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Carols by Candlelight Service
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Every Christmas, we hear the same story. Some of us hear it year after year, while others have only vague memories from childhood nativity plays. Perhaps some of us are hearing it for the very first time tonight. But these events happened 2,000 years ago, about 3,000 miles away. So how can it possibly make a real difference to us today?
We enjoy festive stories—maybe it's the Muppet Christmas Carol, or Love Actually, or even Die Hard. But do they really change us? What does the Christmas story have to do with us?
To answer this question, I want to look at the shepherds in the nativity story. They could have asked the exact same question: "What on Earth has all of this got to do with us?"
They are not Mary, who had to bear a child. They are not Joseph, being asked to adopt and care for the child. They are not the wise men, bringing gifts to Jesus. They are like us—ordinary people. This baby seems to have nothing to do with them at all.
Yet the birth of this child turns their world upside down and inside out in the best possible way. And it can do the same for us.
When we meet these shepherds, they are on a night shift out in the fields, looking up at the stars. Let me ask you: when you look up at the night sky, how does it make you feel? Does it fill you with awe and wonder, or does it make you feel small and insignificant?
There's a beautiful song in the film La La Land called "City of Stars" where the singer asks:
City of stars, are you shining just for me? City of stars, there's so much that I can't see.
That captures something important. When we look up at the vast universe, we ask ourselves the deepest questions: Does this vast universe care about tiny little me? Is there more to this than what I can see? Do I matter? Does anything matter?
Some of us hear voices telling us we're just "chemical scum on a medium-sized planet." The stars are accidents. Your sense of beauty, friendship, love, and joy—it's all just noise, meaningless noise.
But maybe others of us have heard different voices. Perhaps people in our lives made us feel like we don't matter, like no one really cares about us.
I think those shepherds would have felt pretty insignificant sitting in the dark. In their society, shepherds were not well-loved or well-trusted. They had a reputation for stealing from lonely travelers. They were poor, isolated, and shunned. None of them were looking up at the stars thinking, "Are you shining just for me?" They learned long ago that nobody and nothing cared about them.
But then, suddenly, as they sit shivering in the darkness and cold, a light blazes across the sky. The air around them ignites with bright and brilliant flame. An angel of God appears—a mighty supernatural messenger. The glory of God himself shines around them.
In an instant, they are no longer surrounded by darkness and cold. They are enveloped in light, beauty, and majesty.
What a moment that must have been!
They may have believed in God theoretically before that moment, but in that instant, they discovered that God was far more real than they had thought. I love that. I can relate to that. I chose to be baptized because I was intellectually convinced that God existed and that Jesus had risen from the dead. But when I actually was baptized, I had a totally unexpected, very tangible experience of God's presence, his realness, and his love. God turned out to be much more real than I had thought.
When we realize that God is real, we discover that reality is so much better than we think it is.
It's not all darkness and emptiness out there. It's not that love is a beautiful fiction and animal selfishness is the ultimate truth. No. If God is real, then love is the ultimate truth. Reality is not just meaningless noise—it's a symphony.
We sing carols together tonight. We sing at church every week of the year. We don't sing as a distraction from reality to cheer us up in a bleak universe. We sing because music, harmony, and beauty are at the heart of what is most real. This world is not an accident. It is a symphony, because there is a composer and conductor at the heart of reality. He is pure light, life, and love.
Reality is so much better than we think it is.
Yet straight away, when the shepherds see the angel and the bright glory all around them, Luke tells us something fascinating: they were terrified. Why?
Genuinely pure goodness up close is terrifying. It's terrifying because it's humbling.
We all get a sense of ourselves by comparison, don't we? By looking at what's around us and thinking, "I'm a bit better than average." If the universe is a bleak, selfish, animal place, then if I'm quite nice to my family and sometimes I give to charity, then I'm way above average, right? I'm a marvel. I'm the high point of nature.
But here's the thing: if the universe is a gift from a loving Creator who is pure, radiant, beautiful light—if he is perfectly good and I'm made by him to reflect his goodness—then I'm not above average. If that is who I'm made to be, then there is something seriously wrong with me. It's humbling. It's scary.
