In my previous post I made the comment that Christmas is the one time of year when some people who don't really believe in God quite happily go along to church. This Sunday evening is our traditional 'carols by candlelight' service and I will be preaching. (Ten minutes, tops. People come for the carols, not the sermon). I'm excited about it because I enjoy applying the Bible to people's lives, and trying to apply the Bible to the lives of people who may never read it is a challenge, and I like a challenge. Unfortunately, at the moment I am short on inspiration.
That's not to say I don't have any ideas; I do. Unfortunately, I have too many:
1. Talk about A Christmas Carol, and how Scrooge learns to open up his heart to other people. This has the advantage of being a familiar and well-loved story, but there isn't much about God in there. The birth of Jesus is referred to obliquely, and his presence is implied - after all, the Victorians were devoutly Christian (on the surface, at least). The message about caring for the poor echoes Jesus' words strikingly. But I'm not sure this is a goer. Apart from anything else, it's one of my favourite stories, and using one's favourites isn't always a good move for a preacher as it can steal your focus.
2. Talk about Glen Scrivener's Four Kinds of Christmas. I have blogged about this already and I think it's rather brilliant. I suspect it's a little too complex for a five- to ten-minute talk, however. If you're speaking for five minutes you need to say one thing well, not four things briefly.
3. Talk about incarnation: God become flesh in Jesus Christ. The wonderful name 'Immanuel', which means 'God is with us'. Sam Wells, vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, writes beautifully about how God is with us before he is for us - that God doesn't simply do things for us but, more profoundly and at great cost, chooses to be with us. Goosebumps. Easter is about death and resurrection; Christmas is all about incarnation. But this is a vast and rather abstract topic, and I don't have one simple five-minute idea about how to communicate this. I don't want to talk about incarnation badly.
4. Talk about the wise men. A few years ago I preached a sermon entitled: 'God reveals himself in a horoscope' (I got a bit of grief for that title, but not as much as I'd expected). When I read about the wise men I found them quite fascinating. The distance they travelled (a long way); what exactly they saw in the night sky (a supernova? a special conjunction of planets? a comet?); their religion (not Jewish); the fact that they were astrologers, 'magi', people who practised divination by the stars, forbidden for God's people, and yet God revealed himself to them through the stars they knew so well. I wonder whether the wise men might perhaps be especially relatable to non-religious twenty-first century people.
I will have to make a decision by the end of tomorrow...
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