Blessed be the
God who acts.
Luke 1: 67-79
St Mary’s, 24th
December 2000
It seems that there is good evidence now, even from secular sources, that the Nativity may well have happened as it is described. A columnist in the Sunday Telegraph wrote last week how a new study has shown that there was an astral event corresponding to St. Matthew’s account of the guiding star. In November 7 BC (the likely year of Jesus’s birth), Jupiter and Saturn stood still together in the western sky and would have been clearly visible over Bethlehem. As Jupiter was the most sacred star in the Babylonian astral system, it is quite credible that the magoi-the word used by Matthew, meaning astronomers rather than simply wise men-would have interpreted the conjunction as a sign of a messianic event. Independent corroboration also exists for the census that obliged Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem. Even the slaughter of the innocents has archaeological evidence. In February this year an archaeological dig near Bethlehem unearthed a mass grave of 100 infants dating back to the time of Herod’s reign.
It
has always made sense to me that this story actually happened. That Jesus was born in history and lived in
history. That he died and rose in
history. And that God works in history
to his purpose, to change things, and that he is still working today. And this is the thrust of both our readings. Paul tells his fellow Jews how God has
worked since the time of Abraham to announce and bring a saviour through his
prophets and kings and people.
Zechariah’s song of praise which is seen as so significant that many
people pray it every morning, speaks of a God who has raised up a mighty saviour,
who has spoken through the mouth of his holy prophets, who has remembered his
early covenant, and whose dawn is set to break upon us.
But
a lot of people have lost confidence in the idea that God is at work in the
world today. In fact they seem to find
it downright offensive. We pray “your
will be done on earth” in the Lords prayer, we say in our national anthem that
we want God to “scatter our enemies, and make them fall; confound their
politics”. We intercede every Sunday
together for people. But in the light
of all the evil that is present in the world, all the random acts of terror,
the Holocaust, and the tragedies we hear every day on the news, sometimes it
gets hard to believe in a God who speaks, who acts for his purpose in
history. We also associate the idea of
God working for specific purposes with extremists who like to claim him for
their own purposes. The Ku Klux Klan,
Ian Paisley, and you could name lots of others.
And
yet in the old and new Testaments, and in Christian history, people have always
understood that a God who is a creator cannot be a God who stands apart from
our lives. The pagan shipmates of Jonah
clearly assumed that the storm that threatened their lives demonstrated the
anger of an offended God against one of the people on their ship. The prophets saw the exile as God’s
judgement on his people. The writer of
proverbs knew that God could control even human actions: "In his heart a
man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps." Jesus clearly expected the religious leaders
of his day to understand what God was up to.
He said they could understand meteorology better than they could
interpret the signs of the times. He
rebuked the crowds for not knowing how to interpret “this present time”. They should have known from what God had
revealed that he was the coming Messiah.
After Jesus, the pagans of ancient Rome ascribed her
destruction in 410 AD to the anger of their gods at the rise of
Christianity. Augustine responded by
confidently tracing the hand of the one true God in the rise and fall of Rome
.In more recent times, Oliver Cromwell understood God’s hand in the course of
the civil war, and Roman Catholic observers in Europe were no slower to see
God’s hand in every reversal in the fortunes of the Protestant forces.
Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel for he has
redeemed his people, he has raised up a mighty saviour, he has
shown mercy, he has intervened, he has acted. How are we to understand what God is up
to? Paul writes that God works for the
good through all things. This vision of
God is a far cry from the idea that God has somehow wound everything up and let
it go without wanting to get involved any further. It's also a long way from the fatalism which sees our lives as
having no real freedom. It's also one
million miles away from thinking that all events in our lives are just down to
chance.
Christmas to me is about God saying to us in the
clearest terms possible that he has got involved. That he is still involved.
That he acts, that he has as one translation puts it, become flesh and
moved into the neighbourhood. It also
says to me that the way God act is in the most surprising and sometimes upside
down ways. An omnipotent baby. I ask you.
Christmas also says to me that the way God acts is a mystery, and that I
need faith to fully comprehend it. I
can’t work out a philosophical answer as to how exactly God answers my prayers,
but I can trust in the Scripture which points me in that direction. I can't understand how God can be a man, but
I believe it. I can't understand how
God can work through good and bad in history, but I believe it, not only for
everyone else, but for myself.
Christmas also says to me that when he does act not everyone will see
it. In fact very few people did
recognise God acting when Jesus was born.
Christmas also says that when we do see God acting we may not
necessarily all see it the same way. Imagine a well-timed lightning bolt, which
is judged to be an ‘act of God’ in an even more precise fashion than an
insurance policy might suggest. Through this lightning bolt, God could
authentically speak messages which were appropriately different, yet not
ultimately contradictory to a bishop being consecrated, a Christian minister
wrestling with some sin, a sceptical journalist, a devout executive of a local
construction firm, and a young Christian convert. These could be respectively
tested, rebuked, shaken, encouraged and confirmed - all by the same lightning
bolt. And Christmas says to me that
when God acts He becomes vulnerable, he absorbs evil, he doesn't pretend it
isn't there. We struggle with
incompleteness. We are still waiting
for the dawn from on high to break upon us.
And yet we know that God hears our prayers and is working to do
that. In 1996 in Wolverhampton a
nursery teacher was scarred for life as she protected the children from a
machete wielding maniac. She suffered
injuries to her back, her right hand and her head, and four tendons in her left
arm were severed, leaving her with permanent damage. She still suffers from nightmares and flashbacks. “But, it hasn’t shaken my faith in God,”
says Lisa Potts. She says she has a
firm belief that she was “meant to be in the playground on that particular
day.”
So at Christmas I go along with William Barclay who
wrote this: "God did not create the world and set it going, as a man might
wind up a clockwork toy and leave it to run down. God is all through his world, guiding, directing, sustaining,
upholding, loving. In everything and
through everything the providence of God is active and operative and
powerful."
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, of Swindon,
of me and you. For he has come to his
people and set them free.