I once came across Oxford professor John Lennox responding to Stephen Hawking's claim that religion is "a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark." Lennox said, "Well, I see compelling evidence in both science and history that God is real. So I wonder if atheism might actually be a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the light."
That rings true to me. I think of a good friend who, when he's being honest, will admit that he's known intellectually for more than a decade that Christianity is true and that God is real. But he's been holding it at arm's length, trying not to think about it. Only recently has he realized that everything he's looked to for meaning has turned out to be empty. For far too long, he's just been afraid of the light.
But we don't need to be afraid of the light. That's what the angel says next:
Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a savior has been born to you. He is the Messiah, the Lord.
We don't need to be afraid of the blindingly bright goodness of God. Instead, we can be filled with joy. Why?
Because a baby is being born. This baby is the Savior—the one who will rescue and redeem people. This baby is the Messiah—the promised king that God had said he would send for centuries. And most shocking of all, this baby is the Lord—the word Luke uses to describe God himself.
The baby being born—Jesus—he is God himself turning up in human flesh and blood.
But the obvious question is: why does the angel tell them? Why does God send a choir of angels to these poor, unimportant shepherds in the middle of nowhere?
The angel doesn't ask them to do anything. They don't have a crucial role to play in the story. Without them, everything would carry on exactly as planned. They're like us in that respect—they're not needed.
So why is God telling them?
The answer is in the two most precious words in the whole account: "to you."
A savior has been born to you—for you.
This is what God is like. He's not telling them because he needs anything from them. He doesn't need them. He just wants them. He wants them to come and meet him. He wants to invite them into his light, his life, and his love.
I can imagine them responding: "Born to us? Are you sure? You know that we're nobodies, right? You know that we're poor, that we're outsiders, that we don't matter, right? Surely he's not actually being born for us?"
But the angel continues:
This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.
For us, the image of baby Jesus swaddled and lying in straw is cute and storybook magical. But for these shepherds, there was nothing distant about it. It was probably quite normal for poor families to lay their babies in mangers. Some of these shepherds, when they were babies, would have been laid down in mangers themselves.
So the angel is saying: "What has the Messiah, the Lord, got to do with you? He has everything to do with you. You'll find him lying in a manger, just like you did. He is one of you."
It's the same for us. We might ask, "What has God got to do with people like us?" And he says, "I've got everything to do with you. I was born as a baby just like you were."
This is the absolute heart of everything we celebrate at Christmas.
In Jesus, God gave himself to us as a gift. We didn't earn it. We could never deserve it. It's a totally free gift—a wild, wonderful act of divine generosity, kindness, and love.
In Jesus, God gave us himself to be close to us, to have a relationship of love with us.
There is a massive gulf between the blinding purity and goodness of God and our human moral messiness and failure. When anyone gets a true glimpse of God's purity and goodness, they are terrified. There is no way for us to cross that gulf ourselves.
Life is not a ladder that we have to climb step by step to eventually make ourselves good enough to impress God. Jesus said if you try to live like that, you'll become arrogant and judgmental, and eventually you'll be exhausted to the bone. It doesn't work.
But the message of Christmas is this: we don't have to climb any ladder to get to God, because God has stepped down to be with us.
He has come all the way down to give himself to us. Jesus has joined us in our family so that we can join him in his family. He's joined us in our darkness so he can welcome us into his light.
God himself was born as a baby—for us, to us. And that gift is totally free to us. But it's incredibly costly to him.
My wife Rachel and I had our first daughter, Emma, just two and a half months ago. I must say that the Christmas story feels a lot more crazy and beautiful when you have firsthand experience of what a newborn baby is actually like.
One thing that's absolutely mind-blowing is how weak and vulnerable a baby is. When Emma was first born, we were overwhelmingly aware of how easily she could get hurt. Almost anything can hurt her. She is absolutely powerless to look after herself or protect herself. She is totally vulnerable.
And Jesus was just as vulnerable. In order to join us in our family, in order to join us in our darkness, God took on a human nature and made himself vulnerable to our pain.
Not just as a baby—his whole life, he willingly shared our pain. The pain of uncertainty and fear. The pain of disappointment and betrayal. The pain of grief and loss. And ultimately, he made himself so vulnerable that he willingly took on our death for us.
