Homily - 4th Sunday of Advent & Christmas Day - 24th & 25th December 2023

Homily

4th Sunday of Advent & Christmas Day

24th & 25th December 2023

The night before writing this homily, my mind was very active going over ideas for what to write. What came into my head were thoughts of how we humans have a voice and how prayers need to be spoken as part of a group to give praise to God the father.

I was thinking of how stories in the Bible often foreshadowed various situation to set up prophesy for future events, such as Isaiah telling King Ahaz that a virgin would give birth to a child who would be called Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’.

In the reading from Luke for Christmas Eve, the Angel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary to tell her she will conceive a child, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that she must name him Jesus – which means ‘God saves’.

Christmas Day's gospel is from the start of John which says, ‘in the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. Everything was created through him and without him nothing could be’. We are also told about Jesus’s cousin John and how he was a voice in the wilderness preparing the way.

In the early hours, my mind churned over how words are so important in our lives. They can be used for good or bad. Words can cut through someone like a sword straight to the heart. We can be injured by words just as easily as we can be raised up and encouraged.

Why do we always fall towards the negative, by either putting other people down or ourselves? In counselling this is called automatic negative thoughts but where do they come from? What is the influence that makes us see catastrophes everywhere?

These are important questions because they inform us that we all have these thoughts and if we follow science with cause and effect or that energy cannot be created or lost so it is always there just transforming from one thing to another, we should be able to track where it came from and where it is going.

Biblically we talk about temptation. From the Lord’s prayer we ask God to guide us away from temptation. Temptation is the desire to do something, especially something wrong and unwise. Jesus was tempted by the devil in the desert but resisted. Unfortunately, in everyday life we are tempted, especially through the media, we are bombarded by adverts to spend our money on one thing or another. We are encouraged to get the latest thing, even if we have no real use for it.

In Ian Fleming’s book The Spy Who Loved Me, the story is about a young woman called Vivianne Mitchell, a runaway who is given a job at a hotel far away from her family, owned by two dubious characters who are about to carry out an insurance fraud to claim money by having the hotel burnt down. Vivianne is being set up to get the blame, but also would die in the arson attack. It is James Bond who saves her by chance. He has a small role in the story.

Some of the details in the story include how honeymooners staying at the hotel would rob the furniture in their rooms, because they could not afford to buy it themselves and this was why the hotel was failing.

Nowadays, young couples expect to have everything in their homes right from the start, putting themselves into debt. Whereas the previous generations would have spent a lifetime building up their homes into what they had dreamed of when young.

All this leads to us desiring a life that often is beyond our means because the way we are being influenced by society around us.

Proverbs 23: 4 to 5 says don't wear yourself out to get rich; because you know better, stop! As soon as your eyes fly to it, it disappears, for it makes wings for itself and flies like an eagle to the sky.

What are we being tempted away from? The answer is God. Why? Because the devil was jealous that God chose Mary to be the mother of his son Jesus and her beauty out shone his own, as the Angel of Light. For this reason, in the Book of Revelations the dragon waited for the woman, crowned with twelve stars and the moon at her feet, to give birth to her son, but the child, who would be the shepherd of all nations was taken to heaven and the angels took the woman to safety.

What we today are encouraged to do is to give praise to God the Father for all our blessings and to turn away from our selfish ways. Jesus came into the world to surrender all to God the Father, to take on our sins, even though we are not worthy. Jesus was judged in our stead, so that we could be saved.

This is why in these dark days of winter the glory of our God shines through the darkness and cannot be extinguished. This is why we should use our voices to shout out our praise to God, to sing like the angels, hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord for today our saviour was born. Amen.

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