Sermon Summary: Christmas – God With Us

Summary:

Nick’s sermon delves into the heart of the Christmas story, emphasizing the reality of God’s presence in human lives, particularly in challenging circumstances. He challenges the common perception of Christmas as a magical, idealized time, highlighting the often-overlooked struggles and hardships faced by Mary and Joseph.

Nick argues that the true essence of Christmas lies in God’s incarnation, His decision to become human and enter our world. He emphasizes that God doesn’t wait for invitation but actively seeks us, even when we’re lost, broken, or unaware of His presence.

The sermon draws parallels between Mary’s experience and contemporary life, suggesting that even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty, we can find hope and worship. Nick encourages listeners to recognize God’s closeness, to embrace His grace, and to become agents of God’s love in their communities.

Key themes explored in the sermon include:

• God’s Immanence: God is not distant or aloof but intimately involved in human lives.
• The Reality of Christmas: The Christmas story is not merely a fairytale but a powerful narrative of God’s love and grace.
• The Invitation to Worship: Even in the midst of struggle, we can find reasons to worship God.
• God’s Initiative: God takes the initiative to reach out to humanity, regardless of our circumstances.
• Becoming Agents of God’s Love: Christians are called to embody God’s love in their communities and the world.

Ultimately, the sermon invites listeners to embrace the true meaning of Christmas, to experience God’s presence in their lives, and to share His love with others.

