Dave spoke tonight from Luke 2:15-20. Babies tend to be highly popular, often making adults do strange things such as speaking in silly voices and pulling silly faces,  and it’s undoubtedly the baby at the centre of the Christmas story who grabs our attention. However, we need to grow up in our knowledge of Christ and acknowledge that He is more than just a baby. Eph 4:15 urges us to grow up into Christ and we have to move from wonder to worship.

As a man, Christ accepted worship (from the cleansed leper in Matthew 8, from the ruler of a synagogue in Matthew 9, from a blind man in John 9 and from one who had been demon-possessed in Mark 5), quite unlike other men (Paul was at pains to tell people not to bow down to him because he was only a man.) The reason Jesus did this was because He was not just a man; He was also fully God.

We need to grow up so we can understand more of how God works. He is beyond our control and we need to learn to surrender to Him and do what He requires. There was no room for Jesus at the inn in Bethlehem, and so often people want the cuteness of the baby Jesus without the cross of Christ. It’s easy for us to accept the tinsel of Christmas, but not the truth or to love the wonder of the season without the worship of the Saviour. If we are to grow up, we need to move beyond decoration to dedication and understand that love was the motivation behind Jesus coming to earth.

At a children’s Nativity, each child had to hold up a letter spelling out the word ‘CHRISTMAS LOVE.’ One child held the M upside down, however, with the result that the message given was ‘CHRIST WAS LOVE.’ That is the true motivation behind Christmas and we need to understand that out of the chaos, the God of love has come to be with us, not just at Christmas, but for eternity.

This morning, Roger asked the question, ‘Where is church?’ So often, we associate the word with a building, with the place where we worship, and we often talk about churches as great architectural monuments to God’s glory. God does not view church in this light, however. He sees that ‘church’ is where HIs people gather in His name (see Matt 18:20). Jesus firmly debunked the idea that church is tied to a building when He talked about rebuilding the temple in three days, referring to His own body rather than to the building itself. (John 2:19)

The church is being built by God Himself (see Matt 16:16-18) and nothing can destroy this work of God (see also Eph 1:22-23). We need to fulfil God’s commands, showing love for one another as the chief means of testimony (see John 13:34-35). Wherever we meet with other believers in God’s name, there is church.

Christmas is full of the spectacular: angels in the sky praising God, wise men travelling from the East, miracles abounding. But Christmas is also full of the ordinary and the mundane: Joseph and Mary facing the logistical nightmare of a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the hassles of not being able to find a place to rest, the birth of a baby in less-than-perfect surroundings, the ordinary shepherds being summoned to worship.

Christianity is an odd combination of the stupendous and the mundane, of the spiritual and the physical. At times, we favour one over the other (most of us prefer the spiritual, because we like the spectacular!) We enjoy the trappings and trimmings of Christmas because they are pretty and unusual, but we have to acknowledge the humdrum as well (traipsing through shops to buy presents, working out shopping lists to feed an extended family over Christmas and so on.) We need both; both form part of our lives.

Christmas is essentially reassuring, because it reminds us that God values the ordinary. There was no beaming down of a fully formed God-man to earth; instead, the miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit coming upon a virgin sat alongside the normal gestational period and the messiness of labour. There was pomp and ceremony with the hosts of angels startling ordinary people, but there was also the smell and mess of the stable birth. There was the miraculous appearance of a star to men in a country far away, but there was also the near-disaster of assumptions leading to a visit to a palace. God has never despised the ordinary and values us in our everyday lives, however boring or unspectacular these seem to us.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

Our society generally does not favour such repair; we live in a disposable society, where when something breaks, it gets thrown away.  It can actually be cheaper, for example, to buy a new printer than to buy a cartridge for it when the ink runs out. This attitude can even be carried over into the workplace, with many employees feeling that they are discarded whenever it is convenient for the company.

God does not view us as disposable, however. He is the Potter who re-forms and re-works the clay into something beautiful (see Jer 18). I like the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, however, because it does not attempt to disguise the breakage; it uses something precious to repair and strengthen. Jesus still bore the scars of the crucifixion in His resurrected body (in Michael Card’s words, He is ‘known by the scars’). We belong to a God who makes whole (He assembles the broken, shattered pieces of our lives into something beautiful, as Aaron Shust puts it.) We are His living examples of kintsugi.

This afternoon we enjoyed a very informal Christmas Celebration, held at Furlong Road Methodist Church. The church had knitted figures from the Advent Trail and was beautifully decorated:

Our knitted figures were back after the Nativity Trail and there were prizes to be given to the children who had taken part, thanks to the Co-op:

We enjoyed singing carols and taking part in an interactive re-telling of the Nativity story:

There were Christmas crafts to do and festive refreshments to eat.

Our thanks to Furlong Road Methodist Church for hosting the event and to all who came.

Many people like to give their houses a good clean before putting up Christmas trees and Christmas decorations. The rituals associated with decorating our houses for Christmas go back many years and vary from family to family, but often, these are accompanied by the winter equivalent of the ‘spring clean’!

Decorations and trees are often kept in the loft, and so there is a sense of unearthing these treasures once again and dealing with any dust and damage done to them in the previous eleven months.

Our lives can often feel dusty and dirty, but the good news is we have a God who specialises in cleaning! The Message version of Ps 51 says, ‘Scrub away my guilt, soak out my sins in your laundry’ and goes on to say, ‘Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean, scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.’ We can be grateful for the blessing of being clean and purified by God. (1 Jn 1:9)