Midnight & Dawn Eucharists 2011

Fear not the coming of your God: fear not his friendship. He will not straighten you when he comes, rather he will enlarge you...You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

Words on Christmas from Saint Augustine who lived at the turn of the fifth century.

I was taken by his image of Christianity as enlarging.

It’s so against people’s perception of what we’re about.

Yet the Babe of Bethlehem accepted those swaddling bands to give us the glorious liberty of the children of God.

God got straightened, bound up, so we could find new spaciousness and the power to become children of God.

Recently I had one of those awkward medical examinations and I amused my examiner by muttering courage equals fear plus the Holy Spirit.

To be a Christian is to have a capacity to rise through natural fear into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

To know you are loved, that God’s Spirit has been poured into your heart, is to connect with the centre of the universe and see his perfect love casting out your fear and its oppression over you.

One of the saddest caricatures of Christianity is that it’s narrow minded, a sort of strait laced morality. That Christians are holier than thou’s sent as moral policemen to keep the world in order.

I’ve been there, and maybe still am there, God knows!

A priest once had the privilege of speaking to the comedian Groucho Marx. I’d like to thank you, Mr. Marx the priest said, for all the joy you’ve brought into the world. Quick witted as ever Groucho replied And let me thank you, Father, for all the joy you’ve taken out!

God forgive us Christians for making our religion seem so constricting.

Tonight/today Jesus was bound in swaddling bands to set us free but we’ve undone his work trying to bind the world with strictures not of his making.

The Victorian priest Father Frederick Faber captured this in two verses of his hymn There’s a wideness in God’s mercy:

For the love of God is broader than the scope of human mind, and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind. But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own; and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own.

When people look at a Church door they too often think of it as a way to narrow down your existence. Jesus did say enter by the narrow gate!

Once you come through the Church door – and I mean really come through into day by day discipleship and week by week worship - it’s more like the door of Doctor Who’s Tardis. You enter another dimension, the very dimension opened up by tonight.

I believe the new glazed doors serve this perception in the way they open up St Giles to our visitors.

God became man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine – so he can live in you and me, opening up our horizons to his and widening our human possibilities into his.

There are people in Horsted Keynes this Christmas who’re struggling through cancer, unemployment, family breakdown or whatever who know this – I’ve seen them brave their fears and take a larger view!

When the One born to raise the sons of earth comes into our lives he enlarges us to make the most of the world around us in all its frailty.

Man is the macrocosm wrote Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. The whole created universe is the microcosm.

Human beings are pivotal to the universe because they bring the mind and thought of God into matter and there’s no thought or word of God without power.

Welcoming God’s love and his Holy Spirit gives us a life. It makes us what we’re meant to be according to God’s plan for the cosmos.

O Christian, be aware of your nobility wrote St Leo in another 5th century Christmas sermon. Be aware of your nobility. It is God’s own nature that you share: do not then, by an ignoble life, fall back into your former baseness.

Or St Augustine once again: Fear not the coming of your God: fear not his friendship. He will not straighten you when he comes, rather he will enlarge you...You see then, if you love, how much room he gives you. Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love.

Look indeed, on this holy night/morning, and see in the Crib that immense love which makes you noble!

Pray for yourself and for all of us to live as God made us to live!