Sixty-Second Sermon: The Trouble with Christmas

On Sunday 8 December 2019, Graham Nicholls, Director of Affinity, offered this Sixty-Second Sermon on the BBC Radio Sussex and BBC Radio Surrey Sunday Breakfast programmes:

Advent can be a difficult time of the year. I’m not just talking about the trials of negotiating the streets of Brighton with a billion other shoppers, or listening to the mangled versions of Christmas carols and songs blaring from nearly every shop.

Nor about the dilemma of when to start saying ‘Happy Christmas’ to people. There are complex calculations to make: distance from Christmas Day divided by the likelihood of seeing the person again before December 25th, multiplied by how much you like them. And when do you stop saying it? And then there’s the whole Santa Claus thing…

As Christians, there can be a tension between what is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of the Son of God and the sugar-coated, consumerist, “magical” idea of Christmas that it has now become.

We want to celebrate the birth of Jesus, and we do want to take the opportunities presented to us at this time of year the encourage people to consider the Christian gospel. We want them to come to events specifically put on by our churches at this time to capitalise on it being the season for Christmas carols and because there is still some residual sense in the culture that going to church in December might not be the most ridiculous thing imaginable. Whether we like it or not, the reality is that this is the one time of the year when more people go to church.

And for us it really is a time when we can especially remember the earth-shattering, historical reality that Jesus became a man, and that this man went on to die for our sins to save us and bring us to God.

And it sets our hope and expectations, not for a season of celebration but for an eternity of celebration in the presence of God.

I pray for all your personal reflections as you prepare for the Christmas period, for good conversations with friends and family.

I pray for all church events over Christmas: I know if you are a Christian leader it can be hard to get the tone right, to connect with Christians and the many guests who might come to our church, to remain fresh and relevant.

But, more importantly, as we prepare for Christmas, I pray that we might all marvel once more at “our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man”.