Carol Service talk 18/12/16

Here are, supposedly, some of the top thirty Christmas cracker jokes this Christmas...

How will Christmas dinner be different after Brexit? There will be no Brussels.

How do you recognise a Christmas tree from BHS? All the branches have gone.

I bought my mum a Mary Berry cookbook for Christmas. I tried to get Paul Hollywood's but he'd sold out.

Why didn’t Roy Hodgson go to visit Santa at the North Pole? He couldn’t get past Iceland.

What do workers at Sports Direct get for Christmas dinner? About 5 minutes.

What’s the difference between the clementine in your Christmas stocking and Donald Trump? Nothing, they’re both a little orange.

What’s the best advice you can give at the UKIP Christmas party? Avoid the punch .

Why doesn’t Sam Allardyce help load Santa’s sleigh? Because it takes him 67 days to get the sack.

What does Nigel Farage do to the hall with boughs of holly? He Dexit.

What is David Cameron's favourite Christmas song? All I want for Christmas in EU.  Thinking of songs...

Earlier we sung Hark the herald angels sing.

The second verse is

Christ, by highest heaven adored
Christ the everlasting Lord
Late in time behold him come
Offspring of a Virgin's womb
Veiled in flesh, the God had seen
Hail the incarnate deity
Pleased, as man with men to dwell
Jesus, our Emmanuel
Hark the herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn king"

We also sung in Once in royal David's city, "He came down to earth from heaven, Who is God and Lord of all..."

Soon we will sing ‘O come, all ye faithful’. The 2nd verse is
God of God,
Light of Light,
Lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb;
Very God,
Begotten, not created:
O come, let us adore him,
Christ the Lord.

At Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation: the extraordinary, mind-boggling way in which God became one of us in Jesus. There is an awesome mystery in how God becomes human.

What is being said in these carols – and it’s largely taken from one of the great creeds of the church – is something along the following lines. First, the utterly perfect God – he who was ‘Light of Light’ – was prepared to accept being confined in the darkness of Mary’s womb. Second, the infant Jesus is not something created by God but someone who actually is, was & always will be God. And thirdly, the carols encourages us to respond to the incarnation by worshipping & adoring Jesus as God. You see, it is great to sing Carols at Christmas but if they are sung as a performance rather than as an act of worship they are being stripped of their original goal which is to glorify God, not people.

The Incarnation is so important that it changes almost everything. Let me draw your attention to two specific issues.

The Incarnation tells us that history has a purpose.

Aldous Huxley wrote “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

We can learn from the incarnation & Bible history that God is intimately involved with, and committed to, the world and the people he has created. We read this in, probably, the most famous Bible verse John 3.16 "God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that all who believe in him should not perish but have eternal life".

We may not understand where history is going but if we believe in the Incarnation & the Bible we can be assured that God is in control & everything & everyone is in safe hands. The fact that God loved this world so much that he became one of us is a guarantee that our world has a future.

The Incarnation tells us that human beings have dignity and value.

Our modern way of thinking has greatly affected how we human beings think of ourselves. Once upon a time human beings considered themselves to be utterly unique and above everything else. We were made in the image of God and just a little lower than the angels. Such a view had its problems and was abused, but we knew who we were.

Today many think that we are no more than sophisticated animals, & some animal lovers have sought to give animals rights previously only associated with humans. In July 2015 a Spanish town council voted unanimously to define dogs and cats as “non-human residents”, giving them rights similar to men and women. Earlier that year a US judge gave human rights to a pair of laboratory chimps being "imprisoned" in a biomedical research facility.

In January this year, Stephen Hawking warned that the greatest threats to humans come from science & technology. Much of what we have done is under danger from computers & robots. Driving cars & making them!!

The combination of both views produces the conclusion that the human race is merely a temporary interlude between a world dominated by animals and one governed by robots.

On another level, business and industry view us simply as ‘consumers’. Politicians see us as no more than ‘the electorate’. Everywhere there are bureaucracies that treat us as no more than digits on a spreadsheet. The success of our country is determined by how much we spend. You don’t have to be paranoid to worry that, in the modern world, human beings are becoming disposable items.

The Incarnation stands utterly against this depressing view. C.S. Lewis wrote, "The Son of God became man to enable men to become the sons of God."

What can we learn from the incarnation?

God is committed to this world and to you.

The world is valuable to God and so is everyone.

At the start of the Bible it says that God created human beings in his image. Yet in the Nativity of Christ, God becomes one of us, and we can now understand that we human beings are indeed in the image of God.

Jesus, God, lives in human beings. At the end of the parable of the sheep and goats the righteous ask him Matthew 25.44 “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or ill or in prison, and did not help you?” 45 ‘He will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”

To see any human being is to see something that God allowed himself to become. That truth has a meaning for everybody we are in contact with. Whoever you meet – whether they are a street cleaner or a film star, a brilliant academic or a senior citizen, or someone from Eastern Europe or East Ham – when you look at them you see the image of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the manger : Reflections on Advent & Christmas. "Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvellous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvellous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken."

God is committed to this world and to you.

The world is valuable to God and so is everyone.



with acknowledgement to J.John Advent Day 9 "The meaning of the incarnation for us".

http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=e685d22ea9a50877a9e0024b2&id=b5cb4bfcc9&e=7987c4c980