What kind of Christmas present does our world need at the end of 2008?
Undoubtedly a huge financial stimulus would be a very welcome stocking filler. And as we begin 2009 new jobs would surely be a great present for redundant employees across the board from Woolworths to Lehman Brothers. And then there are the neglected environmental concerns. A big drop in carbon emissions seems to be the Christmas present our planet urgently needs but is unlikely to receive certainly this year. And what about further debt relief for developing nations? Or if only Santa could bring that illusive new trade round that failed to bring justice for poorer nations this year in Doha.
Our world has so many needs and so many disappointments. People are frantically looking for solutions but Christmas doesn’t bring the gifts that we collectively need. No wonder we seek solace in the gifts we give one another which, even given the credit crunch, are sure to be far less disappointing. Amazing how a new iPhone can take our mind off bigger matters.
But consumerist escapism is wearing thin. It’s being increasingly remarked that these major problems we face – economic, ecological, social – are making us realise once again the truth that, while we have retreated further into individualism over the last forty years, in reality we’re all in this together. There’s no escaping the mess that other people make whether it’s financial mismanagement or environmental degradation, and blame only gets you so far. And the difficult truth is that the more we open our eyes and look at our own ways of life, the more we realise that we are complicit in these problems too.
So it is said by many that we are moving into a new era of collectivism. But to make collectivism work you need shared values and ideals. So we talk about the need for markets, governments, communities and families to be underpinned by shared values and shared vision. We know that to hold together we need principles like fairness, tolerance and cooperation.
Yet while we know that we need them, for so much of the time these values seem to be nothing more than words. Taught in a citizenship class they lack energy. On the lips of a politician at best they smack of cliché, at worst hypocrisy. We need values. We need vision. We need hope. And yet at the same time they seem so ethereal and meaningless.
The ancient Greeks also believed in a force that they thought was indispensable but rather ethereal. Like values, vision and hope it was a principal of organisation and rationality which they believed animated the universe. They called it Logos – Word. So when John the Evangelist was looking for a language to explain what he believed God had done through his extraordinary friend Jesus he borrowed this Greek word to say: “Imagine everything that the universe needs to hold together, imagine every good value, imagine the most powerful vision, imagine the surest hope – all these things have been made real. They are no longer ethereal and meaningless. They have been ‘fleshed out’. They have literally become flesh and dwelt among us. And I write this because he was – he still is – my companion.”
That idea is very cumbersome and complex. And so he simplifies it and says “This man, my friend, is light – pure, powerful, magnificent light. Light that banishes the darkness of greed, envy, exploitation, violence and division. This is light so powerful that it overcomes the darkness of all destructive ways of living and, wonder of wonders, even the ultimate darkness of death itself.”
And why does he write this? Well, what John makes clear in his gospel and in the letters he wrote subsequently, is that this intimate companionship which he enjoyed with Jesus is in fact available to all. All can receive him. All can believe on his name. All can find values and vision and hope, in fact “life in all its fullness” by being reconnected to God through him.
Many will say, “I’ll accept the values, I’ll buy into a bit of the vision and I’ll hold on to a little of the hope. But I just don’t get that companionship part. I can’t receive him. I just don’t have the faith.” And many won’t see the point. But I believe that the lesson of our age is that values often are ethereal, words often are meaningless, and what we really need are values, vision and hope that our real because they are embedded in a story which we call the Christian faith, they are embodied in the community which we call the Church. But more than anything, they are real because they are incarnated in this man who is present to us, this man who is all grace and truth, and who opens his arms to us and offers us his companionship, his love.
He calls us this night to open our hearts to him so that when we sing “Yea Lord we greet thee”, what we mean is that, by greeting him and accepting his companionship by faith, we too want to be incarnations of grace and truth for our troubled world. We too want to shine the light of Christ’s love into the dark problems that our world faces today.
Christmas is one of the few things that does still bring our communities together. So maybe the time is right for us to realise the gift that Christmas really is. Maybe it’s time to look beyond the baby in the manger and all the sentimental notions that appeal to our privatised religious sense and interest in little beyond the family. Maybe it’s time to ask ourselves the question of what it really means for all our values and vision and hopes to have taken flesh in a man who tells us that he is with us always, even to the end of the age.