Love and Vulnerability

 ‘Fear not, for I bring your tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.’

+ In nomine …

Why do so many people seem so sad at Christmas? Of course there are all the superficial reasons: it’s the darkest and coldest time of the year, we may have to spend time with difficult relatives, our wallets will be under considerable pressure and we may feel somewhat frazzled as we try to bring off an event that would have taxed an entire team of Victorian domestic servants. But deeper than this, Christmas seems to touch on more fundamental questions about who we are and what we’re living for, questions which perhaps get brushed under the carpet for most of the year amid the bustle of our daily tasks. Here, tonight we’ve come to that point where everything comes to a head. And perhaps we find ourselves somewhat anxiously unsure what it’s all about, where we’re going. Beneath all the very real practical anxieties about the financial crisis, about our jobs and homes and security, lies one deeper desire, the one thing needful, with which all these other problems can be handled; without which everything else is as nothing. 

          Human beings are creatures who want to be loved and to love. It’s as simple as that. This festival takes us to this heart of our nature. It is a wonderful but terrifying truth. Wonderful because we know these strange longings deep within our hearts which take us out of ourselves, which make us into something quite different, that come so effortlessly to us and fill us with joy, and make us more alive than we can know.        

          Terrifying because it makes us so desperately vulnerable. Love takes us out of our safe fortresses where nothing can hurt us, breaks down the walls we build around our hearts. In love we are desperately out of control and not a little crazy. It is always easier to live by the sober and sensible ways of power and violence and hatred, from the times of Herod through to Mugabe and others today.  Again and again, day by day whether we realise it or not, we are making choices which commit us to one way of living or another, for or against the possibility of love in our world. Often it is not so much the big obvious acts of evil, as the little ways in which fear, rivalry, survival, control become instead the things by which we live.

          At Christmas we celebrate a different story, a story so familiar from a thousand nativity plays and cards and the like that we can easily be dulled to its wonder. For Christians believe that the meaning of life, the source and end of all things, is found in a tiny baby lying in a manger. God is found, not in the halls of power and celebrity, not in destruction or domination, or the dull fate of the stars, but in a human life, in the gift of a life of love, in the vulnerability of this child, who comes to show us that our salvation is found only in love. As the old English carol puts it: ‘thus he in love to us behaved, to show us how we must be saved.’ 

This is no easy, cheap love. This love is not an abstract idea, it is lived out in our frail flesh. This love is shared between real people in all their complex messiness. This is love pouring itself out in humble service. This love makes itself poor that all might be rich. 

And already from the beginning this love must face rejection. The forces of oppression know that somehow this child represents a threat to them and so they seek to hunt him down. What begins with Herod will end with Pilate and the Cross. Love is costly and painful and has no defences against this. If we learn this way of love, we will be broken and battered by the world. Our love will be rejected and scorned. And yet through all this, not despite it, but precisely in it all, we believe this love will be finally victorious, that nothing, not even death can destroy it. For this love changes the world, it breaks down barriers, casts out fear, raises up the poor and weak, brings down the oppressors, heals wounds, forgives evil and brings peace and reconciliation. This love is for everyone, without exception, although it may be those with least like the shepherds who will find it easiest to recognise and receive. It is for the good and the bad, the rich and the poor, the young and the elderly, the beautiful and the ugly, the clever and the ignorant, the weak and the strong, shepherds and wise men. 

          This is the message of Christ’s birth that we celebrate tonight: Our desire for love is not mistaken nor empty. We are all loved infinitely, from eternity, however little we may feel it, and we are all called to share in this wonderful, costly, vulnerable, forgiving, transforming love, which is the very life of God. God became human so that we might become divine. However bruised and battered, weary and despairing we may feel, it is all here for us once again tonight, it is never too late, nothing is too much to get in its way; everything is possible with God, if like Mary we open our hearts. Whatever our pain and suffering, Christ comes to us, to heal us, to change us, to bring us new hope and new life, to fill us with his Holy Spirit of love, to be born again in our hearts tonight!               

          In nomine …     

AMEN.