Fourth Sunday of Advent

The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Christmas feels like a bit of a joke. There is something profoundly rediculous that on Christmas day we celebrate God’s birthday! How bizzar to celerate the birthday of God, the creator of the universe who has always eternally existed. How many candles for the cake this year, God? Infinite? Again? (mumble) Yeah, I thought you’d say that. “WHAT WAS THAT!” Oh, no, I didn’t say anything!

The idea that God was born as a baby is comical; the idea that God was born as a baby to a teenage girl who, if it hadn’t been for these events, we would never have heard of and certainly wouldn’t have cared about, is, frankly, hysterical! God, like a good joke, is unexpected and messes around with our categories and concepts. Speaking of jokes:

What is green, hangs from the door frame waiting for a lover’s kiss, and goes “ribbit?” A mistle-toad!

What is red, covered in leather, and goes, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Ribbit, ribbit. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of they womb, Jesus. Ribbit? A Roman missal-toad!

To explain - it’s Christmas, forgive me for killing the joke but I’ve got to get one bit of teaching in early before your Christmas sherry kicks in - the Roman missal is the Roman Catholic book which contains all the words of the Mass used on different days of the year or in different seasons. The word Mass actually comes from the latin word, Missa, which means “to be sent” and from which we get words like “epistle” or “missile,” and hence it’s called the Roman missal. Actually, with the traditional Roman Mass being in latin, my joke actually gets even better as the word “ribbit” in latin, according to google, means “he laughs” or “she laughs.” So, the important thing is, even if you didn’t laugh at my joke, this Christmas, the toad will laugh! Ribbit.

Much of life seems to be a big set up to a punch line. The more one thinks about it, the stranger and stranger it gets that anything exists at all. Does all of the universe just have to exist for some strange reason, or lack of reason! Or did the universe just pop into existence out of nothing in a big bang? But surely, from nothing, nothing comes! Or is there some explanation for the universe, a cause of the big bang or of the multiverse, a cause of all of space and time?

The universe has to exist; it came from nothing; or it has a timeless, spaceless cause which one might call God. All very strange explanations and all of them feel laughable, but if the only possible reasons the universe exists seem fantastic, perhaps the universe itself is fantastic!

That is at least how it must have seemed to Mary at the message of the angel. The God who is the cause of all things being born as a human? Being born as a baby, as her baby, to become dependant on her for life. It would be like King Charles, having gone slightly crazy and having escaped the palace, somehow stumbling to Burnley - no offense to Burnley, it was just the first place I thought of - and, having arrived there, sitting down in the marsh on the edge of the river Ribble with his crown on, until a young burnley lass, herself struggling with the cost of living, happens upon him and cares for the king as her own child with chippie tea and tripe an onion, nursing him until the end. That indeed does sound like a joke. I’m not sure what the punchline is but there certainly would be, “trouble at mill.”

Sorry, sorry, this is the sort of humour that comes out when an ex-accountant starts using the left-side of his brain! But the humour gets even bigger when it is God, the source of all life, who has a due date. This is one of the reasons I love the catholic expression of worship here at St Nic’s. It is big, it’s extravagant, and its a reminder that the Christmas religion is as large as life, if only we could see how large life is!

A quote often attributed to Martin Luther is his exhortation for Christians to “re-live their baptism daily.” I think this is a good suggestion although I’d want to say that Christians should also look to re-live the message of the angel daily. Just as the angel announced to Mary that the Lord was with her and that; like Israel’s temple space, the Spirit of God would overshadow her and God would come to live in her; just as Mary received that message, so we receive the message, “The Lord is with you.” But only we can talk about the personal and particular moments when we really did feel that inner vitality, knowing the Lord to be with us.

As Christians, Jesus is our pattern, loving with a sacrificial love unto the end, but perhaps Mary is our model. We imitate Mary in order for our pattern, Jesus, to be born in us and in each other. By re-living the annunciation of the angel daily, remembering and meditating on those moments of our own inner vitality, we re-live our baptism daily, and we also understand baptism for what it is; the breaking of birth waters as God is born in us.

What will it mean for us this Christmas to re-live our moment of annunciation, to meditate on it? To be a mother to the image of God being born in us? What will it mean to meditiate on someone else’s annunciation? To be a mother to the image of God being born in them? To love that child as a mother? To understand Jesus’s sacrifice for us as a motherly form of sacrifice? To understand the hilarity of it all? What does it mean that the barrenness of winter is but the labour pains of the world and that, when the world is truely born, the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them ... and the toad shall laugh!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.