Christmas - Year B

What a friend we have in Jesus.. that’s why we are here isn’t it?  to say to God:

. glad you sent Jesus

-       and what a bonus, what a gift he is in our lives.

Christmas.  God became human.  An act of great love on God’s behalf, and so, we believe, living proof that God in Jesus is someone who loves us, is therefore our friend.

I actually have a bit of concept trouble with this whole “Jesus is my friend” bit.  I struggle with the image…. I mean, I have friends, I know the “type” that is my friend, and as I go through my list of friends I have to admit Jesus isn’t there.

“I would like you to meet my friend Jesus….. “          mmmm

Friendship is a very special commodity and, it seems to me, one we value more and more as we grow older.  Perhaps it’s because we learn and realise and appreciate what true friendship is.  Perhaps it’s because as we journey with people, relationships become deeper and we value the investment of each in that relationship.

Because in my family-life circumstances I have always moved regularly, I value the true friendship that survives movement and change of circumstances in life.  It is then that the loyalty and trueism of friendship sustains and grows into that deeper way of ‘being friends’.

In this, of friendship, we look for common identity.  Not necessarily of sameness, but the identity of shared ways of doing life, of sharing an identifiable language.  There is an aspect of having enough in common to have a foundational base of mutual beginning.  I look back on life and see that mutuality growing from the same school, then the same interest clubs, then the same pre-school of children, then the same parish communities, etc.  For example, I met all my boyfriends at either tennis or squash clubs – at least I knew we would have a common sport language! and something to do….

So in all those aspects of what is shared and finding identity I just don’t figure the Jesus-friend.  I could be humble and say we just don’t have enough in common– but it wouldn’t be humility, it would be the truth.  I may aspire to be Christ-like but I honestly don’t want to be fully like Christ.  And thus, confessions of confessions, he would not be my first choice to go to the Coffee Club with… in fact, to be even more honest, that would have the potential to be one of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life.

Here’s a truth then; we tend to choose, very naturally and understandably, friends we are comfortable with.   I can also share with you that my advice to people who are contemplating marriage and life-partnership  is indeed to marry a friend.  You will always then have something to share, a commonality of liking each other, of a foundational nature.  In fact, I go as far as to say…. marry someone that in 60 years time you know you will still enjoy eating breakfast with.  Or at least not mind….

So, if not a friend, who is Jesus in our lives?

Why do we really celebrate at this time of the year “God among us”.?

Is friendship with Christ a myth to join the myth-perceptions of Christianity that already abound in this world?

Whatever happens from God says something about God… reveals something about God.  At the beginning of my words, we acknowledged the Christmas event as an act of love – God revealed that God loves us, humanity,  through this action.  Now it will go without saying, because it cannot be articulated humanly, that God’s love is beyond understanding.  The revelation of the Christmas event is one of the many images of God that comes to us through scripture and tradition. On our journeys of faith exploration and inquiry we accumulate such images, we investigate what there is to know about God.  And our accumulative “what is there to know” also becomes revelation for our knowing.  We thus “experience” God.

God becoming human, the Incarnation, is the supreme, mega-event to expose the potential of our knowing of God.  Through the action of the Holy Spirit of God, the Creator God became God as human.  In the mystery of God as Trinity you see, our knowing becomes one of God being in complete, mutual relationship with Godself.  A wise parishioner once shared in small-group that only in God do we find how to be and how to do perfect relationship. 

Now, on this Christmas night/day, as we distractedly worry about coping with just our human relationships at Christmas time… will Aunty Joan drink too much this year and offend everyone again?  will the incident of the never-returned Tupperware emerge again…  we can really become very disinterested in the relevance of God being perfect in relationship.  What has that got to do with my life? and indeed, how I will cope with Aunty Joan….

Christmas is not about remembering a story; it is about what God is calling us all in to.  God is calling that whom God made into the way relationship can be, which is much more than how we get on with each other.  Our exploring, growing, knowing of God leads us into the glimpse of moving from relationship to relationality…. the theologian Robin Greenwood uses this as a much stronger image of God’s own life.   And thus the life we are been drawn into also.

It is through this relationality that friendship with Christ becomes real and valid.  My own feelings about the discomfort and the lack of reality of such a friendship are humanly true for all of us.  But that’s because I was viewing it from the point of shared identity.  The friendship God offers is about offering mutual respect to each other as opposites.  It’s about finding a common border at which we can share, very simply, hospitality.  It is through this simple action that we allow ourselves, both us and God, to become more than the sum of our parts. 

The starting point for being friends with God is to acknowledge the absolute radical nature of Christ and that we are not to aspire to be “like Christ”.  We are being called into a friendship of mutual love only.  Just as we are loved, so we are to love and in that action, the simple response of love, we will together create a world, a church, a home…. where the fullest possibilities of growing up into God’s life are possible. 

It is simply embracing values and life not of this world and therefore, looking at appearances, nothing may seem to change.  I have a feeling Aunty Joan will still offend people today at Christmas lunch.  But placed in the big picture of being called into the framework of God’s chaos of mutual love, we are being called to more than cope with such situations and life.  We are called to act out, prefigure how God is with Godself and we are called to become communities of the character of God. 

Perhaps we need to change the line of that hymn “what a friend we have in Jesus” to .. “what friendship we have with Jesus” and the next line to be “and what friendship we are called into with Jesus”…. and another line would need to be “it is a friendship that changes my life and the life of the world”. 

Christmas.  God among us. God calling us.  God and us creating friendship to change the world beyond recognition.  

May that radical joy be yours this Christmas time.                                Amen.