Midnight 2016 - Being Evergreen

Lord, take my lips and speak through them;
Take our minds and think through them;
Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for Yourself,  Amen.

What a year this has been! A year full of the unexpected. 

A Brexit vote from the British people; Trump as America’s president elect, and Bake Off moving to channel 4 -but without Mary Berry, Mel, and Sue. Who on earth would have seen that lot coming. 

And people....

we have lost so very many people. 

David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Caroline Aherne, Victoria Wood, and many many more, the litany of names dropping like autumn leaves falling in the water. And that’s not even to mention the litany of sorrow greeting us almost every time we switch on the news. I don’t know about you but sometimes I really long for the dying to end. For someone to come to earth, to stretch out their hands and say ENOUGH. 

But what if...

what if there was a way to put a stop to this litany of death and sorrow once and for all, and people falling to the earth like autumn leaves. And more than that. What if there was a way to undo the deaths that had already happened and bring back those we have loved and lost.   What if, what if, there was a way to be evergreen? 

And that, in a nutshell is what Christmas is about. Jesus Christ was that someone. The one who came to earth not just to preach a few sermons and disappear, but to conquer the biggest problem the human race has on their hands; the problem of death itself. How?  By putting death itself to death on the cross and by coming back to life to change death itself into something different, something temporary;  heaven giving our dying earth the kiss of life. 

This is the real magic of Christmas and why we take the trouble to bring such a massive Christmas tree into the middle of the cathedral. You should have seen the difficulty our works department had getting a tree that size through the door. Feel free to turn and look at it, standing proud and green in the middle of the surrounding winter; bathed in light. The evergreen tree which has no fallen leaves. The symbol of Jesus who is ever green, ever alive, ever faithful, ever loving and most of all 

ever-with-us. 

Emmanuel: As well as being a carol it is one of his names. It means the immanent El; the one who is God but also one of us. 

So much one of us that he did not appear on earth as an adult. He was born as a baby. He had to learn to walk, to smile, to play and to talk. And why on earth was that? Why did The Word stay so quiet for almost 30 years?

Well he wasn’t doing nothing. He ate with us human beings, drank with us, grazed his knee, sneezed in a dusty room and just spent time being with people and learning to understand what it is like to live on this wounded planet that people sometimes call the valley of tears . And then, and only then, after thirty years, did he speak! And his words rang out through the centuries because they made sense. And they made sense because he'd spent so much time listening to the people around him. He spoke with same accent they did and told stories and jokes about the things that they found funny. "Have you heard the one about the camel that tried to fit through the eye of a needle?"

God grew skin, and skin bruises. God looked through human eyes, and eyes weep. God grew muscles, and muscles shiver when its cold. God gained hands, and hands miss the touch of someone they love when they die. Yet he has promised that the time will come, that those same hands who wriggled in the cradle, and were wounded on the cross will reach out and pull you into a world where you too can be evergreen and ever alive. If you want to come. 

And so the tree is not just a symbol of Jesus. It is a symbol of us too, and what we can be. it is a symbol of the glorious future that is ours for the taking. So this Christ-mass I invite you to gather around God’s table, and meet the one who longs to give us the most amazing gift, the gift of being evergreen. Amen.