Transcription

Nice to see you all. Happy Christmas. It’s
Christmas time. There’s no need to be afraid. There’s a real sense in me that God wanted
to say something. I do know, you know, I can put my, I’m not just saying something, I don’t
know what it is. But the challenge of sensing that and putting it into words and putting
it down on paper is a real one. And I was sort of on my third go at this this morning.
But as we’ve worshiped and prayed and heard what’s been said and what’s been shared, so
much of it resonates with what I feel that God has wanted to say. And so I’m just trusting
him this morning that he will communicate his word through my efforts. And so we’re
going to look at a video. I think, have you got a video there for me, Michel? This is
from a ministry called Proximity that’s to do with the Eden teams. And it’s about people
that are involved in mission in all sorts of urban settings just as we have our Eden
team here. And they’ve produced a whole load of resources and particularly some resources
for Christmas. And this video I found really interesting and inspiring. And so I just want
us to look at that as a prelude to what I want to say this morning.
And now the angel is nowhere to be seen. And she wakes from a dream with her head down
the loo and next down something for the acid, the youngest at antenatal classes. Feeling
like a strict smart lump, trying to hide a bump in oversized clothes, waddling down
the street with swollen feet, scared witless, wondering whether she’s got what it takes
to be a mother. Now she knocks on the door of another knuckle, someone else who feels
each kick and every elbow flick and wakes up sick, a cousin with stretched hips who’s
both blessed and broken. And immediately, almost as if obediently, Elizabeth feels heaven
and earth kicked and flipped inside her as her heavy belly moans with sympathy and angelic
symphony burst from her amniotic sack. And Mary answers back, my soul magnifies the magnificent.
It glorifies the glorious for the God who kicks the wall of the uterus who was worshiped
from the womb to the God of bedsit rooms of tower blocks of basketball and shots of part
took four by fours and shut up shops to the God of tear stained cheeks and grazed knees
of caffeinated drinks and quarter pounders with cheese. Praise be to the father of cold
and rainy nights of overcrowded buses of flickering street lights in the name of bright white
nights and leggings, hoodies, caps and knackered looking jeggings in the name of not living
but surviving in the name of ducking and diving in the name of poverty. God comes to me.
Wrapped in hand-me-down clothes, dirty nappies and blankets. As the creator of the universe,
the maker of all planets is pushed in a boogie and laid in a basket. For he is with us, not
against us, one of us not opposed to us. And he has not forgotten the honest or the humble,
the straight talking, the musn’t grumble. His eye is on the single mum with no disposable
income drowning in debt and depression. The OAP try to make ends meet from a pension.
Those falling through the cracks, they’re the ones who’ve got his attention. Yes, in
a world that don’t make sense, he’s the golden frankincense overturning tables, turning the
world upside down, right side up, bringing heaven to earth with a seasonal burst of Christmas.
And in case you missed this, he makes Christmas every day. No, not in the shops or on the
telly or the jingle jangle of songs and sleighs and snow. No, in the stomachs of the hungry,
in the arms of the lonely, in the hearts of the broken, Christ can be found knocking on
doors, kicking on walls of a mother’s womb, asking us to make room for the kingdom to
be born in us and through us. Glory be to the infinite, magnify the magnificent. Oh
my soul, bless the incarnate. Glorify the omnipotent. Praise be to the God who became
flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.
The gist of that, it’s on the super wide version there, so you can’t actually see what’s happening,
but we’ll share it later. Yeah, we’ll skirt over that. Yeah, so yeah, there’s a whole
lot of visual stuff to that as well, but there’s just a description, hopefully a description
of the reality of Christmas and what the first Christmas really meant. The so-called magic
of Christmas lifts us in a way out of the reality of midwinter and plants us firmly
in this winter wonderland, plays our emotions, our memories, our aspirations, sort of gives
us a sense of unreality. It can give us a real mixed bag of emotions. Christmas can
be really difficult, can’t it? Maybe for people here, Christmas is a really difficult time,
not a magical time. It’s a time that really challenges all that we go through and makes
us think in, perhaps, not in the fairy tale way, but in a really, in a real, in a very
difficult way. It can be a desperately difficult time. A lot of artistic license is used in
telling and retelling the story of Christmas to make it magical and wonderful and we can
left, we left scratch in our head when you actually go to the scripture itself and you
read the story of Christmas, you think, how does this match up with what we hear, what
we see, what we see on the screens, what we see in our Christmas cards or in our, in
the presentation that Christmas, the presentation of Christmas is given to us. Desperately hard,
real life struggle of the Christmas story gets lost as it’s retold to create the magic
and wonder and the sense of unreality. And we need to try and get into the mind of Mary
and Joseph. It was nothing other than a desperately difficult and challenging time for them and
yet God was in the middle of it all. And I think that’s what’s been coming through this
morning in the worship and the prayers, that sense that God in the middle of the mess,
God in the middle of the reality, God in the middle of real life, that’s what Christmas
is all about. And we need to see if it’s possible to get away from the glitz and the glitter
and the elves and the snowmen to get a handle on what this story is really telling us because
there is power in this story that we can lose. Tradition is wonderful. Celebration is wonderful.
Atmosphere is wonderful. But if we lose the power of the story, then we lose everything.
We lose the sense that, you know, and if it doesn’t actually touch our real life, touch
our experience, we think, oh, well, if our experience is only just in evoking a sense
of wonder and excitement and childhood memories, then really Christmas is losing something
in our experience. And just as Genesis is the foundation for our understanding of our
place in the world, we’ve been going through over these months, a Christmas story is the
foundation for our understanding of the purpose of our lives and the nature of our mission.
A Christmas story is about heaven’s interaction with earth, the unfolding of the greatest
story ever told. And so we can’t afford to lose it under all the snow and the starlight
in the present. It should leave us built and encouraged and strengthened and empowered
and ready for the year ahead rather than just nursing a headache in a credit card bill.
That’s not a good deal when the greatest story ever told, the greatest credit card bill ever
