-stories of Roman emperors and other powerful figures in Greco-Roman society. Caesar Augustus, who was Roman Emperor at the time of Jesus’ birth, is said to have delivered an intellectual speech at the age of 12. Perhaps Luke is telling us that this Jewish peasant, Jesus, who began his life in a smelly room full of animals could be a match for the ruler of the Roman Empire.
Indeed, many of the titles that the New Testament gives to Jesus – king, saviour, son of God – were also titles used for Roman emperors. The gospels challenge the empire’s whole notion of what it means to be a king, saviour or god.
I’m struck by Luke’s wording towards the end of the story. He says that afterwards Jesus went to Nazareth with his parents “and was obedient to them”. The word that stands out to me is “obedient”. Jesus doesn’t seem to have been very obedient when he left his parents to go and chat in the Temple. Perhaps Luke is keen to encourage us not to think of Jesus as disobedient and to emphasise that after this point he obeyed his parents.
But I can’t help thinking that if Jesus had behaved like a model obedient child, he would never have gone back to the Temple at all. Jesus was not the model of an obedient child. Despite this, some people have clearly put quite a lot of effort into using – or misusing – Christian teaching as a way of controlling children – and indeed adults. It seems to me that this tendency is especially strong at Christmas.
Take Cecil Frances Alexander, the writer of Once in Royal David’s City. She tells us in Verse 3 of the carol that Jesus was obedient to his mother. The lyrics then declare, “Christian children all must be/ Mild, obedient, good as he”.
Well, if children are to follow Jesus’ example, should they leave their parents and wander off to debate theology? That’s probably not what Cecil Frances Alexander had in mind when she wrote the hymn. The other hymns that she wrote include All Things Bright and Beautiful, which originally contained the verse ‘The rich man in his castle/ The poor man at his gate/ God made them, high and lowly/ He ordered their estate.” Thankfully that verse is now generally missed out. But it’s clear that for Cecil Frances Alexander, God is a god a who has created and blessed the social order, a god of order, obedience, hierarchy and control.
Don’t worry! I’m not suggesting that God wants children to just randomly ignore their parents or disobey their parents. But I am worried when we give the impression that Christianity is all about following rules and doing what you’re told. As Christians, and particularly as Protestants, we celebrate a God who saves us by grace because God loves us, not through any goodness of our own. We are not saved through obedience. We are not saved through rules. We are not saved because of our actions or because we’re somehow better than others. Salvation comes through God’s grace – God’s unmerited favour, flowing out of God’s love for us. We cannot earn God’s love. We cannot earn God’s forgiveness. We seek to do good in gratitude for God’s love and because we want to follow his way – not because God’s love can be earned.
Earlier, we heard those words from Colossians: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” It is love, not obedience, that saves us.
What has this to do with Christmas? As a child, I found that stories and songs around Christmas time were dominated by two individuals. One was Jesus. The other was Father Christmas. Unfortunately, I think I had a tendency to confuse their characteristics with each other.
Sometimes, Father Christmas is a friendly, cuddly figure, part of a nice, entertaining story to tell children. But he can also be misused. I remember a few years ago sitting at a café in December and gradually becoming aware of the conversation at the next table. A woman was telling her grandson that if he didn’t finish his dinner then Father Christmas might not bring him any presents. How would Father Christmas know, asked the child? He’s outside watching you, said the grandmother; I can see him through the window. The child spun round, trying to catch a glimpse of Santa through the window behind him. “You can’t see him,” said his grandmother. “Only I can see him.”
Thankfully, I restrained myself form leaning over and saying, “Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it?”
Even Santa Claus can be turned from a nice story for children into a means of control. The cheerful tune of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town might distract us from the lyrics, which are basically a series of threats: “You better watch out”, “You better not cry”. And so on.
As a child, I found that God and Santa Claus blurred with each other. Santa Claus is apparently watching us, ready to punish or reward us. We have to “watch out” because he can see us all the time. He’ll divide us up into “naughty and nice” and we don’t want to be on the wrong list.
And as a child, that is exactly what I thought God was like. And there are many, many people – adults as well as children – who seem to think that this is the sort of God in which Christians believe. But this is exactly the sort of God that I don’t believe in now. And I want to suggest that the God revealed in the birth of Jesus is the opposite of that sort of God.
The message of Christmas is summed up in the word Immanuel, meaning God With Us. In the birth of Jesus, God has entered into human life in a new way. At Christmas, we see that God is not a big, bearded man in the sky looking down on us. God is a refugee baby lying in a feeding-trough. God has appeared among us, born not as an emperor or a military leader but as a persecuted child in an obscure corner of a brutal empire. God is not simply up there, compiling lists of our sins and categorising us as “naughty” or “nice”. God is down here. God is with us. He shares our lives, he shares our pains, he shares our joy. Whether we enjoy Christmas or struggle through it, whether we laugh or cry on Christmas Day or any other day, God is with us, laughing and crying with us.
At times, it can be hard to believe it. It can be hard to feel it. But God is more than a feeling. God is with us whatever we’re feeling.
A year ago, the Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac made global headlines with the Christmas sermon that he preached in his home church in Bethlehem. As he surveyed the reality of life in Palestine and Israel, he asked, “Where is Jesus today?” He answered, “Jesus is under the rubble in Gaza”.
Jesus is under the rubble in Gaza.
This is the God made vulnerable in the child Jesus who walked away from his parents to return to the Temple. This is the God who as the man Jesus lived so much by the power of love and justice that the Roman Empire considered him a threat and executed him with one of the most painful forms of murder that human cruelty has ever invented. This is the God whose subtle, transformative power cannot be defeated by all the powers of sin, injustice and empire, and who as Jesus Christ rose from the dead and continues to be with us. This is the God who offers to rule in our hearts if we commit ourselves to him and reject those same forces of sin, those same idols of injustice and empire today.
God is not Father Christmas. There is no naughty-and-nice list in the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus’ salvation does not come through obeying rules or fitting into structures. Of course, some rules are worth following. Some structures are good structures. But Jesus made clear that rules were made for people, not people for rules. Obedience cannot save us.
Jesus can save us. To be clear, I am not suggesting that it doesn’t matter how we live or what we do! That is the last thing I am saying. Jesus’ own teachings point to a way of life, to a way for the world, that challenges so many of the values that dominate our broken, unjust and unequal society. But he is down here with us as we resist them – and he will forgive us when we fail. So let’s rejoice in God’s salvation. Let’s seek Christ’s help to follow his teachings. Let’s pray, as the Letter to the Colossians puts it, that the peace of Christ will rule in our hearts. But let us also ask for forgiveness when we turn away – and let us be prepared to forgive others, just as the Lord has forgiven us.
And as we prepare for 2025, let us be ready to support each other, trusting in the reality that whatever we face, whatever the world faces, God is with us.
Symon Hill 