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What Time Is It?: A Christmas Sermon

What time is it?*

On Christmas day I want to ask what time is it?

Most of you are probably thinking

why didn’t someone give him a watch for Christmas.

What time is it?

We read this morning from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians

and there he says ‘when the time had fully come,

God sent his Son, born of a woman’ (Gal 4.4).

What time is it?

Paul says it is the time of Jesus, the Son.

We live in a ‘present evil age’ (Gal 1.4) says Paul,

but now the time has fully come

and God has sent his Son, born of a woman.

Into our world,

God has interrupted time,

and has begun a new time:

the time of Jesus.

The author of the story enters the story

and begins to write a new chapter

and give the whole story a new end.

The whole of time now finds its meaning

in the birth of Jesus.

 

The phrase ‘the time has fully come’

could mean that everything had happened

that needed to happen in order for God to see his Son,

God’s plan from the beginning of creation

            through Adam and Eve

                        Abraham and Sarah

                        Moses and Miriam

                        Ruth and David

                        Isaiah and Esther

reaches its climactic point at this moment:

God enters time.

 

The phrase ‘the time has fully come’

could also mean that all that is opposed to God:

sin, death, and evil

your time is now up

for God has sent his Son;

your time is over,

the end of sin and the end of death

is now in view.

 

What time is it?

It is God’s time;

the one who is beyond time,

who sees all time – past, present and future – as an eternal now,

enters time, adopts it, embraces it,

in order that time might be healed,

in order that time and those who live in time

might share in the eternal life of God.

We are those living in the new time of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit,

and therefore

no longer, says Paul, are we bound by the old time,

where we were slaves to sin and to the law,

where we under the sentence of death

we are now, says Paul, those adopted into God’s time,

we are now living in the time Jesus, born of a woman,

who is now our brother and we are God’s children.

 

Christmas announces the beginning of God’s time,

            the old time is passing away

and God’s time is becoming the new time we live by

and it all began with the birth of a child

to a woman named Mary.

Christmas is the beginning of the end,

            for the coming of Christ

            is the decisive moment that means we can no longer

            consider history has just one thing after another:

            history and future are now focused in Christ.                        

What time is it?

It is the time for joy and grace and truth

for light and love and life.

The long wait of Advent is over,

God has arrived.

It is the time for joy and grace and truth

for light and love and life

because Jesus is the source of all our joy,

            Jesus is full of grace and truth

            Jesus is the light of the world

            Jesus is the love of God in the flesh

            Jesus is life – life as God intended it to be.

It is the time for joy and grace and truth

for light and love and life

because of Jesus

            and as those who celebrate the Christ-child

            we are Jesus-people;

      so let joy be our song,

            let grace and truth be the seasoning for our words

            let light fill our hearts and minds

            let love – the vulnerable love of Jesus – be our habit

and let life of the kind that points towards the Life-giver be our gift;

            the kind of the gift that remembers

that Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas!

Amen and Happy Christmas!

* J. Lou Martyn in his Anchor Bible Commentary suggests this is the question that the letter to the Galatians seeks to answer.

Walking Backwards to Christmas

Stephen Cottrell has written some fantastic books in recent years - 

The Things He Carried: A Journey to the Cross

The Nail: Being Part of the Passion

Christ in the Wilderness: Reflecting on the Paintings of Stanley Spencer

The Things He Said: The Story of the First Easter

 All written for Lent and Easter.

Walking Backwards to Christmas is his first book for Advent and Christmas. 

It's brilliant. In resembles The Nail as it offers a series of monologues from different characters in the story. However rather than telling the story from beginning to end, he tells it from the end to the beginning, beginning with Anna in the temple (Luke 2), and the journeying backwards through Rachel  (a mother who has lost a child to Herod's massacre), Herod, Casper, David (a shepherd), Martha (innkeeper), Joseph, Elizabeth, Mary and back further to Isaiah and finally Moses. Cottrell's inspiration comes from a painting by Albert Herbert, pictured on the front cover called Nativity With the Burning Bush.

Cottrell's imaginative imagining of each character's feelings and choices pushes the traditional story in new directions. Particularly powerful are the chapters on Anna, Rachel, Martha, Elizabeth and Mary - the grief and pain, the conviction and faith.

I used edited selections for our Carols by Candlelight service. It's probably too late to read this book now in Advent, but would make a great read for the 12 days of Christmas, or to wait until next year. 

Let the things that make for ... (A prayer for advent)*

May the things that make for hate decrease
and the things that make for love increase

May the things that make for war decrease
and the things that make for peace increase

May the things that make for greed decrease
and the things that make for generosity increase

May the things that make for speed decrease
and the things that make for patience increase

May the things that make for fear decrease
and the things that make for welcome increase

May the things that make for poverty decrease
and the things that make for equality increase

May the things that make for loneliness decrease
and the things that make for community increase

May the things that make for slavery decrease
and the things that make for freedom increase

May the things that make for the damage of creation decrease
and things that make for the care of the world increase

May the things that make for indifference and apathy decrease
and the things that make for concern and compassion increase

May the things that make for lies and pretence decrease
and the things that make for truth-telling increase

May the things that make for enmity decrease
and the things that make for friendship and forgiveness increase

May the things that make for death decrease
and the things that make for life increase

May the things that make for sin and evil decrease
and the things that make for the kingdom of God increase

May the things that make for idolatry decrease
and things that make for worship of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ increase

*inspired by a Walter Brueggemann sermon, 'Outrageous God, Season of Decrease' 

Living in Advent with John

A few weeks ago, I was at a conference in Amsterdam,

where a Baptist theologian named Curtis Freeman

offered some lectures titled ‘Undomesticated Dissent’

which were reflections on what it means for a people whose

story is Baptist, who were birthed in dissent from the status quo,

who refused to conform to the imposition of religion from the state.

Freeman said that Baptists understood dissent to mean

-       a deep suspicion of the powers

-       a fierce conviction of the lordship of Christ

-       a hopeful imagination of God’s coming kingdom

 

I share this because perhaps John the Baptist was the first Baptist.

He was certainly one, like Elijah before him,

who dissented from the accepted order of the world.

When Luke introduces us to the adult John,

he lists the powers of the day –

Casaer, the governor of Judaea Pontius Pilate, the local kings Herod and Philip,

the high priests Annas and Caiaphas

and then he names John son of Zechariah, who was living in the desert (Luke 3.1-2)

Luke’s point is to identify John as God’s alternative ‘power’ in the world,

John is the one to whom the word of God comes.

John is one who expresses deep suspicion of the powers

to the Pharisees and Sadducees he warns them

‘the axe is already at the root of the tree’

and that claiming Abraham as their father will not be enough to save

them, unless they repent (Matt 3.9-10)

 

John is one who expresses a fierce conviction in the kingdom of God

and in the coming one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

John is one who recognizes the Lordship of Jesus –

‘after me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose

sandals I am not fir to carry’ (Matt 3.11)

 

John is one who expresses a hopeful imagination in the kingdom of God.

            His message is get ready for the kingdom of God is coming:

                        a kingdom that will turn the world upside down,

                        a kingdom that will reverse the current course of the world

                        a kingdom with good fruit as its sign.

 

This Advent as we live with John,

allowing him into homes,

as he intrudes into our daily life,

hear his voice of hope, of demand, and of summons,

allow him to make you suspicious of the powers            ,

            whether they be the multiple sentimental Christmas adverts,

            whether they be a politics that wants to lay blame and spread fear;

follow him in sharing and living with the conviction –

                        the certainty and passion – in the power of the coming Christ;

and imagine with hope the coming kingdom

pray for it, long for it, see it, live for it, and even, perhaps like John, be

ready to die for it.