The Juxtaposition of Pain and Joy

Matthew 2.13-23, Isaiah 63.7-9, Hebrews 2.10-18

This is always a challenging Sunday to preach, not just because in most people’s minds Christmas is now over for another year, Christingles, nativity plays and carol concerts are all done. After all with many Christmas celebrations starting in late November some have been enjoying the season for over a month now and feel that it’s time to move on.

We will welcome in a new decade in a couple of days’ time and then we can all get back to more routine lives.

But hang on a minute, today is the first Sunday of Christmas and today’s readings are an important part of the Christmas story, even if they spoil the warm glow of mangers, shepherds and wise men on our Christmas cards, which will remain in place for a little while yet.

Coming after the Christmas celebrations of this week the Gospel reading is the slaughter of the children under King Herod. Not a joyful story.

Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps we need to be reminded that great joy and great suffering exist right beside each other. Certainly this is a message we find in our readings today. Perhaps we need to be reminded that even as some celebrate, others grieve and I know from what several people have told me recently that many find themselves doing both simultaneously.

It’s exactly this, finding joy and love in others while recalling regret and loss which reinforces our Gospel message. Those of us who have lived a bit, loved, lost and still managed to keep our faith know this to be true.

God is there for us, unchanging throughout the ages, and this this is reinforced by the words of Isaiah we heard reminding the people of all that God has done for them, of his merciful, steadfast love.

Perhaps it’s good for us to go directly from “Peace on earth and good will to humanity” to a story of misused power, selfish violence and suffering inflicted by Herod, so that we can renew our commitment to the Christmas message in a more balanced way rather than a celebratory vacuum out of sync with the reality of the world around us.

When you think about it, Emmanuel – God-with-us – wouldn’t really mean all that much if it was only God with us during the celebrations and times which leave us with a warm glow. Speaking with someone who lost her adult daughter recently, despite the fact that she remained heartbroken, she told me that there was an irrepressible inclination to count her blessings, being thankful for the good times in her daughter’s life and for the grandchildren who love her.

Of course we don’t have to try very hard to find a continuous stream of sad stories from around the world about slaughter and displacement by modern day ‘Herods’ or would be ‘Herods’ including that of Christians executed in Nigeria this Christmas day.

Christingles and nativities seem far removed from such brutal realities and stories about cruelty, fear and despair don’t match with the idealistic fantasy of Christmas but as Christians we want the full picture.

As our faith deepens and matures we find that in facing up to a reality which includes the unjust, sad and tragic elements of life that God is in there, somewhere. This is exactly the world he chose to be born into, a world of injustice, cruelty and danger. Where leaders demonstrated their power by killing those who threaten their status and continue to do so today.

King Herod (‘the Great’) executed anyone he perceived as a threat to his throne, even including three of his sons and a wife so the elimination of some infant males in a small village would not have been big news to those that knew him. He was prepared to protect his privileged position with brutal force without a shred of guilt over the unbearable suffering caused to their loved ones. This was his definition of security and one which has been repeated through the ages.

Contrast this display of power with that of a God who reveals himself as a small, vulnerable and powerless baby. Indeed so vulnerable that his parents must seek refuge in Egypt if they are to avoid the same fate as the other baby boys.

It is to recognise the grief of God in the cry of the mothers who lost their children.

Matthew refers to the voice of ‘Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’

We are introduced to Rachel in the book of Genesis where we can read of her great beauty and how Jacob is besotted with her.

Rachel dies giving birth while on the road to Bethlehem. In the midst of her suffering, the midwife tries to comfort her with the news that she is having another son who she calls Ben-Oni (son of my suffering) though Jacob named him Benjamin. Her child is the cause of her weeping but also her hope for the future.

Matthew tells us that the massacre by Herod is the fulfilment of a prophecy from Jeremiah.  Rachel weeps again, on this occasion over the slaughter of the children at Bethlehem. But the next verse offers hope as it tells of Herod's death and the return of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to the land of Israel.

Time and again we are given examples of why God offers hope that lives on but which we can sometimes find hard to see among the desperate sadness.

Let’s be honest, all this is pretty heavy going isn’t it but if we want to go beneath the surface of Christianity, to dare to discover what God’s love for us really looks like then elements of that journey will be painful.

If we read enough of the bible over a long enough period of time we will experience a range of reactions and emotions, partly due to the text and partly due to where we find ourselves on life’s journey.

I love to find humour and lightness in our readings, sometimes throwing a joke into a sermon, if only to see whether anyone is still listening!

As we lament about children being born in African refugee camps and acts of genocide today we are faced with the stark reality that God has experienced this first hand.

Matthew’s depiction of events is one of those passages which kind of ‘stop us in our tracks’. It’s part of the beauty of scripture and the power of the crafted word which should inspire us to read more of the bible.  

It makes Jesus even more real when we work and think about scripture.

As we explore Matthew’s gospel further over the coming year we will have the opportunity to go deeper and my prayer is that we have the disciple, courage and passion to seek out the authentic Jesus.

Sometimes we have to look a little beyond the immediately obvious to find true meaning. We are all probably guilty of wanting to believe a certain version of events knowing that the reality is going to be a bit harder even it proves to be more enduring and have more real meaning. Christmas is very much like that, we enjoy the socialising, the carols and the cosy images but how much richer can our lives be if we scratch beneath the surface to seek the real love God sent us in Christ? Love that is so strong that it can be with us in every aspect of our life’s journey through sadness and suffering as well as in the good times. Love for all of us for every day, rather than for a season.

Much of the truth we find in the bible is uncomfortable, disturbing and inconvenient but then absolute truth cannot be moulded to suit the circumstances. If we choose to wrestle with this then we are truly engaging with God.

Hebrews pictures Jesus as the pioneer who opens the way to God. Our challenge is to take the imagery from the Christmas cards, the stained-glass windows even, and seek the man who walked our earth in the first century.

