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)

At Christmas-time, the Royal Mail in the UK delivers many cards and parcels, and they are simply one of the many companies working to get presents from A to B! It can be a frustrating time, waiting for deliveries (I am rarely home and so it is often a logistical nightmare trying to arrange collection of parcels, often leading to much frustration!), and sometimes parcels don’t arrive on time.

On the whole, though, I’m grateful for our postal and delivery services which do a fantastic job, often in very unpleasant weather. When we talk about God as our Deliverer, though, we are not really thinking of this kind of delivery. Nor are we talking about the kind of delivery we hope politicians may give on their manifesto promises! Deliverance is all about being rescued and set free.

Christmas reminds us that the Son of God came to set us free (Gal 5:1). Paul says, ‘In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.’ (Eph 3:12) Because God delivers us from sin, the penalties of sin and the punishments for sin, we can now know freedom and confidence. Frequently in the Old Testament (particularly in the book of Judges), we are told that God raised up a deliverer for His people (see Judges 3:9,15; also 2 Kings 13:5). We can now rejoice in the Deliverer sent by God to rescue all people!

There were some heart-warming stories of the emergency services rescuing people from the floods which happened in our area in November. When disasters happen – be they fires, floods or sudden illness – we are very grateful for all who work to save and rescue, often risking their own lives to rescue us.

Our carol service this year is called ‘God’s Great Rescue Plan’, because Christmas is a story of rescue. We often don’t think of it this way, because we don’t really see the peril we’re in. We can be spiritually blind to our needs, thinking that life is simply about the here and now. But God’s word tells us that we’ve all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Rom 3:23) and that we are dead in transgressions and sins (Eph 2:1). We’re in a desperate situation and we can’t get out of this mess by ourselves.

The blessing of Christmas is that God has sent us a Rescuer, a Saviour. The very name ‘Jesus’ tells us this: He was to be called Jesus ‘because he will save his people from their sins.’ (Matt 1:21) Every time we say that name, we are acknowledging the blessing of a Saviour!