seen, doesn’t match up. And that’s what I like about that video, if we could have seen
it fully. It takes what’s actually plain in the scripture, takes away all the layers of
glitter that have been put on it over the years and it roots it in the experience of
real life. The first Christmas was rooted in the experience of a real couple. And it’s
so hard to get behind what they actually felt away from the magic of the Christmas cards.
And many times religious tradition can separate important things from reality. Jesus has a
way of connecting and including and uniting things with reality, of bringing us. That’s
why Christmas is Emmanuel, God with us, not God out there, God somewhere there, God somewhere
to be found, but God with us, God coming close, God alongside, God in it with us. The creator
of the universe, he said, the maker of all planets is pushed in a buggy and laid in a
basket. They had buggies in those days, but you know what I mean, is bringing it into
the real life of the everyday. There’s nothing separate or aloof or unreachable about this
God. He’s presented himself in the humblest form and destroyed all natural preconceptions
about the way God will introduce himself to us if he does. Which God could actually do
that? Who could actually write this? Who could actually imagine this story except that it
come from the heart of God himself, that he would become a baby and be born in humility,
born in poverty, born against misunderstanding, born in shame, born against the background
of a young couple that are thinking, what on earth is going on with our lives? And yet
God in the middle of it all, God with us, Emmanuel. Christmas tells us that he doesn’t
wait to be invited. You know, one of the things that evangelists often have said over the
years, I’ve heard it many times, is that God is a gentleman. He waits to be invited. He
waits until we open up our hearts to him and then he comes in. Well, Christmas tells us
actually that’s not quite true. He doesn’t wait to be invited. He comes even when we
don’t want him. He comes even when we’re dead in our sins. He comes even when we’re lost
in our transgressions. He comes when we’re drowning in the confusion of our circumstances
and the mess of our lives. He steps into our lives when we didn’t even think of inviting
him. We didn’t even think we wanted him. We perhaps even thought he was responsible for
the mess that we’re in. And yet he comes in to introduce himself on a normal night, born
to a young woman whose life has been thrown into absolute chaos through her encounter
with God. You’re gonna have a baby, Mary. Oh, good news, let’s have a celebration. From
that moment, everything went wrong. And yet, when all the pieces fall into place, when
she understands the magnitude of what has happened to her and who it is that she’s carrying
in her womb, what happens? Worship comes out of her heart. Her heart explodes with worship.
She glorifies God. I heard Sam Ward from the message trust saying the other day that perhaps
we might say, if we were in Mary’s position, God, you’ve ruined my life. But she says,
my soul glorifies the Lord. That’s the connection. That’s what happens when in the middle of
that confusion, we meet God. There’s not that separation that, you know, how do we
work this out? How do we come to a point of worship? In actual fact, that is the moment
when she suddenly, her eyes are open. She doesn’t have answers to all the questions.
She doesn’t understand what’s happening. She doesn’t know what her future holds. She doesn’t
know what this means to give birth to this baby. She knows that there’s a lot of trouble
ahead. But at that moment, her heart says, my soul glorifies the Lord. And you see, worship
doesn’t happen when we’ve got everything together and we feel ready. Worship happens when we
finally see God, see God himself even in the middle of our mess and our chaos and our fear
and our insecurity and our shame and our upset and everything else. It’s that moment of seeing
God when all those other things fall away and say, well, my soul glorifies the Lord.
And we stand in the middle of it all with all the debris around us. And we say, God,
you are great. You have come into my life. You are God, Emmanuel. You are with me in
all of this. If you’ve ever been on the London Underground, whenever a train pulls into the
station and the doors open, there’s a recorded voice that says, mind the gap. Sound familiar?
I grew up down there, so I know it all. It used to be easy to get to London. Now it’s
not so easy. Mind the gap. And it made me smile as I thought about this because I realized
that there’s actually no warning for us when we come to God, say, mind the gap, because
there’s no gap anymore. God has come right close. And actually, religion, traditional
religion relies on there being a gap, relies on there being a chasm, relies on there being
something to do in order to cross that divide. And yet, there is no gap anymore. Emmanuel,
God with us is not something for those who’ve got it all together. It is good news of great
joy for all the people, often reflected on that. When the angels come, the first thing
they do, they don’t say, right, let’s sit down and talk about how we’re going to access
this blessing of God. They just say, good news of great joy for all the people. A Savior
is born. For who? For all the people. Good news of great joy. And we look at the gap
sometimes. We stare at what the gap that we imagine, but there isn’t one. Mary had a lot
of fear, no doubt. There must have been a lot of tears. There must have been a lot of
anguish. There must have been a lot of uncertainty, as I’ve already said. And yet, in that moment,
she realized there was no gap between her and God, that there was no sense that she
had to sort all this out. She had to understand it. She had to figure it out. She had to find
the keys. She had to take some steps. She had to do a number of things in order that
she could get herself to a position where she could open up her heart in worship. It
was at that moment that her eyes were opened, she saw God, and she said, my soul glorifies
the Lord. And God says, do not be afraid. He means there’s nothing to be afraid about.
You are free to trust me, free to worship, free to praise. No ifs, no buts, no maybes,
no gap. God with us, Immanuel. That’s the beauty of Christmas. And we can disqualify
ourselves from Christmas. I don’t like Christmas, but, you know, life has been difficult. Life
is a challenge. There’s no magic for me in Christmas, but there is a wonder in God coming
to us. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve had a perfect life and a perfect understanding
and a perfect experience of Christmas, or everything about it makes us want to run away
and hide. Yet, for each of us, there is an opportunity to meet with God because He is
God with us, Immanuel. Sometimes when God comes close to us, our first thought can be
about sin. Oh no, what about sin? What about my sin? What about my shame? If God knew all
about me, then He wouldn’t, there wouldn’t be this, the invitation would be canceled.
But the wonderful thing about God coming without invitation is that He, it’s because He already