As we continue to learn, to be inspired and strengthened we need to think deeply what difference our allegiance to Christ makes to our lives and the lives of others.

Many will choose to dismiss our Christmas celebrations as a fanciful Christmas fairy tale but it becomes a lot more difficult to dismiss when it manifests itself as a gritty determined love which suffering and pain cannot overwhelm.

If we each play our part in sustaining this reality, wherever we find ourselves, it can also be a celebration of justice and a call to life in all its fullness.

Kevin Bright

29 December 2019

The Juxtaposition of Pain and Joy

Matthew 2.13-23, Isaiah 63.7-9, Hebrews 2.10-18

This is always a challenging Sunday to preach, not just because in most people’s minds Christmas is now over for another year, Christingles, nativity plays and carol concerts are all done. After all with many Christmas celebrations starting in late November some have been enjoying the season for over a month now and feel that it’s time to move on.

We will welcome in a new decade in a couple of days’ time and then we can all get back to more routine lives.

But hang on a minute, today is the first Sunday of Christmas and today’s readings are an important part of the Christmas story, even if they spoil the warm glow of mangers, shepherds and wise men on our Christmas cards, which will remain in place for a little while yet.

Coming after the Christmas celebrations of this week the Gospel reading is the slaughter of the children under King Herod. Not a joyful story.

Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps we need to be reminded that great joy and great suffering exist right beside each other. Certainly this is a message we find in our readings today. Perhaps we need to be reminded that even as some celebrate, others grieve and I know from what several people have told me recently that many find themselves doing both simultaneously.

It’s exactly this, finding joy and love in others while recalling regret and loss which reinforces our Gospel message. Those of us who have lived a bit, loved, lost and still managed to keep our faith know this to be true.

God is there for us, unchanging throughout the ages, and this this is reinforced by the words of Isaiah we heard reminding the people of all that God has done for them, of his merciful, steadfast love.

Perhaps it’s good for us to go directly from “Peace on earth and good will to humanity” to a story of misused power, selfish violence and suffering inflicted by Herod, so that we can renew our commitment to the Christmas message in a more balanced way rather than a celebratory vacuum out of sync with the reality of the world around us.

When you think about it, Emmanuel – God-with-us – wouldn’t really mean all that much if it was only God with us during the celebrations and times which leave us with a warm glow. Speaking with someone who lost her adult daughter recently, despite the fact that she remained heartbroken, she told me that there was an irrepressible inclination to count her blessings, being thankful for the good times in her daughter’s life and for the grandchildren who love her.

Of course we don’t have to try very hard to find a continuous stream of sad stories from around the world about slaughter and displacement by modern day ‘Herods’ or would be ‘Herods’ including that of Christians executed in Nigeria this Christmas day.

Christingles and nativities seem far removed from such brutal realities and stories about cruelty, fear and despair don’t match with the idealistic fantasy of Christmas but as Christians we want the full picture.

As our faith deepens and matures we find that in facing up to a reality which includes the unjust, sad and tragic elements of life that God is in there, somewhere. This is exactly the world he chose to be born into, a world of injustice, cruelty and danger. Where leaders demonstrated their power by killing those who threaten their status and continue to do so today.

King Herod (‘the Great’) executed anyone he perceived as a threat to his throne, even including three of his sons and a wife so the elimination of some infant males in a small village would not have been big news to those that knew him. He was prepared to protect his privileged position with brutal force without a shred of guilt over the unbearable suffering caused to their loved ones. This was his definition of security and one which has been repeated through the ages.

Contrast this display of power with that of a God who reveals himself as a small, vulnerable and powerless baby. Indeed so vulnerable that his parents must seek refuge in Egypt if they are to avoid the same fate as the other baby boys.

It is to recognise the grief of God in the cry of the mothers who lost their children.

Matthew refers to the voice of ‘Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’

We are introduced to Rachel in the book of Genesis where we can read of her great beauty and how Jacob is besotted with her.

Rachel dies giving birth while on the road to Bethlehem. In the midst of her suffering, the midwife tries to comfort her with the news that she is having another son who she calls Ben-Oni (son of my suffering) though Jacob named him Benjamin. Her child is the cause of her weeping but also her hope for the future.

Matthew tells us that the massacre by Herod is the fulfilment of a prophecy from Jeremiah.  Rachel weeps again, on this occasion over the slaughter of the children at Bethlehem. But the next verse offers hope as it tells of Herod's death and the return of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to the land of Israel.

Time and again we are given examples of why God offers hope that lives on but which we can sometimes find hard to see among the desperate sadness.

Let’s be honest, all this is pretty heavy going isn’t it but if we want to go beneath the surface of Christianity, to dare to discover what God’s love for us really looks like then elements of that journey will be painful.

If we read enough of the bible over a long enough period of time we will experience a range of reactions and emotions, partly due to the text and partly due to where we find ourselves on life’s journey.

I love to find humour and lightness in our readings, sometimes throwing a joke into a sermon, if only to see whether anyone is still listening!

As we lament about children being born in African refugee camps and acts of genocide today we are faced with the stark reality that God has experienced this first hand.

Matthew’s depiction of events is one of those passages which kind of ‘stop us in our tracks’. It’s part of the beauty of scripture and the power of the crafted word which should inspire us to read more of the bible.  

It makes Jesus even more real when we work and think about scripture.

As we explore Matthew’s gospel further over the coming year we will have the opportunity to go deeper and my prayer is that we have the disciple, courage and passion to seek out the authentic Jesus.

Sometimes we have to look a little beyond the immediately obvious to find true meaning. We are all probably guilty of wanting to believe a certain version of events knowing that the reality is going to be a bit harder even it proves to be more enduring and have more real meaning. Christmas is very much like that, we enjoy the socialising, the carols and the cosy images but how much richer can our lives be if we scratch beneath the surface to seek the real love God sent us in Christ? Love that is so strong that it can be with us in every aspect of our life’s journey through sadness and suffering as well as in the good times. Love for all of us for every day, rather than for a season.

Much of the truth we find in the bible is uncomfortable, disturbing and inconvenient but then absolute truth cannot be moulded to suit the circumstances. If we choose to wrestle with this then we are truly engaging with God.

Hebrews pictures Jesus as the pioneer who opens the way to God. Our challenge is to take the imagery from the Christmas cards, the stained-glass windows even, and seek the man who walked our earth in the first century.

As we continue to learn, to be inspired and strengthened we need to think deeply what difference our allegiance to Christ makes to our lives and the lives of others.

Many will choose to dismiss our Christmas celebrations as a fanciful Christmas fairy tale but it becomes a lot more difficult to dismiss when it manifests itself as a gritty determined love which suffering and pain cannot overwhelm.

If we each play our part in sustaining this reality, wherever we find ourselves, it can also be a celebration of justice and a call to life in all its fullness.

Kevin Bright

29 December 2019

The House of Bread: A story for Christmas Day

As usual, I told a story at our Christmas morning communion service instead of preaching a sermon. Here it is...

Terraced fields near Bethlehem.
https://www.wmf.org/project/ancient-irrigated-terraces-battir

Audio version

There was once a baker who lived in Bethlehem. It was a good place to be a baker, because Bethlehem was surrounded by terraced fields stretching down the high hill on which it stood, which grew good wheat and barley. The grain made fine flour for baking into bread. The town’s name even reflected that. People said that Bethlehem, in Hebrew Beit Lehem, meant “The House of Bread”.

The baker had done well for himself in this House of Bread. He was married and had two young daughters, Ruth and Naomi, and he’d been able to build a good house for them all to live in. At first it was just one room, like most of the houses in Bethlehem, with a section at one end down a few steps where the animals were brought in at night, with a feeding trough on the raised platform. But as the baker prospered, he was able to build a store room for his jars of flour, and a guest room for visitors, and even a shelter on the roof where the family could sleep out on hot summer nights.

All was well until the Emperor Augustus, in far-off Rome, decided that everyone in his empire should return to the place where their families came from to be counted, and taxed…

The baker and his wife didn’t have to go anywhere. Their families had always lived in Bethlehem. But soon the town was full of those who’d moved elsewhere, coming back home, and needing somewhere to stay, relatives who would put them up. Soon there were aunts in the guest room, uncles in the store room, cousins in the roof shelter. Then the baker’s wife’s mother’s nephew turned up with his family. The only place left to put them was in the baker’s family room. Still, never mind, said the baker’s wife. “If we all budge up, I’m sure we’ll fit in. We can sleep down at the animals’ end of the room – it’s a bit smelly, but it’ll be warm!”  

“Alright” said the baker, “but really, after this, we have no more room, and even if we had room,” he whispered to his wife, “we have no food left to feed all these people. I looked in the store room just now, and I am down to the last handful of flour in the last jar. There isn’t even enough to feed our guests, never mind to have any to sell to the people of Bethlehem. I don’t know what we’ll do when that is gone, because I know that all of Bethlehem is the same!”

“God will provide”, said his wife, “He has told us we should welcome people. And we must never forget, after all, why we gave our children the names we did.”

The children pricked up their ears. “Why did you give us these names? Why did you call us Ruth and Naomi, mother?”

“Dear me! Have I never told you the story?”

“No – tell it now”

“Well, I suppose it is bed-time, so perhaps I should!

Many years ago, in the time of your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandparents…a woman lived in Bethlehem called Naomi”

“That’s me!” said the older girl.

“That’s right! She lived here with her husband and two young sons. But there was a famine. The food ran out. Naomi and her family had to leave or they’d starve. But they had to go all the way to the land of Moab before they found food.”

“Moab – but they are our enemies!”, said the girls.

“It’s true, we have often fought with them, but on this occasion they were kind. They welcomed Naomi and her family, and there her two boys grew up, and, in time, married Moabite girls. But then tragedy struck again. Her husband and two sons got very sick and they died. Naomi was left all alone in a foreign land. She decided to go home to Bethlehem where, surely, her own family would take her in – it was the custom of their people that they should!”

“So Naomi said goodbye to her son’s wives – they could marry again in Moab. But one of them, called Ruth…”

“That’s me” said the younger girl.

“…Ruth insisted on coming with Naomi. She said ‘where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people and your God my God’.

So, off they went together, but when they got to Bethlehem, no one would take them in or look after them. They had no money, no food, no friends. Fortunately, it was the time of the barley harvest, and Naomi remembered another custom of her people – she hoped this one hadn’t been forgotten like the law of hospitality!  

‘Go out into the fields,’ she said to Ruth. ‘It is a law here that farmers mustn’t cut the crops right up to the edge of the fields or go back for what they have missed. So you should be able to gather a little barley for us to eat.’

So that’s what Ruth did. She worked all day long in the hot sunshine, and at the end of the day had gathered enough to feed them for a day or two. But she hadn’t realised that the owner of the fields, a man called Boaz, had come by and had noticed her working hard. He’d asked his farmhands who she was, and they had told him that she was Ruth, a Moabite scrounger, who had come back with a woman called Naomi, who claimed she was from round here. They were dismissive, but Boaz saw how hard she worked, and how kind she was, and realised how much she must love her mother-in-law. He called her over and gave her a whole bag full of grain to take home, and…to cut a long story short… he very soon fell in love with her, and she with him, and he married her…!”

“Ahh! That’s a lovely story, “said the girls.

“But it’s not just a lovely story,” said their mother. “It is also an important story, because Ruth and Boaz had a son, called Obed, and when Obed grew up he had a son called Jesse, and when Jesse grew up, he had lots of sons, and the youngest of them was a little shepherd boy who became a king.”

“Not David, King David, the one who killed Goliath!” said the girls.

