THE ORIGINAL TABLOID STORY

The Christmas story is so familiar that it’s hard to get behind the pretty Christmas card images. The facts of the story are actually quite scandalous. Any newspaper reporter would have a field day. Let’s start with an unmarried pregnant teenager who claims to have had a vision of an angel. Then there’s the tradition that Joseph was an older man. That sort of scandal is always popular in certain sections of the press. The broadsheets might prefer the story of the foreign tyranny which made heavily pregnant women travel miles along difficult and dangerous roads to fulfil the registrations procedure for taxation. Or the appalling state of maternity services in Bethlehem, the unhygienic conditions in which to give birth not to mention the lax visiting rules which allowed a bunch of smelly strangers to pay a visit to the child. And later there’s a visit from foreign travellers telling an odd tale of star gazing who leave the most peculiar gifts. Finally another tyrant murders babies to protect his dynasty and forces a young couple into more misery, a flight into exile.

The angels might be pretty, though I suspect they were more scary than we can possibly imagine, the gifts valuable if odd, but the rest of the story has a brutality and an earthiness about it. Although these events happened two thousand years ago, there are many countries where such brutal events are part of everyday life for many.

And that’s the miracle about the Christmas story. Once we get beyond the tinsel and the snow and the pretty-prettiness of the Victorian Christmas card, the story speaks as loudly to the human condition today as it did all those years ago. Teenage girls still fall pregnant and get shunned by their family and friends. Tyranny still makes pregnant women undertake long and dangerous journeys. Young mothers still give birth in unhygienic and unsafe conditions. Young families are forced into exile to an unknown and uncertain future. Babies are murdered at the whim of military dictators.

When the church talks of incarnation, this messy situation is what it means. The birth of God’s own son, his coming to live among us, not in a palace, not surrounded by adoring friends and relations but in loneliness, in danger, in squalor. His birth is celebrated by out-casts, those living right on the margins of society, and by strangers, those of another religion who’ve undertaken a difficult and dangerous journey purely out of their alien faith.

The risk taken is unimaginable. There was so much that could have gone wrong What if Joseph had refused to marry Mary?. What if she’d gone into premature labour, on the journey or caught an infection during the birth? What if Herod had succeeded in catching up with the child? You’d have thought that God would have more sense. It’s such an over-the-top way of doing things.

But God, of course knew exactly what God was doing. This had been planned since before the beginning of time. ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Humanity had managed to make such a mess of things that only by coming to live among the mess could the situation be redeemed. God needed to take on all the danger to which ordinary human beings were subject. God needed to get right there among the messiness, the risk, the pain and the sorrow of human existence. And God’s message ringing through all of this is ‘I care, I have always cared, I will always care’. God cares so much that God risked that only beloved son, not in a nice controlled way, but in a totally out of control way. God risked everything, really risked everything.

And that tells us an enormous amount about who God is. First and foremost God is love. Love so great that it will give away its most precious possession. And who does God love? Not just the pious person in the pews, not just the saints, but each and every person, from the drug addict to the saint, from the child with special needs to the university professor, from the person working on the supermarket check-out to the successful entrepreneur.

Like the overture to an opera or a musical, the story of Jesus’ birth gives us the themes which will characterise his ministry. He will be friends with outcasts, he will tramp the dusty roads of Galilee, he will be outside the establishment, he will scandalise his home-town, he will be in conflict with the authorities. He will risk everything, even life itself. In the end, he will choose not to go into exile, but to accept death. But the angels didn’t sing of a saviour in vain, for beyond the cross there is resurrection and redemption.

So what are we going to do in response? Like those staying in the Inn we can make no response at all, we can decide that it’s of no concern to us. Or like Herod we can persecute, make life difficult and dangerous for those of faith. But like Joseph and Mary, like the shepherds and the Magi we can respond to God’s call. We can use our own particular gifts and talents in the service of God. Mary responded with total faith, Joseph was a loyal and loving husband, the shepherds were obedient and worshipped, the magi undertook a long and arduous journey, gave precious gifts. Each had their own path to tread, their own particular calling, their own individual response of love to God’s great gift of love. And that’s our calling also, to reply with love to God’s love.

Rev. Penny Sayer

Curate, St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea