This week I asked people on
Facebook to share their favourite Christmas movies.
So now, it’s a bit like
family Feud...
Who thinks they can guess
what’s behind the pieces of card board.
Top 8 Christmas movies
It’s a wonderful Life
A Christmas Carol
Miracle on 34th Street
The Santa Clause
The Grinch
Polar express
Scrooged
Elf
As I was thinking about these
movies and I confess I have not seen all of them recently one of the things that
struck me was that most of them have an element of the magical or supernatural
about them.
With amazing special effects
and script writing we imagine Hollywood magic can take us anywhere.
It seems we long for the miraculous
moment; the supernatural intervention; the miracle of the divine. It is found in our obsession with all things
magical at Christmas – we gaze at a star in East, we think about angels and
amazing miracles; we sentimentalise the story and we make it fantastical.
Yet running counter to this theme
of the supernatural I have to admit I do like the retelling of the Christmas
story as we heard it tonight from Andrew McDonough: Bethlehem Town.
McDonough gives us a more realistic
retelling. Mary and Joseph probably
stayed with relatives, the architecture of the first century Middle East meant
the animals were inside the houses with the people, when the baby was born the
men, including Joseph, were kicked out and the local women, probably relatives,
came in to help.
For many of us it is not the
story we have been indoctrinated with but the archaeological and Biblical
evidence suggest this is a better retelling than inns filled with strangers and
wooden stables out the back.
The coming of Jesus into the
world does have its supernatural moments, like the angels in the fields, but
part of what Luke was trying to say is that Jesus birth was earthy and real and
normal for the time in which he lived.
For me there is a reversal
going on here. Not us longing for the
divine and the spectacular but God, the divine, longing for us, seeking for us,
coming to be with us. God wants to share
in the mundane and might I say the hidden spectacular reality of human
existence. By becoming one of us and sharing our life God reminds us that what
God has made was good and more to the point that what God desires for us is
life in all its fullness.
When the angels came
announcing good news to the shepherds they didn’t say a Saviour is born so you
can have a better afterlife or the Messiah is here so you can go to heaven and
avoid hell.
No, the first concern of the
angels was peace on earth! Salvation was
about what was going to happen to them in this life.
Of course, there is a bigger
story at play and there are promises made elsewhere in the Scriptures about
what happens after we die but these should intrude on this story nor take away
from the affirmation and promise of fullness of life now.
This brings me back to all
those movies I mentioned before and in particular two of them. The old movie and favourite of many It’s a wonderful life is about the main character
George Bailey discovering that his life meant something, that despite him
missing out on many of his personal desires, the knock on effect of how he had
lived and meant positive outcomes for so many others.
Salvation in the movie for
him was not about him being rewarded with going to heaven but with being rewarded
with the realisation of how wonderful his life had been. It was in one sense about discovering
gratitude for the life that he had.
Many of you will have had difficult
lives, and often terrible moments within them. Often these are times we ask in desolation
where is God in all of this, why have you abandoned me. Sometimes our prayers for healing and pain to
stop seem to go unanswered.
On the other hand some of you
may have not yet experienced great hardships yet in your life. You may take what you have for granted and
may not fully understand just how blessed you are.
The message of Christmas is
about how God seeks to come alongside us to be with us in those tragic and
difficult moments and to help us to find gratitude for the gift of life when
things are going well.
In a similar way the movie A Christmas Carol and its various
adaptations are about the key character Scrooge
realising that his life too could mean something to others and that through his
transformation others could rejoice more fully in life.
The message of transformation
is part of the Christmas story as well. Mary
and Joseph were changed. The shepherds
were change. And we can be changed by
this encounter too.
Jesus birth to me is about God’s
longing for us, for you, to live, to live fully, to live gratefully, to live
mundanely in the everyday wonder of our existence seeing with hope beyond the
terrible tragedies that God is inviting us all as humanity to live well, to
live better and so encounter salvation in this life as we hope for it in the
next.
My prayer for you this
Christmas is that you will encounter the deep truth of God’s love for you: God
become like you to affirm your existence and to share in all of the joys,
sorrows and challenges of our human life and thereby make each moment that we
live holy.
May you catch a glimpse of
the divine in the ordinary and extraordinary this Christmas!
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