“The very same!  But he wouldn’t have been born if Ruth hadn’t been kind and generous to Naomi, and Boaz hadn’t been kind and generous to Ruth and Naomi! So when we welcome people we never know what will come of it. We might be welcoming a king!”

“It is a wonderful story,” said the baker, “ but it doesn’t change the fact that we have no room for anyone else – so the next time someone knocks at our door, the answer has to be “no!”.

And just at that moment – you’ve guessed it – there was a knock at the door.

The baker’s wife went to the door, and she opened it. Outside was a worried looking man, and a very tired, very pregnant woman. “Please could you help us? We have nowhere to stay,” said the man “and my wife, Mary, is about to have a child. Please can we stay with you!”

From behind the door the baker mouthed “NO!” silently at his wife, shaking his head. “Yes! Of course you can come in!” said the baker’s wife. “It’s very crowded, and you’ll have to sleep next to the animals, like us, but our home is your home, and you’re welcome! And in they came. And everyone budged up a bit more. And there was just enough room. And it was not a moment too soon, because that very night the baby was born. But it was now so crowded in that little house, that the only place to put him where he wouldn’t be trodden on was in the manger, the animals’ feeding trough.

What a night it was! The baker’s children should have been asleep, of course, but who could sleep with all the excitement of a new baby. So they were still wide awake when a bunch of shepherds came in from the neighbouring fields, saying they’d heard from angels in the sky that the child had been born. They’d been sent to find him.

“Who is this child” said Ruth and Naomi “that all this fuss should be made of him?”

“The angels told us he was the Messiah,” said the shepherds, “the great leader God said he would send us.”

“What? Like King David?”

“Hmm,” said one of the shepherds. “The way the angels talked about him, it sounded as if he’d be an even greater king than David but if God sent him to start life in a manger, maybe he isn’t going to be the kind of king who rules from a throne with a golden crown on his head, but someone who rules in our hearts, and shows God’s love for everyone, however humble and ordinary they are. And that’s the best kind of king, I reckon.”

The baker’s wife looked at the baker, and smiled. Just as she’d said, you never knew who you might be welcoming when you took in a stranger!

Eventually the shepherds left, and everyone fell asleep, except the baker, because, for all the wonderful things that had happened, he still knew that in the morning, he’d have nothing to feed his guests, or the rest of Bethlehem. What was he going to do?

As dawn broke, he decided that the only thing he could do was to do what he always did, get up and start baking. He might only have a handful of flour, but it would at least make bread for this new mother and her husband, who needed it most of all.

So he crept into the storeroom, picking his way over the sleeping uncles. He lifted the lid of the flour jar. Sure enough, there was just a handful left. He scooped it out, and went out into the courtyard to mix it. He fired up the bread oven till it was good and hot, and shaped the dough into a flat circle, then put it in the oven to bake. While it baked he went back to the storeroom to put the lid back on the jar. As he did so, he peered inside. How strange! There was still a handful of flour left in the bottom. “I’m sure I emptied it!” He thought to himself. “Still, if there’s some more, I might get another flatbread out of it.” So he scooped that out, and mixed it and put it in to bake.

Back he went to the store room. And – what was this? – there was still a handful left. Again he scooped it out, making sure he’d got every last speck this time, and went to mix it up and bake it. But when he came back, there was yet another handful there. To and fro he went, again and again, but though he emptied the jar every time, there was always more when he came back.

Soon he’d made enough bread to feed his household, then enough to feed his whole street, then enough to feed the whole of Bethlehem. And so it continued, until the little family left Bethlehem for the next part of their journey, the next part of their story.

And it’s said that when that baby grew up there were other times when people found themselves miraculously fed on bread, and fishes, and even wine, when there should have been none.  And still today, people find that they when they welcome others and share their food - not just bread, but also the food of love, hope, joy and peace -  however little they feel they have, somehow it always turns out that there’s enough and more to spare, for themselves and for everyone else as well.

Amen 

Acknowledgements: There's no such thing as a "new" story, and this, like all stories contains recycled bits and pieces pinched from all over the place. I am indebted to Paula Gooder for some very helpful insights into the likely background to Luke's statement that there was "no room in the inn". The ever renewing handful of flour is drawn from the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath. (1 Kings 17). The story of Ruth and Naomi can be found in the book of Ruth.

Excavations at the traditional site of the Shepherd's Fields, near Bethlehem. Taken on our trip to Israel earlier this year.

A reminder of the significance of Bethlehem before the birth of Jesus. I couldn't resist taking this photo, just opposite the entrance to the "Shepherds' Fields".

The House of Bread: A story for Christmas Day

As usual, I told a story at our Christmas morning communion service instead of preaching a sermon. Here it is...

Terraced fields near Bethlehem.
https://www.wmf.org/project/ancient-irrigated-terraces-battir

Audio version

There was once a baker who lived in Bethlehem. It was a good place to be a baker, because Bethlehem was surrounded by terraced fields stretching down the high hill on which it stood, which grew good wheat and barley. The grain made fine flour for baking into bread. The town’s name even reflected that. People said that Bethlehem, in Hebrew Beit Lehem, meant “The House of Bread”.

The baker had done well for himself in this House of Bread. He was married and had two young daughters, Ruth and Naomi, and he’d been able to build a good house for them all to live in. At first it was just one room, like most of the houses in Bethlehem, with a section at one end down a few steps where the animals were brought in at night, with a feeding trough on the raised platform. But as the baker prospered, he was able to build a store room for his jars of flour, and a guest room for visitors, and even a shelter on the roof where the family could sleep out on hot summer nights.

All was well until the Emperor Augustus, in far-off Rome, decided that everyone in his empire should return to the place where their families came from to be counted, and taxed…

The baker and his wife didn’t have to go anywhere. Their families had always lived in Bethlehem. But soon the town was full of those who’d moved elsewhere, coming back home, and needing somewhere to stay, relatives who would put them up. Soon there were aunts in the guest room, uncles in the store room, cousins in the roof shelter. Then the baker’s wife’s mother’s nephew turned up with his family. The only place left to put them was in the baker’s family room. Still, never mind, said the baker’s wife. “If we all budge up, I’m sure we’ll fit in. We can sleep down at the animals’ end of the room – it’s a bit smelly, but it’ll be warm!”  

“Alright” said the baker, “but really, after this, we have no more room, and even if we had room,” he whispered to his wife, “we have no food left to feed all these people. I looked in the store room just now, and I am down to the last handful of flour in the last jar. There isn’t even enough to feed our guests, never mind to have any to sell to the people of Bethlehem. I don’t know what we’ll do when that is gone, because I know that all of Bethlehem is the same!”

“God will provide”, said his wife, “He has told us we should welcome people. And we must never forget, after all, why we gave our children the names we did.”

The children pricked up their ears. “Why did you give us these names? Why did you call us Ruth and Naomi, mother?”

“Dear me! Have I never told you the story?”

“No – tell it now”

“Well, I suppose it is bed-time, so perhaps I should!

Many years ago, in the time of your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandparents…a woman lived in Bethlehem called Naomi”

“That’s me!” said the older girl.

“That’s right! She lived here with her husband and two young sons. But there was a famine. The food ran out. Naomi and her family had to leave or they’d starve. But they had to go all the way to the land of Moab before they found food.”

“Moab – but they are our enemies!”, said the girls.

“It’s true, we have often fought with them, but on this occasion they were kind. They welcomed Naomi and her family, and there her two boys grew up, and, in time, married Moabite girls. But then tragedy struck again. Her husband and two sons got very sick and they died. Naomi was left all alone in a foreign land. She decided to go home to Bethlehem where, surely, her own family would take her in – it was the custom of their people that they should!”

“So Naomi said goodbye to her son’s wives – they could marry again in Moab. But one of them, called Ruth…”

“That’s me” said the younger girl.

“…Ruth insisted on coming with Naomi. She said ‘where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people and your God my God’.

So, off they went together, but when they got to Bethlehem, no one would take them in or look after them. They had no money, no food, no friends. Fortunately, it was the time of the barley harvest, and Naomi remembered another custom of her people – she hoped this one hadn’t been forgotten like the law of hospitality!  

‘Go out into the fields,’ she said to Ruth. ‘It is a law here that farmers mustn’t cut the crops right up to the edge of the fields or go back for what they have missed. So you should be able to gather a little barley for us to eat.’

So that’s what Ruth did. She worked all day long in the hot sunshine, and at the end of the day had gathered enough to feed them for a day or two. But she hadn’t realised that the owner of the fields, a man called Boaz, had come by and had noticed her working hard. He’d asked his farmhands who she was, and they had told him that she was Ruth, a Moabite scrounger, who had come back with a woman called Naomi, who claimed she was from round here. They were dismissive, but Boaz saw how hard she worked, and how kind she was, and realised how much she must love her mother-in-law. He called her over and gave her a whole bag full of grain to take home, and…to cut a long story short… he very soon fell in love with her, and she with him, and he married her…!”

“Ahh! That’s a lovely story, “said the girls.

“But it’s not just a lovely story,” said their mother. “It is also an important story, because Ruth and Boaz had a son, called Obed, and when Obed grew up he had a son called Jesse, and when Jesse grew up, he had lots of sons, and the youngest of them was a little shepherd boy who became a king.”

“Not David, King David, the one who killed Goliath!” said the girls.

“The very same!  But he wouldn’t have been born if Ruth hadn’t been kind and generous to Naomi, and Boaz hadn’t been kind and generous to Ruth and Naomi! So when we welcome people we never know what will come of it. We might be welcoming a king!”

“It is a wonderful story,” said the baker, “ but it doesn’t change the fact that we have no room for anyone else – so the next time someone knocks at our door, the answer has to be “no!”.

And just at that moment – you’ve guessed it – there was a knock at the door.

The baker’s wife went to the door, and she opened it. Outside was a worried looking man, and a very tired, very pregnant woman. “Please could you help us? We have nowhere to stay,” said the man “and my wife, Mary, is about to have a child. Please can we stay with you!”

From behind the door the baker mouthed “NO!” silently at his wife, shaking his head. “Yes! Of course you can come in!” said the baker’s wife. “It’s very crowded, and you’ll have to sleep next to the animals, like us, but our home is your home, and you’re welcome! And in they came. And everyone budged up a bit more. And there was just enough room. And it was not a moment too soon, because that very night the baby was born. But it was now so crowded in that little house, that the only place to put him where he wouldn’t be trodden on was in the manger, the animals’ feeding trough.

What a night it was! The baker’s children should have been asleep, of course, but who could sleep with all the excitement of a new baby. So they were still wide awake when a bunch of shepherds came in from the neighbouring fields, saying they’d heard from angels in the sky that the child had been born. They’d been sent to find him.

“Who is this child” said Ruth and Naomi “that all this fuss should be made of him?”

“The angels told us he was the Messiah,” said the shepherds, “the great leader God said he would send us.”

“What? Like King David?”

“Hmm,” said one of the shepherds. “The way the angels talked about him, it sounded as if he’d be an even greater king than David but if God sent him to start life in a manger, maybe he isn’t going to be the kind of king who rules from a throne with a golden crown on his head, but someone who rules in our hearts, and shows God’s love for everyone, however humble and ordinary they are. And that’s the best kind of king, I reckon.”

The baker’s wife looked at the baker, and smiled. Just as she’d said, you never knew who you might be welcoming when you took in a stranger!

Eventually the shepherds left, and everyone fell asleep, except the baker, because, for all the wonderful things that had happened, he still knew that in the morning, he’d have nothing to feed his guests, or the rest of Bethlehem. What was he going to do?

