Do you remember this day last year? Christmas 2005? It has a special place in my memory because it was my first Christmas as Curate at this church. Of course because memory is strange and selective what I remember are the odd, insignificant details. So for example I remember that at the Christmas services I wore high heels. Afterwards I vowed I would never wear high heels in the sanctuary again. And I haven’t.
I invite you to remember last Christmas for yourselves. Who were you with? Where were you? Are you celebrating Christmas in the same place this year? And with the same people? Have important relationships in your life changed? Have you changed? Do you feel yourself to be the same person? At the very least I know myself to be standing here two inches shorter than I was this time last year.
Of course when we remember the past it is not just a case of sitting back and letting the facts surface. It is a creative process of putting things together- literally re-membering.
Remembering is about telling a story, bearing witness; it is the human activity at the heart of the Gospel. Without the memories of the disciples and their desire to re-form these memories into a story, there would be no surviving account of the life of Jesus. Remembering is a way of coming to terms with painful experiences and of celebrating joyous ones. It can also be a way of preparing for the future and understanding those forces which bind us in our individual and collective lives. Remembering is critical to forming an identity. Without memory we literally do not know who we are.
A story which goes to the heart of human identity is the story of Jesus Christ. As Christians we believe that we are defined through his life. We re-member the story of his life over the course of a year, every year, in our churches.
The story never changes; most of us will have been familiar with the nativity from childhood. We may even relate especially to some of the characters from having been a young Mary or Joseph in a school nativity play. Whilst the story doesn’t change we do. We meet the story differently every year because we are different people: If you’re an expectant mother or father this year you will, I suspect, hear the story in a way that you haven’t before. The decisions which Mary and Joseph faced, the arduous journey that they went on, suddenly resonates on a deeper level and in a new way.
If we think of the gospel writers trying to understand who this Jesus was we can see that they, like us, had the job of putting his story alongside their own. Or rather, in the light of Christ’s story they saw their story; the story of the People of Israel and all humanity, differently. Their lives had been changed by this incredible man and all the old stories that they knew so well, the words and stories that had formed them as a people, took on a new meaning. The birth narrative in Matthew’s gospel is a rich tapestry of OT allusions.
The words from Isaiah:
23 “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,”
was originally a promise that Judah would be saved from political domination. It becomes in the story of Jesus God’s promise to be present with us in every age.
We, like the gospel writers are invited to see our lives, our personal and collective lives, in the context of the greatest story ever told’.
But what does this actually mean?
The global story at the moment seems to be one of fragmentation and disunity; the march of progress seems to have led to greater and greater alienation. From one another and potentially from our very selves. We witness the effects of huge inequality in terms of wealth, education and opportunity. The voice of radical fundamentalism is one that is being heard with more and more terrifying violence across the world.
Of course none of these things are new. Jesus was born into just such a climate where his very birth led a Roman governor to have many other children massacred. The story of a baby born to a young woman of dubious moral character in a context of fear and poverty is one that speaks to us now. That both the wealthy, educated wise men and the shepherds gathered together to witness the birth of this baby is at its heart a story of radical inclusion which challenges all the sources of disunity in our world today. The people who we might, if we were the directors of a play, give only cameo roles to are, in the nativity story, central.
This story of radical inclusion is the story of God’s love for humanity. A love so overwhelming that we can only begin to understand it as we expose ourselves to it again and again each year. As we meet the Christmas story as slightly different people the nuances or emotions of the story will touch us in a new way.
But the most radical element of this story is that it is not only the story of God becoming man, or the story of 2000 years ago, it is the story of God becoming incarnate in you and me. When we hear and rehear the story of Christ’s birth Christ is born in us. We, like Mary, carry the Christ child within our very selves. This might be difficult to accept especially when we know ourselves to be far from the person that Mary was, or the person God is calling us to be. When we remember our own stories most of us will have memories of things we regret, of doing things which we knew even at the time to be selfish.
This will be true of us not only as individuals but us a society. But God goes to these dark places within us, and within the world, to transform us and to transform it. He is the light which the darkness will not overcome.
Matthew’s gospel begins with the story of Christ’s birth and the knowledge that he is our Emmanuel; God with us’. Today we are celebrating God’s presence in the form of a helpless baby who astonishingly is also the light of the world’.
Matthew’s gospel ends with the risen Jesus commissioning his disciples. In this ending he reasserts what was declared at the beginning for he says:
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28.20)
Let us pray that this Christmas time Christ may be born in us and so transform our stories to ones of unity, grace and light. Amen
Sarah Eynstone