Christmas has lots of traditions, some more related to the Christmas story than others. One tradition that I’ve never really understood is that great British institution: the Christmas cracker. For some reason, in my family, we always have to pull Christmas crackers after lunch, even though nobody can really see the point of doing it or really wants any of the things that come inside them! But Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without them, so I’m going to get my Christmas off to a good start by pulling a cracker with the vicar.
Now you get three things in a cracker: a gift, a crown and a joke. I think that maybe Christmas crackers can tell us something about Christmas. So let’s think about those 3 things you get in a Christmas cracker.
First of all, the gift. Christmas is a time for gift-giving. And we talk about Jesus as being God’s gift to us at Christmas. But sometimes we forget what a gift really is. A gift is a symbol of love, given without demand for anything in return. We’ve become so accustomed to the idea that the things we really want in life are the things that we strive for through our own merits, things we have had to struggle and compete for. But the Christian faith tells us that the opposite is true. The message of Christmas is that this baby in the manger is God’s gift to us because he brings us life in all its fullness, both in this age now and in the eternal life to come. And we obtain that life, not because we deserve it or we earn it, but simply through trusting God. Jesus Christ is the gift we receive through grace. That’s what St Paul was saying in his letter to Titus.
Second there is the crown. Right from the beginning of his life Jesus is called a King. But kings aren’t born in cattle sheds, kings don’t make friends with fishermen and tax collectors, and kings aren’t killed in a way that Jesus was eventually killed. So in the Christmas story God is telling us something about what kind of people really matter in the world. It’s not just people who live in palaces, and have a lot of money, and are respected by everybody. Take these shepherds who are the central characters in this morning’s gospel story. Being a Shepherd might seem like quite a pleasant romantic job to you and I. But at the time of Jesus, they were the lowest of the low. Because they lived out in fields, they weren’t able to keep the religious laws that were thought to make you a good person and so they weren’t even allowed to go to synagogue. They were the people who everyone thought that God had no time for. And yet these are precisely the people to whom God sent a great host Angels, in order that they should be the first people to greet the Messiah.
The thing about the crown in the Christmas cracker is that on Christmas Day we all put them on. In my family we would sit wearing them to watch the Queen’s Christmas message. And it seemed ironic that we should be wearing crowns when she wasn’t. But that tells us something important about Christmas, that God, King of the universe, became unimaginably humble so that we might all be kings through the gift of abundant life. Some of the early Christians put it like this: “God became human that we might become divine.”
And finally there is the joke. We don’t usually think that church is the place for jokes (especially if they’re as bad as the one I’ve just read out!). We don’t think that humour has much of a place in religion, and the popular images of religious people today seem to do more and more to reinforce that. But St Paul is clear that the message of Christmas is one of foolishness to people who think themselves wise. And when you think about it, it is a farce of a story that the creator of the galaxies, of life and being itself should become one among us in a newborn baby, born in a barn in a small Palestinian town.
I hope there will be laughter in your homes today, because Christmas is the day when God laughs at himself and what he is prepared to do in his reckless love for these funny human beings he has created. And maybe God sometimes laughs at us too, at our churchy seriousness and piety. So this Christmas, let’s laugh with God and call to mind the words of the mystic Meister Eckhart:
“When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the Holy Trinity is born. When the Father laughs at the Son and the Son laughs back at the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit”.
Laughter, pleasure, joy and love be with you all this Christmas.