As dawn broke, he decided that the only thing he could do was to do what he always did, get up and start baking. He might only have a handful of flour, but it would at least make bread for this new mother and her husband, who needed it most of all.

So he crept into the storeroom, picking his way over the sleeping uncles. He lifted the lid of the flour jar. Sure enough, there was just a handful left. He scooped it out, and went out into the courtyard to mix it. He fired up the bread oven till it was good and hot, and shaped the dough into a flat circle, then put it in the oven to bake. While it baked he went back to the storeroom to put the lid back on the jar. As he did so, he peered inside. How strange! There was still a handful of flour left in the bottom. “I’m sure I emptied it!” He thought to himself. “Still, if there’s some more, I might get another flatbread out of it.” So he scooped that out, and mixed it and put it in to bake.

Back he went to the store room. And – what was this? – there was still a handful left. Again he scooped it out, making sure he’d got every last speck this time, and went to mix it up and bake it. But when he came back, there was yet another handful there. To and fro he went, again and again, but though he emptied the jar every time, there was always more when he came back.

Soon he’d made enough bread to feed his household, then enough to feed his whole street, then enough to feed the whole of Bethlehem. And so it continued, until the little family left Bethlehem for the next part of their journey, the next part of their story.

And it’s said that when that baby grew up there were other times when people found themselves miraculously fed on bread, and fishes, and even wine, when there should have been none.  And still today, people find that they when they welcome others and share their food - not just bread, but also the food of love, hope, joy and peace -  however little they feel they have, somehow it always turns out that there’s enough and more to spare, for themselves and for everyone else as well.

Amen 

Acknowledgements: There's no such thing as a "new" story, and this, like all stories contains recycled bits and pieces pinched from all over the place. I am indebted to Paula Gooder for some very helpful insights into the likely background to Luke's statement that there was "no room in the inn". The ever renewing handful of flour is drawn from the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath. (1 Kings 17). The story of Ruth and Naomi can be found in the book of Ruth.

Excavations at the traditional site of the Shepherd's Fields, near Bethlehem. Taken on our trip to Israel earlier this year.

A reminder of the significance of Bethlehem before the birth of Jesus. I couldn't resist taking this photo, just opposite the entrance to the "Shepherds' Fields".

No room? Midnight Mass Christmas 2019

Isaiah 62.6-12, Luke 2.1-20

I wonder how many of you are here because you are visiting family this Christmas, perhaps back in your parents’ home, or gathering with other family members.  If you are, you might have come across the twitter hashtag #duvetknowitschristmas . People are using it to tweet pictures of the extraordinary sleeping arrangements families come up with to fit in all their Christmas guests. Adult children are squashed back in their childhood beds, sleeping under Thomas the Tank Engine bedding which they loved when they were six, but somehow doesn’t feel quite right when they are 28 and trying to look cool in front of their new girlfriend. But they’re the lucky ones. Others are being put up in storerooms, offices, under the stairs, under the dining room table, under the piano, in walk-in cupboards, in camper vans on the drive, on rickety camp beds and inflatable mattresses and yoga mats… My two children are home for Christmas and that means one has to sleep in what I call my craft room, among my sewing bits and bobs. I do try to make sure I’ve picked up all the stray pins and needles from the floor, but still, it’s safest to keep your shoes on! If you’re one of those who’s enduring “less than optimal” accommodation this Christmas, you might have some sympathy for Mary and Joseph, who found there was “no place at the inn”  and who end up putting their newborn in an animals’ feeding trough.

“There was no place … at the inn”. It’s a phrase which probably conjures up memories of school nativity plays, where a series of grumpy innkeepers turn Mary and Joseph away until one softens, just a bit, and says that, ok, they can bed down in the stable round the back if they really must, but don’t expect any special treatment, because it’s a busy night, and there are far more lucrative customers needing attention in the bar…

In reality, though, it wasn’t like that at all. For a start, the Greek word that’s translated as “inn” in our Bibles doesn’t mean somewhere like the Five Bells in Seal. Luke could have used the word pandocheion, literally a place that welcomed all, if he’d wanted to. That would have been the equivalent of our  word “inn”. That’s the word he uses to describe the inn to which the Good Samaritan takes the man he’s rescued on the Jericho road in the story Jesus tells. But Luke uses a different word here – kataluma – and it really just means a “guest room”, the spare room, the room you put Auntie Flo in when she comes to visit.

Many homes in ancient Palestine would only have had one room, where the family ate, slept, and worked. At one end, down a step or two, would be an area where the animals were brought in at night. But if you could afford it you’d build an extension, a kataluma, a guest room, so you could offer hospitality to visitors more easily. Welcoming others, even if complete strangers, was an essential part of the culture Jesus grew up in. Pandocheia, those public rooming houses, only existed in out of the way places where no one lived, like that Jericho road out in the desert.

So when Luke tells us that there was “no room in the kataluma”, all it means is that the guest room was already occupied. Mary and Joseph had to squash in with the family. And it must have been a squash. Because when Mary’s child was born, there was nowhere to put him except the animals’ feeding trough, a makeshift bed, so at least he wasn’t lying on the ground where someone might tread on him.

There was no grumpy innkeeper, just a family who wanted to show hospitality, but had to budge up to a ridiculous extent to do so. Mary and Joseph weren’t rattling around in a barn. They were cheek by jowl with the family - and their animals – in their home when the baby arrived. They ‘d been made as welcome as that family could manage, but all they could offer was a tiny space in a very crowded house in a very crowded town, packed with people who’d been forced to return by the edict of the Emperor in far-off Rome who wanted to count, and tax, his subjects, and didn’t care how disruptive that was.   

And, of course, it was always going to be the poor who suffered most. It always is. Luke’s account of Jesus’ life is full of stories of his ministry to people on the margins, the kind of people who are overlooked and pushed about, people for whom there is no room in the world.The birth story he tells sets the scene for that, as Jesus is born in an overcrowded house, where there is no room for him.

