May I speak in the name of God, the Creator, God, the living Word, and God, the Holy Spirit.

Merry Christmas!

Has anyone had good presents today?

<Conversations around presents – several tea pots were mentioned!>

Well, did you notice that today’s Gospel reading was about a gift, although it didn’t use that language. It’s all about a really amazing, stupendous, mind-blowing gift. Let’s dive in and see if we can find out more…

The reading from John starts off with God, together with the Word, the creator of everything. God created each of us in our uniqueness and differences. Take a look down at your finger, at the very tip of your finger. (You might need to remove your gloves!) Your fingerprint is unique to you. And if you were to dive into your finger, and go really small, you’d see cells and molecules, down to atoms and beyond, to quarks and other subatomic particles – God created all of those and designed how they’d fit together to make matter work. And, if we head off to the other end of creation, it’s just as mind-blowing.

Let’s go on a journey of imagination? We’re in Loughborough. Imagine that we travel vertically upwards, getting faster and faster. Are you with me? So, we’re looking down on the church roof, then the whole town of Loughborough, then all of Leicestershire and, as we go higher, the whole of Great Britain. As we carry on travelling, speeding up as we go, we can see the whole of planet Earth looking beautifully green and blue. On we go, further and further out into our inner solar system, we see our moon, the rocky planets and our Sun, as well as the Earth.

Further and further, we go. There’s Neptune! We are billions of miles away from All Saints. And then, as we move many, many more light years away, we can see the Milky Way galaxy. We could go on and on, and on. The universe is so huge and it’s getting bigger all the time. It’s mind-blowing. In comparison, we certainly feel very small indeed. But that’s not what God thinks…

Going back to the reading, the Word, Jesus, was there with God at creation. He too was God and ‘All things were made through him’: this universe and everything in it.

Despite this, God the Word, Jesus, cared about us so much that he took the plunge to came into our world, bringing light into the darkness. He came to earth at a specific time and a specific place, into a land of people who were occupied by foreigners, the Roman Empire. He came into a land where his parents had to journey a long way, even when his mother was about to give birth. He came to a land where very small boys were in danger because of a King’s jealously, so much so that his family would have to flee as refugees. So, it was not a safe thing to do. He didn’t come to a well-protected palace. The Word, involved in the creation of the enormity of the universe, who designed the complexity of the world and the laws of physics, atoms, quarks, Higgs Bosons, all those tiny, tiny things, and also everything on a massive scale…. He came as a vulnerable baby, was swaddled and placed in a feeding trough for animals.

This is the amazing thing about Christmas. God the Word, Jesus, chose to give himself to us, the most amazing, stupendous, incomprehensible gift ever. He come down to be with us, as a hugely vulnerable baby, unable to speak, unable to communicate, emptying himself of power.

Although He was with God, and He was God, the Word cared so much about us that he came down into the darkness of our world, bringing his light. And that darkness, despite him being a vulnerable baby, did not overcome his light, even though it tried its hardest later in his life. (We’ll revisit this in our communion shortly).

Even though the world came into being through him, the world didn't know him. He came to his own people, and his own people did not accept him. But, and this is the heart of the gift, to all those who receive him, who believe in his name, he gives the power to become children of God. That's the gift on offer to you, the offer from the God who loves you so much. No matter your complexity, no matter what's what has happened in your life, no matter your story, whether you are with people that you know and love, or whether you feel alone in the world, whether you are what's considered “normal” in our society, or probably even more if you're on the edges, if you're marginalised, because those are the people that Jesus particularly loved.

If you've been excluded before, perhaps because of your sexuality or gender, or class, or neurodiversity, or disability, or your race, or your finances… Whether you haven’t been to church for a long time or ever before, or if you spend all the time you can here at All Saints, the invitation is there for you. It's held out to you in love.

The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a Father's only son, full of grace and truth.

I suppose this Christmas, it's a time for all of us to recognise the deep truth that this baby doesn’t just mean a time off work and a time to party with friends and family. This baby is the most amazing gift, the offer of light and life and love, to me and to you, to all of us, and to everyone in the world.

I wonder what we will do with this light and life and love, with this stupendously, amazing gift that is offered once again to all of us this Christmas day? Let’s tear off the paper and receive God’s Word, the very best of all gifts, and become the Children of God.

Amen

As Richard sings ‘O Holy Night’ to us, let’s use this time to consider our response to God’s gift to us: our world, our community and to each of us individually.