City United Reformed Church
CHRISTMAS FOR ADULT CHRISTIANS
Session 5
In this session we will be looking at Mark’s Gospel and how the “Christmas” story in Mark relates to your own experience.
Pause for thought
Remembering that Mark was written before Matthew or Luke, what would you say is the “Christmas” story in Mark? Think about this before you read on, and don’t be afraid to use your imagination.
Did you get stuck? Use you online concordance to look up the word “son” in Mark (don't inlcude in your list references to "the Son of Man"--that's another issue). This will give you God calling Jesus “my Son”. When does that happen? What else is happening when God calls Jesus "son"? Who else in the Gospel of Mark calls Jesus the Son of God, or God’s Son or refers to him as the Son of the Most High? Under what circumstances? And when?
Read the story of Jesus’ baptism in Mark Chapter 1, where Jesus is named the Son of God. Would it be fair to call this Mark’s Christmas story? Baptism marks Jesus out for a particular way of life that will eventually get him crucified. Note that no one, aside from the odd demon, affirms Jesus as God’s Son until the Centurion does so at the crucifixion in Mark 15. (The demons and the high priest seem threatened by the idea that Jesus should be the Son of God.) Do we pick up some parallels with the dark, foreboding mood of Matthew’s birth narrative? The way of life promised to the baptised is not a bed of roses. For Jesus, it ends on the cross.
The best way to understand Mark’s “Christmas story” is to think of your own baptism, or, if you were baptised as an infant, of some moment of conversion in your adult Christian experience. (Don’t we all go through multiple conversions?). Read the challenge of baptism in the story of James and John the sons of Zebedee in Mark 10.35-45. What does it mean for us to take on the life of Christ for our own? Is it for glory? Or to put our life on the line?
Now, for further reflection, read this (short) sermon I preached here at City Church at the midnight service on Christmas eve in 2003 (I had this course in mind when I prepared it):
“The night before Christmas”
Our cultural historians tell us that it is the poem “The Night Before Christmas” published in 1823, which is more responsible than anything else for this holiday’s emphasis on children.
Before the Night Before Christmas was published Christmas was pretty much an adult affair, and Father Christmas was an enforcer of an adult insistence that children know their place. Cheeky children in those early days actually got the coal and sticks in their stockings that my parents used to comically threaten to put in ours.
The poem changed all that. Now Children’s dreams of sugar plums are answered by the cheerful elves of capitalist enterprise, but they are not very close to the biblical story of Christmas.
While we go into debt and work hard to conform to the world as it is in The Night Before Christmas, the Bible tells a story that is more true to life.
Here in Scripture is the story of children in peril. Here is the story of children in an adult world, where homeless families are turned out of hotels fully booked for seasonal indulgence, where children are refugees or die as victims, often the first victims, of political upheaval.
Conscious that the Biblical version of the Christmas story continues to be the more accurate account twenty centuries later, we gather here tonight in solidarity with the darkness in the lives of today's children, orphaned by or themselves dying from AIDS, for instance. While in Britain we all become children at Christmas, singing carols, dreaming of presents under the tree, escaping into a seasonal innocence, in Africa children who have lost their parents are forced to become adults, caring for their families, struggling for survival. How do we get in touch with their darkness?
How do we get in touch with the darkness of children who are abused, on the run, victims of cutbacks in our social services budget, preyed upon by merchants, their lives crippled by our mad rush to war against those we hate? It was into such darkness that Christ was born, not the snow-felted Bing Crosby mid-winter darkness they try to sell us, but that darker darkness from which the forgotten cry out in hope. We gather here tonight not in nostalgia but to learn to hope.
I do not think the tinseled, nostalgic lights of our winter festivities will teach us to hope. Christmas calls us to get connected with those who hunger, with those who thirst for righteousness, with the refugee who longs for a place of safety, with the peacemaker struggling to build an alternative to a world locked in conflict. Until we touch such darkness, and discover the light that shines from that darkness, we will never really know what it means to hope or be a people of hope, we will never recognize Christmas when it comes, but we will be condemned to a flat, shopping-mall landscape without meaning and without passion, where hope rarely rises above the lottery or the middle class toys waiting for us under the tree. We need to learn a deeper hope than what we have known. The night that comes before Christmas is important, in the same sense that you cannot have Easter without moving through Good Friday, no resurrection without the experience of the cross. Paul says at one point (Philippians 3.10) that he wants to share in the sufferings of Christ, even in his death, that through such experience he might know the power of Christ's resurrection.
So we must seek the darkness of night that comes before Christmas. The candles that we light here burn with the assurance that God is here in the darkness, that Christmas comes to those who meet each other here and join their lives together here. The candles that burn in this darkness assure us that Christ is born in such darkness, and perhaps only in such darkness, and for this we have reason to rejoice on this dark night, and on the darkest of all nights. Amen
How does the story of Jesus become your story? How have you struggled to embrace or avoid the challenge of baptism? No academic answers please. We’re moving beyond the analytic approach of the last few sessions to begin opening up the heart of the message in a way that touches our own hearts. But don’t feel pressurized to disclose in a way that leaves you uncomfortable. Look in your heart, and see where the “Christmas story” is being played out there, in your own life choices. Are you willing to be baptized with the baptism in which Jesus was baptized?