Poverty and overcrowding tend to go hand in hand. In our own nation, the urban poor of the Industrial Revolution were crammed into slum tenements, and back to back terraces, while the rural poor crowded their large families into tiny cottages that now sell for hundreds of thousands as bijou holiday homes for one or two. In more modern times, cramped shared houses, with rooms divided and divided until there is barely enough room for a bed, command ridiculous rents in our cities, and sheds and garages are often illegally converted to house people too. Space is a luxury that only the rich can afford; the poor have always been expected to put up with living on top of each other. Official figures say over 84,000 UK families are in B& B’s, hostels or temporary accommodation right now, often in just one or two rooms, with cooking and washing facilities shared with others. More than 126,000 children in the UK will wake up on Christmas Day in places like that, often with barely enough room for everyone to lie down, and that number has been steadily growing. 

According to this story, Jesus would have been one of them, spending his first night in the world squashed into a narrow, hay-filled trough. It was the least likely place for the Son of God, the new Messiah, the great leader his people had been expecting.  And yet that little space was enough, says Luke. A tiny child, a manger bed, a small beginning was all it took to change the world. In that small space a huge thing happened.

A thousand years ago, a monk called Aelfric (955-1010) put that into words better than I can.  "[Jesus] was crowded in his lodging place” Aelfric said, “so that he could give us spacious room in the kingdom of heaven."  Aelfric’s words echo the words of the Psalms in the Bible “Out of my distress I called on the Lord,” says Psalm 118, “the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place.”

Spacious room, a broad place: these are images that we can probably all understand, even if we’ve never been physically crammed in somewhere. We may have felt hemmed in by circumstances, with no room for manoeuvre, mentally and emotionally overcrowded. We talk about being in “dire straits” when we’re in trouble, when we can’t see any options, when we don’t know where to turn. Strait, in this sense means “narrow”, like the Straits of Gibraltar.  

Many of us live lives that are over-crowded with busyness. We’re bombarded with words and images, demands and opportunities , haunted by FOMO, the fear of missing out.

And then there are the possessions we crowd our lives with. Marie Kondo, the decluttering guru, has a huge following, but perhaps that’s just an indication of the hunger we have for that “broad place”, a place where there is room to breathe, room to move, room to be ourselves.

The good news in this Christmas story, though, is that God doesn’t wait for us to declutter before he comes to us.  He doesn’t need us to get ourselves sorted out before he can act. It doesn’t matter whether your t-shirts are folded just so, or you’ve got rid of everything that doesn’t “spark joy”. A manger is enough for him, a tiny space. That’s all God needs to start to change us, to bring us out of those “dire straits” into his “spacious room”.  

Our mess and muddle and shortcomings are no problem. That manger was never meant to be a baby’s bed. It was quite unsuitable, horribly unhygienic – someone should have made a safeguarding referral – but that didn’t matter to God. He doesn’t wait until we’ve been to the spiritual equivalent of Mothercare to get the kit we think we need to live a holy life. We don’t have to know the words of the hymns or be able to find our way around the Bible or understand what’s going on in church services. Just as he made his home in that narrow manger in Bethlehem, he can make his home in us, however unprepared we feel.

So, whatever your sleeping arrangements are this night, whether you are crammed in like sardines, or on your own, but over-crowded with worries and cares, the message of Christmas is that there is plenty of room for us all in God’s heart, the “broad place” which is our true home.  All we need to do is whisper “yes – come in!” and that’s enough.

I’m going to leave the last words to the seventeenth century poet, Richard Crashaw from his poem, The Holy Nativity of Our Lord.

Poor World, said I, what wilt thou do

       To entertain this starry stranger?

Is this the best thou canst bestow,

       A cold, and not too cleanly, manger?

Contend, ye powers of heav’n and earth,

To fit a bed for this huge birth.

…

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!

       Eternity shut in a span;

Summer in winter; day in night;

       Heaven in earth, and God in man.

Great little one, whose all-embracing birth

Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.

Amen

No room? Midnight Mass Christmas 2019

Isaiah 62.6-12, Luke 2.1-20

I wonder how many of you are here because you are visiting family this Christmas, perhaps back in your parents’ home, or gathering with other family members.  If you are, you might have come across the twitter hashtag #duvetknowitschristmas . People are using it to tweet pictures of the extraordinary sleeping arrangements families come up with to fit in all their Christmas guests. Adult children are squashed back in their childhood beds, sleeping under Thomas the Tank Engine bedding which they loved when they were six, but somehow doesn’t feel quite right when they are 28 and trying to look cool in front of their new girlfriend. But they’re the lucky ones. Others are being put up in storerooms, offices, under the stairs, under the dining room table, under the piano, in walk-in cupboards, in camper vans on the drive, on rickety camp beds and inflatable mattresses and yoga mats… My two children are home for Christmas and that means one has to sleep in what I call my craft room, among my sewing bits and bobs. I do try to make sure I’ve picked up all the stray pins and needles from the floor, but still, it’s safest to keep your shoes on! If you’re one of those who’s enduring “less than optimal” accommodation this Christmas, you might have some sympathy for Mary and Joseph, who found there was “no place at the inn”  and who end up putting their newborn in an animals’ feeding trough.

“There was no place … at the inn”. It’s a phrase which probably conjures up memories of school nativity plays, where a series of grumpy innkeepers turn Mary and Joseph away until one softens, just a bit, and says that, ok, they can bed down in the stable round the back if they really must, but don’t expect any special treatment, because it’s a busy night, and there are far more lucrative customers needing attention in the bar…

In reality, though, it wasn’t like that at all. For a start, the Greek word that’s translated as “inn” in our Bibles doesn’t mean somewhere like the Five Bells in Seal. Luke could have used the word pandocheion, literally a place that welcomed all, if he’d wanted to. That would have been the equivalent of our  word “inn”. That’s the word he uses to describe the inn to which the Good Samaritan takes the man he’s rescued on the Jericho road in the story Jesus tells. But Luke uses a different word here – kataluma – and it really just means a “guest room”, the spare room, the room you put Auntie Flo in when she comes to visit.