knows. He doesn’t wait for the invitation because He knows we’re not going to invite
Him. He knows that we don’t actually qualify, we don’t actually have any reason why we should
believe that God would actually want our worship, but so He comes to us and He closes that gap.
And basically He says, I’m dealing with sin in order that you might be free to worship
me. He has dealt with sin so that He can draw close. Good news of great joy for all the
people. A Savior is born. That means that all of those things can be set aside in order
that we might know God, in order that He might come close. We’ve never been able to solve
the issue of sin and so God does it at His own initiative, comes close to us. So Mary
responded as Jesus, as Jesus certainly came close to her, as the Spirit of God came close
to her, Mary responded, oh how my soul praises the Lord, how my spirit rejoices in God my
Savior. For He took notice of His lowly servant girl and from now on all generations will
call me blessed. For the Mighty One is holy and He has done great things for me. He shows
mercy from generation to generation to all who fear Him. His mighty arm has done tremendous
things. He has scattered the proud and the haughty ones. He has brought down princes
from their thrones and exalted the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away with empty hands. He has helped His servant Israel and remembered
to be merciful. For He made this promise to our ancestors, to Abraham and his children
forever. And so the fantasy Jesus, the Christmas Jesus, the life that is suitable for worship
is beyond us. But if we open our eyes we can see Him today. And there might be people
here like I said that are thinking, well I can’t, it’s too far away, the gap is too big.
Remember what I’ve said, there is no gap because Emmanuel has come to us. He comes to your
life uninvited. He comes regardless of the situation. He comes regardless of the barriers
because He said actually all of those things I’ve taken them in hand. I’m dealing with
them in order that you might come close. And you think well I’m a million miles away from
being able to worship like Mary. Imagine how Mary felt at that moment and yet as her eyes
were opened her heart magnified the Lord. So the wonderful thing as God draws close
is that He allows us to take our eyes off ourselves and to fix them firmly on Him. Matt
Britton said in that video, in the name of everything we are, everything that defines
our lives, He knows it all. He knows everything about us. There’s nothing to hide. There’s
no point even trying to hide because He knows it all. He sees it all and then He comes close.
Shepherds didn’t receive the angels after an all night prayer meeting and a sacrificial
offering. They were just sat doing what shepherds do, probably telling dodgy stories and lighting
fires. And in the middle of it all the angels come and say good news, the Savior is born.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what your story is, God comes to you today. God comes
to you at Christmas and He stays with us. He doesn’t just visit for Christmas. Christmas
can be a problem can’t it with visitors? Lots of people come in. A few murmurs. But God
comes to stay, comes to dwell, comes to live amongst us. You might have spent years trying
to worship and being dragged down by that nagging sense of unrighteousness. We’ve been
following the story of Abraham in Genesis and the covenant promises God made to him
and how God credited his faith to him as righteousness. Those promises are real for us today. May
Mary’s last line in her song is simply this, for He has made this promise to our ancestors
to Abraham and his children forever. We are living in the good of the promises God made
to Abraham. The Mary’s song can be our song. I’m just going to quote from that video. In
a world that doesn’t make sense, He’s the gold and the frankincense. Overturning tables,
turning the world upside down, right side up, bringing heaven to earth with a seasonal
burst of Christmas. And in case you missed this, He makes Christmas every day. No, not
in the shops or on the telly or the jingle-jangle of songs and sleighs and snow. No, in the
stomachs of the hungry, in the arms of the lonely, in the hearts of the broken, Christ
can be found. Knocking on doors, kicking on walls of a mother’s womb, asking us to make
room for a kingdom to be born in us and through us. And so we need to see for ourselves what
Christmas means. Don’t disqualify ourselves ever. Christmas is the great leveler. It’s
the thing that opens up the doors, the opportunity that Jesus says, I am coming. I am coming
to you regardless. He isn’t invited. He doesn’t come according to our timetable. He doesn’t
come according to our agenda. He comes according to His will and to His purpose. And so as
we see for ourselves what it means for Christ to be born among us, our hearts sing with
what that means for us. But it also wakes us up to what we are about, that this Christmas,
our purpose, our task, whether as individuals or as a church, is to bring Christ to birth
again in our communities and in our world. Give birth to the kingdom, to the reality
of God in our world. So we’re not just celebrating Christmas or telling the story of Christmas,
but we’re agents of Christmas. We’re people who have seen that God has drawn close and
we know that actually He draws close to anybody who will see Him. Bringing Christ to birth
in the heart of our neighborhood. Don’t shut Him away. Let’s see Him live in our communities.
He makes Christmas every day in the stomachs of the hungry, in the arms of the lonely,
in the hearts of the broken. Christ can be found knocking on doors, kicking on walls
of a mother’s womb, asking us to make room for a kingdom to be born in us and through
us. That’s the reality of Christmas. Applicable in any and every situation. Applicable in
every tragic situation. Applicable in every lost situation. Applicable in every situation
where people think, actually I’ve made a mess of it. And yet Jesus comes. Not only
to us, but to all who will see Him. So we can find Jesus today in the midst of everything
we have going on. And be part of seeing Him brought to birth in our families, in our workplaces,
and in our neighborhoods. That’s good news. Good news of Christmas. Good news of great
joy for all the earth. A Savior is born. I don’t know where you stand today, whether
you’ve never, ever considered it, whether Jesus has been locked up in the stories of
the past, in the stories of tradition. But maybe today might be a day like Mary had where
your eyes open and your heart is ready to see and to accept that actually Jesus is not
just this huge figure that people all around the world worship, but He’s your Savior. He’s
one who draws close to you. He’s Emmanuel, God with you in the midst of everything that
you think of and everything that you come up with that says, actually not me. I don’t
qualify. I’m not good enough. Everything that you come up with, every barrier that you put
in place, He sweeps away and says, actually, I’m coming. There is no gap. There is no distance.
Emmanuel, God with us. Amen.