Our readings this week are, well... Genesis 3:8-14, Genesis 22:1-19, Isaiah 9:2,6-7, Isaiah 11:1-9, Luke 1:26-38, Luke 2:1-7, Luke 2:8-16, Matthew 2:1-11, and John 1:1-14!

They are, of course, the nine lessons of Nine Lessons and Carols fame.  It's a service that has been a part of Christmas celebrations for over 100 years, since its adaptation for use at King's College, Cambridge, in 1918.

These Lessons, though, tell of an even longer story.  They are intended to give an overview of the whole of human history - and in particular that history as understood as a relationship with God.  At the beginning of the story that relationship is one of loving creativity, of personal intimacy, of ease, and joy, and potential as we join Adam and Eve at the dawn of human history.  As it carries on it turns into a story of betrayal, of loss, and struggle as we walk with them away from Eden into the callings and reproaches of the prophets.  And it finds its fulfilment in restoration and reconciliation, as the God who cannot let his people go, steps into the world as a tiny baby, to grow, live, laugh, and love amongst us.

A telling at such a scale, though, comes at a risk.  It can tempt us to place the Christmas story at some distance from ourselves.  In the past, certainly, or perhaps more distant still, into the land of myth or fable - a moral lesson delivered as a bedtime story for children, or fuzzy feels through a primary-aged pantomime with tea-towels, fictitious donkeys and anachronistic kings...

Christmas though isn't fiction.  It isn't fantasy.  It is history.  

The clues are the details of the story - relationships teetering close to breakdown, poverty, oppression, refugees, the slaughter of innocents... when we look at it with the gravity it demands, this 'story' is far too realistic to be dismissed lightly.  It clearly takes its place in our experience of the world, and by so doing transforms the question we ask of it.  

The challenge of our Christmas celebration isn't to revel in it from a distance, but to recognise its presence: the story isn't over, and we're in it as much as it is in us.  The services we'll be joining make the point subtly and clearly - throughout, if you're attentive to them, you will find the story told not in the past tense, but in the present as we meet 'in this holy night' and 'on this holy morning'.

As God becomes human, heaven touches earth, eternity inhabits time, and we become players in the ongoing story of salvation.  We cease to be watching from afar, or rehearsing a well-known tale, and find ourselves standing in that stable, surrounded by this same world, and being asked to believe that this tiny child is God himself.  And as that moment becomes real, the question stops being, 'What does this mean?', and becomes, 'What am I going to do about it?'

Because if nothing changes, what was the point in opening the book?

With my prayers for a very blessed - and real - Christmas, God bless you,