Many homes in ancient Palestine would only have had one room, where the family ate, slept, and worked. At one end, down a step or two, would be an area where the animals were brought in at night. But if you could afford it you’d build an extension, a kataluma, a guest room, so you could offer hospitality to visitors more easily. Welcoming others, even if complete strangers, was an essential part of the culture Jesus grew up in. Pandocheia, those public rooming houses, only existed in out of the way places where no one lived, like that Jericho road out in the desert.

So when Luke tells us that there was “no room in the kataluma”, all it means is that the guest room was already occupied. Mary and Joseph had to squash in with the family. And it must have been a squash. Because when Mary’s child was born, there was nowhere to put him except the animals’ feeding trough, a makeshift bed, so at least he wasn’t lying on the ground where someone might tread on him.

There was no grumpy innkeeper, just a family who wanted to show hospitality, but had to budge up to a ridiculous extent to do so. Mary and Joseph weren’t rattling around in a barn. They were cheek by jowl with the family - and their animals – in their home when the baby arrived. They ‘d been made as welcome as that family could manage, but all they could offer was a tiny space in a very crowded house in a very crowded town, packed with people who’d been forced to return by the edict of the Emperor in far-off Rome who wanted to count, and tax, his subjects, and didn’t care how disruptive that was.   

And, of course, it was always going to be the poor who suffered most. It always is. Luke’s account of Jesus’ life is full of stories of his ministry to people on the margins, the kind of people who are overlooked and pushed about, people for whom there is no room in the world.The birth story he tells sets the scene for that, as Jesus is born in an overcrowded house, where there is no room for him.

Poverty and overcrowding tend to go hand in hand. In our own nation, the urban poor of the Industrial Revolution were crammed into slum tenements, and back to back terraces, while the rural poor crowded their large families into tiny cottages that now sell for hundreds of thousands as bijou holiday homes for one or two. In more modern times, cramped shared houses, with rooms divided and divided until there is barely enough room for a bed, command ridiculous rents in our cities, and sheds and garages are often illegally converted to house people too. Space is a luxury that only the rich can afford; the poor have always been expected to put up with living on top of each other. Official figures say over 84,000 UK families are in B& B’s, hostels or temporary accommodation right now, often in just one or two rooms, with cooking and washing facilities shared with others. More than 126,000 children in the UK will wake up on Christmas Day in places like that, often with barely enough room for everyone to lie down, and that number has been steadily growing. 

According to this story, Jesus would have been one of them, spending his first night in the world squashed into a narrow, hay-filled trough. It was the least likely place for the Son of God, the new Messiah, the great leader his people had been expecting.  And yet that little space was enough, says Luke. A tiny child, a manger bed, a small beginning was all it took to change the world. In that small space a huge thing happened.

A thousand years ago, a monk called Aelfric (955-1010) put that into words better than I can.  "[Jesus] was crowded in his lodging place” Aelfric said, “so that he could give us spacious room in the kingdom of heaven."  Aelfric’s words echo the words of the Psalms in the Bible “Out of my distress I called on the Lord,” says Psalm 118, “the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place.”

Spacious room, a broad place: these are images that we can probably all understand, even if we’ve never been physically crammed in somewhere. We may have felt hemmed in by circumstances, with no room for manoeuvre, mentally and emotionally overcrowded. We talk about being in “dire straits” when we’re in trouble, when we can’t see any options, when we don’t know where to turn. Strait, in this sense means “narrow”, like the Straits of Gibraltar.  

Many of us live lives that are over-crowded with busyness. We’re bombarded with words and images, demands and opportunities , haunted by FOMO, the fear of missing out.

And then there are the possessions we crowd our lives with. Marie Kondo, the decluttering guru, has a huge following, but perhaps that’s just an indication of the hunger we have for that “broad place”, a place where there is room to breathe, room to move, room to be ourselves.

The good news in this Christmas story, though, is that God doesn’t wait for us to declutter before he comes to us.  He doesn’t need us to get ourselves sorted out before he can act. It doesn’t matter whether your t-shirts are folded just so, or you’ve got rid of everything that doesn’t “spark joy”. A manger is enough for him, a tiny space. That’s all God needs to start to change us, to bring us out of those “dire straits” into his “spacious room”.  

Our mess and muddle and shortcomings are no problem. That manger was never meant to be a baby’s bed. It was quite unsuitable, horribly unhygienic – someone should have made a safeguarding referral – but that didn’t matter to God. He doesn’t wait until we’ve been to the spiritual equivalent of Mothercare to get the kit we think we need to live a holy life. We don’t have to know the words of the hymns or be able to find our way around the Bible or understand what’s going on in church services. Just as he made his home in that narrow manger in Bethlehem, he can make his home in us, however unprepared we feel.

So, whatever your sleeping arrangements are this night, whether you are crammed in like sardines, or on your own, but over-crowded with worries and cares, the message of Christmas is that there is plenty of room for us all in God’s heart, the “broad place” which is our true home.  All we need to do is whisper “yes – come in!” and that’s enough.

I’m going to leave the last words to the seventeenth century poet, Richard Crashaw from his poem, The Holy Nativity of Our Lord.

Poor World, said I, what wilt thou do

       To entertain this starry stranger?

Is this the best thou canst bestow,

       A cold, and not too cleanly, manger?

Contend, ye powers of heav’n and earth,

To fit a bed for this huge birth.

…

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!

       Eternity shut in a span;

Summer in winter; day in night;

       Heaven in earth, and God in man.

Great little one, whose all-embracing birth

Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.

Amen