Christmas Day 2013
A few weeks ago there was praise yet again for the oratory of Barak Obama at the Nelson Mandela Memorial Service. He knows how to deliver a speech, to put together a set of words in a way that lifts them beyond our everyday talking, that connect with us in not only the words, but in their sound and their delivery. As well as politicians, we think of the great actors. During the autumn the National Theatre celebrated 50 years, and through a number of programmes there was an opportunity to see Laurence Oliver, Maggi Smith, Michael Gambon, Judy Dench, Adrian Lester, Derek Jacobi and others entrance us with speeches from playwrights old and new. Human culture at its most astonishing is seen in music, art and also the poem, the play, the novel. Words strung together in patterns that make us wonder, think, love, weep, be inspired and so on. Stop a moment and think about just what it is to speak words, to communicate the trivial and the profound, the mundane and the unusual.
At Christmas though, we celebrate not fine speeches or clever sentences, but baby talk. The way you cannot help but talk to a baby with funny sounds and made-up words. And as Mary and Joseph gathered round their tiny baby, and as shepherds turned up and later other visitors, we can imagine that there was no quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Homer’s the Odyssey, but a lot of coo-ing and goo, goo and ga, ga.
At Christmas, we celebrate baby-talk, because that it is the way God always speaks to us. The church Reformer, Martin Luther said ‘when God speaks to humanity, he always speaks in baby-talk'. What he means by this, I think, is that first, God, because he’s God and we are, well not God, speaks to us in ways that we will understand, God speaks with a simple language … like a parent might speak to a baby. Second, God uses ‘baby-talk’ because ‘baby-talk’ is a language of love. If you ask someone who knows about child development they will tell you that ‘baby-talk’ is essential for a baby’s flourishing – all the cooing and tickling, grinning and silly chatter that goes on between parents and their young builds trust that is essential for one’s whole life.
Our reading from Hebrews, says God has spoken in many and various way, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son. In Jesus, God speaks not just like a parent to his child, but as a baby himself. God’s baby-talk takes on a new meaning. Stop a moment and think, for at least a year, Jesus spoke no words perhaps beyond whatever the Aramaic for ‘mama’ or ‘dada’ is. We declare at Christmas that the gospel begins not in the words of the adult Jesus, but in gurgling, laughing of a tiny baby. This is not incidental or insignificant to the gospel, this is God’s announcement that the good news is one in which God goes the full distance, taking no short cuts …
This messes with our theology, this messes with our faith, this messes with our world – we want an ordered, clean, reverent God … and God comes via the blood and water of birth, God comes pooing and weeing, God comes crying and screaming. There was perhaps some irony as we attempted on Sunday evening at our carols by candlelight to have this reverent service where we sing carols about the birth of Jesus a baby and we were surrounded by the noises of children. As I reflected after the service, what we experienced perhaps was God saying to us: ‘Don’t you get it? Aren’t you listening to the words you’re singing? I came as a BABY!’ Our neat attempts to experience the mystery, to receive the quiet, to celebrate the holy, get disrupted by baby-talk. Ours is not a tidy faith, ours is not a neat faith, it’s as messy as the baby found in the manger. God in Jesus enters into our messy lives as one who creates a mess of the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-holy God we so often want. Here in this moment God turns power, knowledge, holiness on its head. So today, tomorrow and at least until the 6th of January embrace the baby, listen to the babbling baby-talk and discover the love and presence of God that messes up our lives and redeems us from our adultness that wants to be in control. And remember that the grown-up Jesus was heard to say that it was like a child that we receive the kingdom of God.
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