on 7 December 2022
Dear all,
Lidl’s Christmas advert strap line this year is “a Christmas you can believe in”.
I expect they are trying to draw attention to their low prices. I think if they are claiming anything more than that they are overstretching themselves. Underpinning Lidl’s claim, I fear, is the widespread belief they are tapping into that the Bible’s Christmas story is not something you can believe in.
It’s what we can call the conspiracy of Christmas. The true message of Christmas in our culture is so mixed up, not taken notice of and certainly not taken seriously, to the degree that it just sounds plain unbelievable and ridiculous. Add into that the whole community is thrown into madness and panic and no one has any energy left to enquire about the truth of Christmas. For those who do hear the bible’s claims, they seem unbelievable.
That God became man, that God’s son was born of a virgin, that the king of the universe was laid in a feeding trough, that angels greeted his birth and wise men paid him homage and so on.
The truth about Christmas though is powerful, it has changed history and it is able to change people.
There are many great summary statements of Christmas, but take what is possibly the most famous found in John chapter 1.
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”
The first truth about Christmas is that there is a reality that lies behind the scenes of life. We live life on what we hear and see and feel and this first truth is that there is more to life, more to what you see and hear and feel. In the beginning before there was anything else, there was the Word, the word was with God and was God. We are talking about something that stretches the biggest and ablest of minds. We are talking about the reality behind the reality, behind our senses. The reality of the Word who was with God and was God.
Secondly. “Through him all things were made without him nothing that was made that has been made.” It is simple and yet deeply profound, the words are all one or two syllables and yet mind bending. All things were made and all things were made through the Word which was with God and was God. That is a definitive statement: the Word is the source of all existence and all life. Our modern world has been conned into a comfortable and dangerous lie that everything is an accident, time and chance accounts for it all. It’s a lie. ‘All things’. That is a comprehensive statement – all things are utterly dependent on the word for their very existence.
What has this got to do with Christmas? Everything, because John shatters the conspiracy with this statement “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
That is not what you will hear from our culture, not what you will take in from most nativity plays and school productions, and certainly not from our supermarkets. The word that was in the beginning with God and was God, the Word that is the cause of all existence and life became flesh and lived among us for a while.
That is the truth about Christmas. It is like a beam of light shining into the darkness “the true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world”.
If God is really there, and if he is our maker and our judge – and he is – and if it is possible to know God, then we live in a world of terrible darkness. For all the good things in our world there is terrible darkness, because people do not see the truth, do not recognise God and into this dark world came the Word. With the birth of Jesus the true light was coming into the world. For a while he lived in the world he made. “He was in the world and though the world was made through him the world did not recognise him”.
Here then is the crisis of Christmas. The word became flesh. The light has shone. Jesus Christ has come and made himself known and since that day there have been two groups of people in the world.
There are those who rejected him – “he came to his own but his own did not receive him”, those who continue and persist in rejecting Jesus.
I think the reason for that is we need his forgiveness and that is humiliating. He asks for our allegiance and that is demanding. It is not because this hasn’t happened: it has happened. It is not because there has been some discovery which discredits Christianity: there hasn’t been. It is not because there is a lack of evidence: there is more than enough evidence. He is rejected because it is more comfortable and much easier to ignore him.
Then there is another group – “to all who received him to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become Children of God”. By receiving Jesus we can be brought into God’s family.
The crisis of Christmas is simply how we respond to Jesus once we know the truth about Christmas.
Christmas invites you, calls on you, to receive the one who came into this world to make God known. The word who was in the beginning with God and was God and became flesh and dwelt among us. There is so much to tell about him, so much to learn about him, what he has done for us and what he will yet do for us. We only begin to learn when we believe in him and stop rejecting him, when we accept him and stop ignoring him. It is only those who receive him that have the right to be called children of God.
That’s a Christmas to believe in.
Your Minister and Friend,
Paul