Sermon Tone Analysis

There was once a woman who hated Christmas.

Many years earlier she’d fallen out with her daughter who had left slamming the door behind her and saying she wanted nothing more to do with her mother.

The woman hadn’t seen or heard from her daughter since that day.

Every Christmas the woman nursed a secret hope that this would be the year her daughter would come home.

But she never did.

Then came the moment when the woman decided to stop waiting and take things into her own hands.

It wasn’t hard in this age of the internet to track her daughter down.

She lived in Chicago where she was a lecturer.

She made up her mind to go to Chicago for Christmas, to find her daughter, and to offer the olive branch.

It wasn’t easy.

She didn’t have much money and she was scared of flying, but such was her resolution to see her daughter again she knew that she’d just have to get over it.

She’d thought that getting the money and making the flight would be the hard part, but in actual fact that was the easy part.

The difficult thing was getting up the courage to knock on her daughter’s front door.

What if her daughter slammed the door in her face?

What if this whole thing had been a waste of time and effort?

She must have walked backwards and forwards in front of that house a dozen times, before she finally got up the nerve to ring the doorbell.

Now this story has two possible endings.

First, it has the Christmassy “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “Miracle on 34th Street” ending.

With that ending the daughter takes the mother in her arms, swings her round, calls for the children and her husband, and tears start streaming down her face as she says, “My mother’s here for Christmas” as mysteriously the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” begin in the back ground.

After years of separation they are finally reconciled.

That’s the first possible ending.

But of course there is another possible ending.

The second is the “life is not a fairy tale” type of ending.

In this ending the daughter slams the door in her mother’s face, leaving her alone and friendless in a strange city on Christmas Eve, unsure of what to do or where to go.

Now after time, energy, money, and resolve she remains estranged from her daughter.

While we all have a preference to how this story ends, both are possible and both are played out around the world most every day.

The Christmas story is like this too.

By this I don’t mean the nativity story, the virgin mother, the angels and shepherds, there isn’t much similarity there but the other story, the story behind the nativity.

It’s the Christmas story which John tells us in his gospel.

We may not think of John 1 when thinking about the Christmas story, but it tells us about when God took on human flesh and became a man – which is the Christmas story.

Here’s how John tells the story.

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2He was with God in the beginning.

3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.