Christmas Eve Jesus comes "down to such a world as this"

 Luke 2: 1-7; John 1: 1-14

Last week I read the results of a mental health survey of young people. It was done by ‘Sanctuary’ – who are a charity helping churches to learn more about mental illness and respond with positive help for people around them.

They asked young people who were involved in support groups for mental health in churches,  “what makes the biggest positive difference to your mental health?”

The young people replied:

1.   Knowing God is with you in the darkest moments

2.   Knowing you are not alone  - that you can be part of a community of friends or family or church

 

I hope that at Christmas these young people know that God is with them and that they are not alone.

Yet I know Christmas can be a difficult time for everybody, whatever our age, in all sorts of ways.

 

I was very touched by these words by Revd Moira Biggins, a chaplain at East Midlands airport.

 

For those who are trying to keep up with the season but are already exhausted – God is with you.

For those who feel alone in the crowds of shoppers, carol singer and party goers – God is with you.

For those who miss the one they love so deeply, they didn’t even realise this pain existed – God is with you.

For those whose family members struggle with the change, lights and noise of Christmas but no-one truly understands – God is with you

For those who didn’t anticipate this would be life, and it would be so hard – God is with you

For God so loved the world he gave his only son – Emmanuel – God is with us.

 

In the simplicity of the stable and in the complexity of our lives, God is with us. This is part of the message of Christmas, and it is great comfort if we have personal struggles.

 

But there are wider problems in the world this Christmas.

So many people have commented over the last few weeks that the news seems to be getting more and more troubling.

 

    .    The war in Ukraine grinds on.

·      Everytime peace is discussed for Gaza it seems something happens to snatch it away again.

·      Syria is holding its breath hoping that what follows the Assad regime is not something as severe as the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

·      The climate crisis keeps bringing new dangers to the lives of people and ecosystems around the world.

·      Hatred and fear breaks out into violence in a German Christmas Market, and no doubt in many other unreported places.

 

We might think our world has never been more in need of the coming of the prince of peace.

 

And yet everytime this Christmas I have heard the words ‘this took place when Quirinius was the governor of Syria’ I have remembered that Jesus was born right into the middle of a world of conflict and oppression.

 

The Hebrew scriptures of our Old Testament are full of accounts of wars and occupations of various lands, and by the time of the birth of Jesus, the Roman empire ruled vast swathes of what we would call today the Middle East. Slavery was a fact of life for oppressed and conquered people, and their children, born into servitude. Crucifixion wasn’t invented to deal with Jesus – but was the Roman occupiers’ preferred way of keeping insurrection at bay.

 

Jesus was born in the simplicity of the stable – and the immense complexity of a desperate and cruel world.

 

The writer of ‘See in yonder manger low’, Edward Caswall, describes all this beautifully in the last verse of his hymn:

 

“Sacred Infant, all Divine

What a tender love was thine,

Thus to come from highest bliss

down to such a world as this”

 

The detail of the pain of the world changes of course – the world Jesus was born into, the 19th century world Edward Caswall was writing in, and our world of today are all different in many ways. And yet the birth of Jesus, the son of God, into this world of ours offers hope whatever the particular challenges and pain of our day.

 

Where people need to know God with them – Jesus comes

Where people need to know they are not alone – Jesus comes

Into such a world as this – Jesus comes.

Into such a world as this – God offers, in Jesus, hope, grace and peace.

Into such a world as this – with all its darkness – the light of the world has come.

 

Glory to God in the highest.

Amen.

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