TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my notes from this evening’s Metro Christian Centre Carol Service (22nd December 2024). May they bless you and encourage you to follow the Prince of Peace.

You may be able to watch this, and the whole service, via our YouTube channel, depending if we can get the sound levels correct. Please give us time to get this video ready.

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‘Because of God’s tender mercy,

the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us,

to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

and to guide us to the path of peace.’

—Luke 1:79 (NLT)

What is it that makes a Christmas song a Christmas song, and a Christmas film a Christmas film?

I’m asking because I’m confused over what makes the list these days.

For example, I have a Christmas album at home containing songs I don’t think are Christmas songs.

Maybe you’ll agree with me in saying that Stay Another Day, by East 17, is not a Christmas song, regardless of the snow in the music video and despite the fact that it kept Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas from the UK top spot in 1994. Poor Mariah had to wait twenty-six more years to get that coveted Christmas number one spot (2020)

The Power of Love (1984), by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is an amazing song, deserving airplay throughout the year. Nevertheless, this eighties’ classic is not a Christmas song, unlike Last Christmas by Wham!

Swinging on A Star (1944), sung by Bing Crosby, is a crooning standard and, yes, Bing Crosby’s voice is a necessity during the festive period (it would be a crime to exclude Crosby’s tones from any Christmas album). But Swinging on A Star is not a Christmas song.

It is not only songs, films also get mislabelled.

I recently saw a top ten list of the highest rated Christmas films. It rightly included the films It’s a Wonderful Life and Home Alone. But also included Edward Scissor Hands, Silver Lining’s Playbook, Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, and a Jack Lemon classic from the 1960’s called The Apartment.[i]

The world’s gone mad!

At least we can all agree that Die Hard is a Christmas film.

I heard that groan. But, I stand by what I said; Die Hard is a Christmas film—possibly the Christmas-iest of all movies. After all, it’s an epic rescue story.

In Die Hard, a terrorist organisation, led by Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber, invades an LA skyscraper on Christmas Eve taking a group of people hostage. Little do these terrorists know, however, that hidden within the hostages is Bruce Willis’ very ordinary looking John McClane—a New York cop, who is willing to get grubby, bloodied and barefoot as he goes toe-to-toe against evil in order to rescue those held in captivity.

The Christmas story is a little like Die Hard.

What started in that manger in Bethlehem was an all-out war against the forces holding us and our world captive.[ii]

According to C.S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection is the story of how the rightful ruler has come, in disguise, like Die Hard’s John McClane, I suppose, into enemy-occupied territory in order to liberate hostages and invite those liberated hostages to take part in a great campaign of sabotage against all evil.[iii]

Within the story of Jesus’ birth, one person sings about it as God rescuing us from our enemies; as God saving us from sin; as God bringing light to those trapped in darkness and the shadow of death; as God leading us down the path of peace.[iv]

The outcome of this rescue mission, as the angels sang it to the shepherds all those years ago, would be ‘Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, goodwill among men.’[v]

It only takes a quick glance around our world to see that we live in a world in desperate need of peace. Our world is a wounded world that continues to wound.

Even now, as we are gathered together, the conflicts in the Middle East, the war between Ukraine and Russia, the strife in Sudan, to name a few, all continue to rage on, getting hotter and hotter, as people suffer unthinkable violence.

In our own shores and in our own neighbourhoods, life is hardly trouble free, either. We experience pain, trauma, bad news. Poverty increases. Abuse transpires. Injustice prospers. There are people who inflict us with problems and people we inflict problems upon. Daily life, though mostly good, seems tainted by a shadow of sorrow and darkness.

There have been many times this year when I have asked,

Where is the light?

Where is the peace?

Where is the rescue?

I’ll be honest with you, at times I often think, ‘if only Bruce Willis’ John McClane would show up! He’d sort it all out.’ When trouble comes, I guess we all hope for some John-McClane-like character to arrive and take care of the troublemakers. And sometimes, if we’re being really honest, when we’re tired of waiting for such a person, we are even willing to become like John McClane and do whatever it takes.

The problem is, even though John McClane’s goal is certainly better than the bad guys, his methods are the same.

On his “path of peace”, John McClane is willing to kill whoever stands in his way. Bruce Willis may rescue the hostages, but there’s no peace in what he achieves—a Die Hard Christmas leaves behind a high body count and a lot of destruction.

This is not the way of God.

When God rescues, he doesn’t turn up with a machine gun shouting ‘yippee ki-yay’. God rescues us from darkness not by being dark, but by being light. He saves us from tyranny by not being a tyrant. He comes in vulnerability, as a child, becoming one of us. As an adult he teaches loving others and loving our enemies. He topples evil by doing good. ‘Jesus is so nonviolent [so non-destructive] that all you had to do was touch him and you would be healed.’[vi]

God doesn’t kill for us, but dies for us—dying for those he is unwilling to see die.

In Jesus, war, violence, hate—that unholy trinity, those enemies of peace—are abolished, he overthrows them. He makes peace between us and God, and calls us, as C. S. Lewis reminds us, on to a path of peace toward each other. In Jesus, a better world, a better life has come—a life that is at hand to all of us here tonight.

You see, the reason I’m left wondering where the peace is, where the light is, is not because Jesus failed to bring us peace and light. It’s because we, myself included, are often so resistant to following the path Jesus made for you and me—we would rather follow after John McClane than Jesus Christ.

Jesus once said that the path of destruction is wide and many people pursue it. But the road that leads to life—the road God’s Kingdom takes, the path of peace—is narrow and only a few people find it.[vii]

We have a choice.

And in my opinion, one of the people who described this choice best in recent Christmas music was John Lennon. He put it this way:

So this is Christmas | (War is Over) | (If you want it)[viii]

Tonight, I want to invite you to see the peace that has come to us in Jesus.

I want to invite you, as C. S. Lewis described it, to follow Jesus and join this campaign of sabotage against evil using the peace-making methods of Jesus.

I want to invite you, like the last song that was sung [Matt Maher, Glory (Let There be Peace)], to acknowledge the peaceful reign of God and allow that reign to start in you.

Christ has come. So let there be glory given to God in the highest, and let there be peace among men.

Amen.

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‘The ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for… God is our last hope because we are God’s first love. We are God’s dream for his world and his image on the earth he loves. God is waiting for his human beings to become truly human… God is waiting for human human beings… God is waiting for his image, his echo, his response in us… God isn’t silent. God isn’t dead. God is waiting… God is restless in his Spirit until he finds rest in us and in his world.’

—Jürgen Moltmann[ix]

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[i]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Trends_in_Christmas_Movies_over_nearly_a_Century_%281925-2022%29.svg

[ii] Hebrews 2:14; Matthew 1:20-23; John 3:13-17

[iii] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: ‘Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.’

[iv] Luke 1:68-79

[v] Luke 2:14 (italics mine)

[vi] John Dear, The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence¸  p. xiv

[vii] Matthew 7:13-14

[viii] John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Happy Xmas (War is Over)

[ix] Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, pp. 40-41