Carol Service 2016

To the attentive ear, the open mind, and the humble heart, the Christmas readings and carols this evening plumb the depths of our very being, questioning what it means to be truly human, challenging our preconceptions and prejudices about the meaning and purpose both of our own lives and of life itself. That challenge is not intended simply to stop us in our tracks that we might take a long, hard, honest look at ourselves and at the human condition; it is also meant to encourage and inspire us by offering the possibility of new or renewed understanding, vision, and purpose regarding ourselves and the human condition. The fact and meaning of Jesus’ birth were indeed ‘tidings of great joy’; and they very much still are because all people need to hear or to be reminded of the Christmas message, of its compelling truth and its wonderful love. It was a message of ‘good news’: it was and it still is for everyone.

As we look around our broken world today we are forced to admit that neither this world nor we ourselves are as we would want: as the carol says, ‘and man at war with man hears not the love-song that the angels bring’; whilst we, if we are honest, fail to live up to even our own moral standards – let alone God’s!        The coming of God, his incarnation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, is a demonstration or manifestation of his love for us whilst also answering life’s most profound and most pressing questions. What the human mind could not discover by its own efforts, God reveals to us and does so in a way that those whom he created could understand. In one of his forms of being God he comes to his creation in human form. ‘He came down’ – to quote the carol – ‘to earth from Heaven, who is God and Lord of all.’

We learn so much from the coming of Jesus: that life has come into existence not by chance but by design and through a personal agent; we learn that this world has meaning and purpose; and we learn, again from those readings and carols, that his primary purpose in coming was to save - to save us from ourselves and from the bad choices we make. ‘Light and life to all he brings’; and he came to ‘fit us’, as the carol so simply and perfectly puts it, ‘for heaven’. All the while we believe that we are here by chance, created by chance and, to quote a famous popular biologist, simply ‘dance to the music of our own DNA’ and therefore cannot be held responsible for ourselves or for our actions, the very idea of the need to be saved will seem ludicrous if not indeed highly insulting.

But as any jury will do, we must look at the evidence; and as any lawyer worth his or her salt will tell you, we must examine both the quality of the evidence and its appropriateness to the case in question. There is altogether too much about this life that cannot be explained purely by science or philosophy: surely reason and experience confirm this to us. And it is the coming of God into his world in human form which answers those most fundamental of existential questions that science and philosophy simply are not equipped to answer.

Taken as a whole, a thorough and open-minded examination of the evidence for Jesus and for who he truly was furnishes a verdict that, depending on the state of our hearts, as again the carols record, will be either joyously compelling or quite the opposite! When we consider the facts about Jesus’ - his birth, his teaching, his authority, his death, and the events of Good Friday and Easter Day, we should not be at all surprised that his first coming was clothed in mystery, his life unique, his teaching never since surpassed, his death sacrificial, and no less a lawyer than a former Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Denning, being constrained by the evidence to write as follows: ‘There exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true.’

But we begin once again this evening with the babe in the manger. The danger is to leave him there, to forget about the adult Jesus of Nazareth, or to choose not to consider who he really was, the challenge of his love, and the truth he came to tell. So as we look around and pray for our broken world, may I invite you to allow your ideas, your hopes, your prejudices and your priorities, your very self in fact, to be challenged by the real message of Christmas. Don’t say to yourself ‘Look what the world has come to!’ but, rather, ‘Look what has come to the world!’ And so I pray that each one of you here tonight might allow not only the message but the person of Jesus to touch your heart and your mind with his truth and his love. May our loving Creator and merciful Heavenly Father grant you the joy of the angels, the enthusiasm of the shepherds and the wisdom of the wise men to accept him as your very own Saviour, Lord, and Friend.