CHRISTMAS EVE and DAY

Not to be copied or republished without written permission

CHRISTMAS EVE and DAYDecember 24 and 25 2007

God Actually Likes Us

Grant Bullen

Christmas Sermons

Some years back I took a priest-friend out to lunch to mark his impending retirement. I said that he must be feeling sad, knowing that this would be the last Christmas he’d celebrate as a parish priest. “On the contrary”, he replied… “I’ve been preaching Christmas sermons for 40 years and I haven’t had anything new to say for the last 30 of them. I’m entirely glad that I’ll never have to do it again!”

He’s right… Christmas is the hardest sermon of the year. So many words have been said about it, how can you come up with something fresh? It’s quite daunting… But a few years back I came up with a fool-proof system.

The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams,is arguably the most brilliant scholar-theologian ever to occupy that esteemed chair… and that’s high praise because there’s been some good ones over the centuries. I love his writing… but he can be incredibly dense… You know, one of those writers you need to pause and reflect carefully over their every sentence because he crams so much into it. He’s quite exceptional! So this is my system… I wait until he releases his Christmas message and then I bounce off whatever pearl of wisdom he offers. It’s fool-proof! I don’t even try to think of a Christmas sermon… I just steal his!

So in a press release from December 12th, titled ‘Archbishop’s Christmas Words of Wisdom’, here is what the great Christian theologian has to say in 2007… (Are you ready for it?)

“One of the main things that Christmas means to me is that God actually likes (us).”[i]

God actually likes us! ... God actually likes us!

At first take it might sound disappointing… too simple… too childish perhaps. But let’s take ten minutes and unpack what he’s saying.

The Incarnation

When Christianity burst upon the Greco-Roman world 2,000 years ago, it was regarded as revolutionary. Its assertion of a God who loved all humanity was outrageous and inconceivable. You see in the pagan world, the gods were at best ambivalent in their attitude to people – sometimes cruel and malevolent, but normally just disinterested. A lot of pagan religious practice was about trying to please, manipulate, bribe and placate these essentially disinterested heavenly beings… trying to convince them to use their power to prosper selective nations or individuals. There was never any thought that a god would favour all people… but only those who by worshipping the right idol, or offering the correct sacrifice could ‘buy’ their interest. They were often fickle and being on the right side of them was often a matter of pure luck.

It’s into this world that Christianity comes, telling a story of a God so lovingly disposed to humanity that He commits His whole life, indeed His very being to their welfare. Instead of hugging the remote safety and comfort of divinity in heaven, this Christian God comes to live not only with us… but as one of us. God loves us! And not only that… God actually likes us.

In the ancient world this was regarded as ridiculous… unbelievable… and if wasn’t for the historical fluke of it suiting Constantine to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire, the faith inspired by Jesus would probably never have been more than a minority oddity. At the time it provoked a revolution in the way ordinary people saw the world. Because of its impact on western culture it did in a real sense change everything. We’ve grown up with it, unaware of how central concepts, like the dignity of the human person, were radical notions introduced by Christianity. God actually likes us! It was a new and novel idea.

And now in the 21st century, even though the Christmas story is so well-known and sentimentalised so as to no longer shock us, the idea that ‘God actually likes us’ is still both challenging and hard for us to believe.

Part of the challenge lies in the ‘us’. God actually likes us! It’s not just that God likes fine people like you and me… but that God likes humanity… all of us. And that includes the people we choose not to like. Those people we’re afraid of. Those we despise. You only need to consider the public discourse of professed Christians, to realise how difficult many of us find it hard to accept that God doesn’t have favourites… that God doesn’t select between those who are worthy of being liked and those who are not. The Christmas story, what we call theologically the story of the Incarnation, is good news for all people because God’s love and approval extends to all humanity.

Some of us do find that hard to hear… but I have a hunch that there might be one thing that is even tougher. That is accepting that God actually likes me!

The Birthday Party

I turned 50 a year or two after we shifted here from Adelaide. I carry a child-hood hang-up about birthday parties, so it was really only to humour my wife and daughter that I gave-in to their insistence to do something. I thought I could manage a quiet dinner with a few family members who by chance were going to be in Melbourne that weekend. I dutifully sent off invitations to close Adelaide friends… far too late for them to accept… And to my ‘horror’, almost all of them said they were coming! So there I was at my 50th, looking at the faces of long-time friends… all of whom I would judge that I’d significantly let down at different times… who’d gone to considerable effort to let me know they loved me. I couldn’t wriggle away from it. I had to accept that despite my own struggle to accept myself, these friends who knew me far too well, actually did like me! It was exquisite agony… being pinned butterfly-like by their approval. It was also liberation.

Well I know mine’s a tortured psycho-pathology… but one I also know is not at all uncommon. The great desire to have people like us… love us… approve of us. And yet that nagging deep seated fear, indeed conviction… that we are at our core… unlovable!

The Human Journey

Yes, the masks we learn to wear are quite convincing, but underneath many of us find ourselves difficult to like. And so we find it hard to believe that others, let alone God, can like us. Sometimes it is those who present the most confident front of self-approval, who struggle most fiercely in their hidden places. This seems so widespread that I’m tempted to think it’s somehow hard-wired, whether by culture or genetics, into our humanity. And so we spend too many years, trying to please, trying to earn approval and acceptance.[ii]

But there are these moments, these epiphanies that challenge our self-deprecation and offer us a glimpse of an entirely different world. Moments like my 50th birthday party… a surprise friendship… an unexpected affirmation from a colleague… a letter of thanks… Where a different voice speaks… breaks through and says, ‘No, that’s not the way it is at all!

Well, that’s how the Christmas story is designed to function.

Good News

The Christmas story is a radical breaking-through of good news into our collective human psyche. “You know how you used to think it was like this… you know, about having to earn approval. Well, it’s actually not like that at all. The central truth of this whole life and humanity business is that… God likes us. God actually likes us!”

I know it sounds outrageous… simple, naïve and unbelievable. But what if it’s true?

It changes everything. The whole orientation of the universe is friendly towards us. God… or… the Creator, the Spirit of Life, the Essence of all Being… however you would describe the spirit that initiates and sustains this thing called Life… is actually friendly towards us. There is nothing we need to prove… nothing we need to earn… nothing we need to achieve. Being loved is the foundation of this whole life business… and we can’t stuff it up. All the struggle is totally unnecessary.

It’s a wild story! God chooses to live amongst us. God chooses to live as one of us. Why? It’s simple. God actually likes us!

[i]Full quote was … “that God actually likes the company of human beings.”

[ii]Or if it turns bitter… we can slip into lifestyles designed to punish the world for not liking us.