Along with the uncooked turkey and the overdone pudding comes the Christmas ritual of the nutty vicar. This year’s offering was the poor fellow who had the temerity to suggest to a group of children that maybe Santa Claus does not exist, for which he was justly pilloried by the media. Usually our morally upright newspaper editors have their teeth in to a priest who has decided they can no longer believe the Christmas story. Shock, Horror, how can the Church of England allow these people to minister, they write, before nipping out to share a few lines of coke with their current mistress.

For me, the real shock is not that so many priests give up their faith but that so few do. Whilst we get to share in some of the most joyous occasions, such as tonight, weddings and baptisms most of our pastoral time is spent dealing with tragedy and loss. As we get older, that tragedy and loss begins to creep in to our own lives and faith can take a battering.

The odd thing about wearing a dog collar, even if only a virtual one for I never wear it at work, is that you find yourself cut out of the trivial office gossip but asked to listen to the big things in life – broken minds, broken hearts, broken bodies, broken spirits.

What you most want to do is to help but how? You read the bible and preach it in your church and it tells of great miracles, of healings, of freedom, of resurrection. But on Monday a man pulls out a tattered black and white photo from his wallet. It is of him lowering a tiny white coffin into the ground. He shakes his head and cries. What do you say? “I’ll pray for you,” sounds trite. You say nothing but hold his hand till he stops shaking. When you get back in your car you drive down the autobahn shouting with Isaiah – Oh that you would tear open heaven and come down to earth! With Isaiah, you desperately want God to do something dramatic, to do what you’ve read he can do. But there is silence.

You hold the hand of a mother as she dies in the hospice and pray that God would intervene. And he sends peace but leaves a shattered family.

You pour water over a baby’s head, gently because the child is badly deformed. “Where now is the God of Elijah?” shouted Elisha, and a path was driven through the river he was standing by as it had for Elijah. “Where now is the God of Elijah?” you whisper as you pray for the child. And all you hear is Uncle Joe trying to secretly listen to the football on his pocket radio.

So, come on God? Why should I believe all this stuff about angels and virgin births and wise men and stars and miracles and Jesus rising from the dead? Come on, where’s the evidence, because I’m not seeing it? You find yourself in complete darkness, that sound-dead darkness in which you sense nothing, utter nothingness.

And in the middle of this darkness, when all is silent, you hear a baby cry. The God of Christmas comes not in a thunderstorm, not in an earthquake, not even in the booming voice of a prophet, but in a baby’s cry. The God who created the universe nestled in the womb of an ordinary girl, cried in a makeshift cot and died like a thief, unwanted and unloved.

This is a God I can believe in, a God who has himself experienced all the joys and traumas of human life. In this child God tore heaven open and came down. In this child, the God of Elijah drove a path through the divide between His people and Himself. I find it baffling, but I find it to be true, the only thing that allows me to make sense of the reality of life. My prayer for you this Christmas is that you too will hear God’s cry in the darkness and believe.

Christmas Eve 2000

John 1:1-14 Isaiah 52:7-10

Shepherds? Yes, I can accept shepherds. Wise men? Yes. Inn keeper? No problem. Joseph? OK. Virgin birth? Well, er. Star? Angels? Nice story, but. A baby who is the light of the world, who is God himself? Surely, as the former Bishop of Durham would say, it's all just a story? Before St Matthew's suffers the fate of York Minster I'd better move on.

Easter is almost understandable, whatever we make of it. A man is executed. His friends claim he came back to life. But Christmas is hard to swallow. The darkness of our condition cannot fathom out the glory of the divine. The light of the world is not understood by the world, nor does the world recognise that he is here. Even his chosen people fail to see his significance; his own brothers and sisters question what on earth is going on, his closest friends take three years to begin to understand man with whom they share their lives. Little wonder that we, not to mention some of our bishops, find it so difficult to take it in.

So who did understand? Let's start with those who came to the stable.

Shepherds, those wonderful biblical characters, were by this time regarded with contempt. Religious fundamentalism had determined that looking after sheep on the Sabbath was sinful, so the descendants of the shepherd king David now contracted the work out to heathen nomads. Few were the 'good shepherds who looked after their sheep', and rather common were the 'hirelings'. Migrant workers, on the margins of society, involved in petty crime to help eke out their living were the first to worship the Son of God. Feckless as ever, they abandon their flocks to the wolves and thieves, and run off to Bethlehem to see the child.

Later on came the Magi, who we coyly refer to as 'Wise Men'. That's taking liberties with the story. These were astrologers - Mystic Megs of the ancient world. They studied the stars to discern the future. They were practising an art specifically forbidden to the Jews, so detestable it was punishable by death. And God led these pagans to his child to present their gifts and worship him, and guided them safely home.

Let's take a diversion here and note who did not come to the stable - the rich, the powerful, the religious - their sole interest was in denying or destroying this child who might upset their comfortable lives.

And so it was throughout Jesus' ministry. The prostitutes, the quislings, the diseased, the cursed, the mad, the bereaved, the enemy soldier, the adulterer, the foreigner, the thief, all found friendship and love from this man.

But the 'morally upright citizens', those on whom the fabric of society depended, mostly despised him, and most were in turn despised.

The uncomfortable message of Christmas is that God's choice is based on a quite different understanding of what is right from the one we've formed to protect our comfortable lives.

A few saw and understood. Along with Mary the prostitute; Simon the terrorist; and Zaccheus the embezzler, were Nicodemus, the Pharisee; Joseph the landowner; Saul the theologian; and Matthew the taxman. If we had told any of them the Christmas story before they met Jesus, I doubt they would have believed a word of it.

But each of them found in Jesus a person so unlike any they had met before that the Christmas story seemed almost too small to contain the mystery of the man. They found in Jesus the God who accepted them without qualification - they had only to welcome him into their lives, however splendid or sordid those were.

“To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God'. May we each discover the truth of that this holy night. Amen.

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