Texts: Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25
Christmas has got something to do with childhood; and perhaps that's why a rather strange thought popped into my mind when I started to focus on the coming week, and to re-read the Christmas narratives in the Scriptures. I thought of my Mother, and her seemingly endless quest to teach me good manners. There were various things that we weren't supposed to do at the dining table; we had to use our knife and fork properly (which meant, never turn the fork the right way up or put food on the knife), keep our mouths closed while chewing, and, of course, never, ever put our elbows on the table. Many of the rules seemed to be like rules in a game, invented to make a very simple operation as complicated as possible.
But if there was one supreme rule in my Mother's collection that mattered to her more than all the others it was the prohibition on interrupting. Children must never ever interrupt when an adult is talking. And as my Father was a very quiet man, it's not hard to see who the principal beneficiary of this rule was! Interruption was a very BAD THING!!
So why did all this come back to me as I started to think about the Christmas Season? Because at all sorts of levels Christmas in about interruption – about disruption of normal routine. At this time of the year we put things on hold. Things like our education – our schools, colleges and universities close down – our learning is interrupted. We go on holiday, interrupting our usual work routines. National Radio takes off all the programmes we would now have time to listen to – even Morning Report goes into hibernation – or whatever the summer-equivalent of hibernation is.
Normal service will resume one day, but in the meantime we must survive the Christmas interruption.
And if you look at the Christmas stories in the Scriptures you will see a whole string of interruptions, political and angelic. Earth and heaven is interrupted. Caesar Augustus was one of the chief causes, of course. He suddenly took it into his head to order a census to be held throughout the entire Roman Empire; and for reasons best known to him, every person had to return to their place of birth to be registered there. Just think about that for a moment. Apply the same rules to the Commonwealth today! People were suddenly on the move throughout the empire, their lives interrupted for no obvious good reason.
But in the scheme of things, massively disruptive as that must have been, a political interruption of that kind was just part of the reality of life in that part of the world at that time. Worst things could happen in occupied lands, and frequently did. If all that your political masters wanted to do was count you, well, thank your lucky stars and get on with it.
Most of the other interruptions in the Christmas story come from on high. Zechariah is going about his priestly business in the Temple when he is interrupted by an angelic visitor who tells him that he and his elderly wife are to have a baby, and then strikes him dumb for daring to express some doubt. Mary receives a similar visitor with a similar message; Joseph gets a complementary message in a dream
And it doesn't stop there. When the big day arrives, shepherds are quietly minding their sheep and are interrupted in spectacular fashion. Wise men notice a star that was never there before, drop everything, abandon their families, work commitments and everything else and set off on a journey. King Herod goes ballistic and orders mass infanticide; and Joseph and Mary are directed into exile in Egypt.
That's quite a lot of interruption caused by the birth of just one baby. But, of course, this isn't just one baby. This is the greatest interruption imaginable. This is the interruption of history, no less. This is the eternal God interrupting Time itself. Spend a moment thinking about that first Christmas night – put yourself in that dark, smelly uncomfortable stable as Mary is delivered of her child. Now remind yourself that, for much of the time ever since, and in much of the world, history has been divided into "B.C." and "A.D.", according to whether it occurred before or after the birth of that particular baby. Isn't that amazing? How are we to explain this interruption of history itself if not as the working of God himself? Put like this, isn't it incredible – and yet it is an historical fact!
I wanted to put all this on the record first because there is no doubt that the Church has become more and more defensive about these Christmas stories in this modern age. They make us feel uncomfortable with our educated friends. They are hard to explain to inheritors of the scientific revolution. It's bad enough that they are rather full of angels bearing messages, frightening people witless, and bursting into song. But strangely it's not them we feel called upon to defend. Perhaps we can all agree that they are colourful characters as real and unreal as Hobbits and other inhabitants of Middle Earth, and just as harmless. We can indulge a taste for angels – it's Christmas, after all.
It's the virgin birth that causes us the real worry, isn't it. That is flatly contradicted by science, so what are we to say about that? Well, as Christians what we are to say about that is very clear and simple, and we will say it together shortly. It goes like this: For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became fully human. That's what we are to say about this infant, born on Christmas Day. That in him the divine and the human came together, and that this coming together was for our benefit, for our salvation.
In him human nature was joined to the divine nature; in him it was taken down into the depths of death and purged of sin; and in him it was raised up to enjoy full communion with God. Christmas Day is as much essential to human salvation as Good Friday and Easter Day. If that baby is not God incarnate, then Easter does not work. As I have said on many occasions recently, the Christian story is one whole story – it only makes sense when taken in total.
How, then, do we tell it without deeply offending our scientific friends? Well, as much as I love St Luke's gospel, I do think that when it comes to the birth of Jesus we should stick more closely to St Matthew, and then add a little dash of St Paul. Look at today's passage from St Matthew: see how much more restrained and discrete it is. By focussing on Joseph's reaction to the news that his fiancée is pregnant we are offered a way into the story that doesn't require any suspension of belief. We can understand his reaction; we are sympathetic to him. Then he has a dream – again, we are with him. We all have dreams. In that dream he is told the truth behind Mary's pregnancy. He decides to accept the truth that the dream reveals to him. He decides to accept that the baby is 'incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary". He accepts that the baby's name is to be Jesus, the one who saves.
And look at the discrete but clear way St Paul puts it in the opening paragraph of his Letter to the Romans. Speaking of the Son of God, he says: who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. The resurrection declared what had been true from the beginning – that Christ was both human and divine. Christmas and Easter are all part of the one story.
The story of divine interruption. And there's one thing more to say about that. It's an interruption that does not end. We live in the wake of God's interruption until the end of time. Morning Report may return to air in January, but in the wider sense normal service will never be resumed.
That's the good news of Christmas. It lasts for ever. All we have to do is believe it – and live it! May 2008 be another year of interruption – whatever my Mother would have thought of it.
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