I was struck this week imagining the little newborn baby Jesus that night—probably cold, probably crying out in the dark, crying in confusion about this strange, scary new world he'd come into. Constantly thirsty. Totally helpless. Totally powerless. Unable to protect himself.
And it struck me how similar his birth actually was to his death thirty years later. A grown man, but once again totally helpless. Nailed to the cross, unable to move. Desperately thirsty from blood loss. Once again crying out in agony in the dark.
In Jesus, God stepped down to us. He chose to become helpless. He took onto himself our weakness, our vulnerability, our pain. He lifted onto his shoulders all of our guilt and our failure. And he willingly died our death.
God stepped down as deep as death to be with us.
And what the angel said to the shepherds—what the whole Bible says to each one of us tonight—is this: he did it all for you.
You, the ordinary, unspectacular person. You who don't think you matter very much. You who maybe aren't that interested in God and very much doubt that he would be interested in you. He did it for you. He gave himself to you. Not because he needed you, but because he wanted to be with you.
So let me sum this up: What does the Christmas story have to do with people like you and me?
First: You are not insignificant. You are invited.
Sometimes at home I'll be working in my little spare room office, and Rachel will come in to make tea. She'll do a double take and say, "Do you want the light on?" As the daylight through the window has faded, I've gradually gotten used to the darkness and haven't noticed that I'm now working in the dark.
I think for some of us tonight, God is saying: Do you want the light on?
You've gotten used to it being dark in your world, but it really doesn't need to be. It's not supposed to be. Reality is so much better than you think it is. God is so much better than you think he is.
Please don't settle for a life in a dark, cold universe that doesn't care about you. That is not the universe we really live in.
Second: You are not needed. You are wanted.
I had a heartbreaking conversation recently with someone in my family who told me they weren't coming to church anymore. They'd gone for years and helped out in whatever way they could, but now they're old and can't really be useful anymore. And old people are just a bit of a nuisance, aren't they?
I have not been able to get that out of my head ever since, because I really want to say to her: That is not how God feels about you.
God doesn't think that just because you can't move chairs around or your voice is a bit too wobbly for the choir that you're a nuisance. He doesn't need you. He wants you. He loves you. He made you and knows you inside out.
And he loves you so much that he came to be with you. Jesus was born in poverty and died in agony so that he could forgive you for everything you've ever done wrong and scoop you up in his arms and bring you into his family forever.
You are not insignificant. You are invited. You are not needed. You are wanted.
I wonder how you react to that. Are you skeptical? Are you curious? Are you grateful?
Luke tells us how the shepherds reacted: "They talked to each other and decided to go and see." They took the message seriously enough to go and find out if it was true.
I think Luke wants that to be an example for us too. The whole point of Luke's book is to help people look into Jesus, to help people investigate, to help people see for themselves.
So let me encourage you: if you're here tonight and you're not 100% convinced either way—if you're not 100% sure this is all true but you're also not 100% certain it's not—let me encourage you to look into it.
In the little gift bags we're going to give you on your way out, there's a copy of Luke's biography of Jesus. Why not take it home over Christmas and read it? See what you make of Jesus. Then why not come and join us at church in January? You could sit in the back, just watch over our shoulder, and see what you make of Jesus's family.
Once the shepherds found Jesus and saw him, Luke says they did the same two things the angels had done: they told people the good news about Jesus, and they praised God.
I love that. These scruffy little shepherds—God gave them a glimpse into the beautiful, radiant heart of reality. They saw a choir of angels in the blazing light of God's glory, telling the good news about Jesus, singing God's praises.
And how did the little scruffy shepherds respond? They joined in. They lifted their little, weak, unimpressive voices and joined the symphony at the heart of reality.
So if you're here tonight and you're a Christian, and all this Christmas stuff has just gotten way too familiar—you've sung these songs, you've heard these readings so many times before—let these shepherds wake you up to the outrageous privilege and beauty of being a Christian.
The God of the universe has invited you to join in with the bigger, brighter, more beautiful reality at the heart of this world. He has invited you to lift your little, weak, out-of-tune voice and join in with the angels.
God doesn't need you. He wants you. He loves you so much that he entered into your poverty, darkness, and death so that he could bring you into his family forever.
