One little known fact about Father Christmas - and I am not making this up - is that in the year 325AD he punched someone in the face. I am sure he was very sorry about it afterwards. It certainly flies in the face of Jesus’s teaching about loving your enemies.
Father Christmas is best known for the giving of gifts - beginning with three gifts he gave to very poor girls - three daughters whose family had gone bankrupt and were about to be sold into slavery. And in the middle of the night Father Christmas crept to their house and tossed in three bags of gold, one for each girl. The stories differ - some say he climbed onto the rood and chucked the bags down the chimney - and even according to one version, the girls had just washed their stockings and had hung them up to dry over the fire and the bags fell down and fell into the stockings. Another version says he threw the bags on the day the girls came of each - and after the second occasion, the father waited up to see who would do it and “caught” Father Christmas delivering the third present - never a good thing waiting up to see if Father Christmas delivers you presents.
Father Christmas is most associated with giving presents - presents that remind us of the ultimate present - God’s gift to us of himself in the form of the baby Jesus “the exact imprint of the Father’s being” - “God the only Son”
So however bad a deed it might be - what would provoke Father Christmas to punch someone in the face?
Another question we might ask (and they are linked) is why we are celebrating Jesus’s birthday on the same day as what used to be a pagan festival?
There are plenty who would criticise us for celebrating Jesus’s birth on 25 December. There are even groups - both slightly weird Christian groups and also non-Christian groups like the Jehovah’s witnesses who would claim that the fact you ate a mince pie or gave me a present today makes you a crypto pagan. Which is to miss the whole point of what John Chapter one is saying.
You probably all know that the Queen celebrates her birthday on a day when she was not actually born. And it’s the same with Jesus. If you want to know when Jesus was actually born you’ll have to ask his mum because no one else knows. We haven’t a clue what month Jesus was born in and neither did the earliest Christians.
“In the beginning was the Word. The word was with God and the word was God… and the Word became flesh and lived among us”
The God - the one through whom all things came into being and without whom nothing came into being - that God would become a human being to save us - that was significant. Early Christians wanted to celebrate that. They didn’t have a clue when Jesus was born but they wanted a day to remember Jesus becoming a human being. What should they do? Perhaps they should take out their diaries and randomly flick through and pick 23rd June, 19 March, 8 August…. No. They didn’t do that. Instead - they read their bibles. What would Jesus do?
In John Chapter 1 we read - The Word became Flesh, and lived among us - or more accurately “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us”. Just as in the Old Testament when the Children of Israel wandered through the desert, God travelled with them in the arc of the covenant in a special, so in Jesus God pitches his tent amidst our tents and travels with us as we journey through life. God gets involved in our mess.
Jesus could have been born in a nice holy place like the Temple. Instead he is born in a stable, surrounded by animals. A pong smelly stable. When he is less than two years old, his family will flee as assylum seekers to Egypt. And when he grows up does he stick to holy places doing holy things? No. His first miracle is when he gets invited to some friends wedding, and much of his teaching happens at parties- not parties he has thrown, but parties he has been invited to. The story of Jesus is God getting involved in our existing lives. “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us”
So the early Christians wanted a day to celebrate God’s birth as a human baby. What would Jesus do? Well Jesus went to people’s parties and while everyone was having fun, he told them about God. “So” said the early Christians - “When are people having a party? - That’s easy: December.” Every culture, every religion in the Roman Empire, had a party in December. Why? Because December’s cold, it’s miserable, it’s horrible. Let’s have a party to cheer ourselves up. So everyone had a party in December. “Right,” said the early Christians “What would Jesus do? He’d go to that party”. So the early Christians picked one of those days - 25 December, and made it the day when they celebrated Jesus’s birth. And when their friends saw them having fun they’d ask “hey - why are you singing songs about Jesus rather than about Dionysius or Mithras” And as they shared good food with them, they would be able to tell them the wonderful story about how God loved them.
It’s why for example, one of the most effective pieces of Evangelism we have done as a church this year was to go and sing Carols and lead a children’s activity at the Blackhorse pub. They were having a party anyway. It would have happened whether we turned up or not. But we did what Jesus did in the Gospels. We took Jesus to the party. And surprisingly people found that this churchy stuff wasn’t boring or scary like they thought, and the kids who did the activity engaged in real faith questions while thinking it was all a game and only yesterday evening I had yet another conversation with someone who came up to me because he had encountered us in that pub.
Which is exactly why the early Christians picked 25 December to celebrate the birth of Jesus. They found a party and took Jesus to it. “The word became flesh and pitched his tent among us”
Which brings us back to why did Father Christmas punch a man called Arius. Now I want to emphasise that it is not biblical to go around punching people. Jesus tells us to love our enamies and pray for those who persecute us. But what could have provoked kind loving gift-bearing Father Christmas so much as to do that bad thing.
Well Arius had been trying to take over the church, and Arius taught that Jesus wasn’t the real God. Jesus was a demigod - god with a little “g” - something the true God had put together. “Here’s one I made earlier”.
Now lots of people don’t believe Jesus is God. There are plenty of people out there who will say “Oh well he was just a good man but I admire him”. Our Muslim friends will say “I have great reverence for Jesus. As a prophet”. Jehovah’s witnesses will say pretty much the same as Arius did - that Jesus is a demi-god, god with a little “g”.
All these people are deeply respectful of Jesus. What got Father Christmas so upset was that they weren’t dissing Jesus. They were dissing God. And they were saying God doesn’t really love you.
You see if Jesus isn’t really God, that means God sent someone else to do his dirty work. If they are right God wasn’t born in a stinky stable. God didn’t dirty his hands by touching leppers or washing feet. God didn’t suffer or die for you on the cross. No God just stayed up there in heaven, distant and safe, leaving Jesus to do all the tough stuff.
But what if Jesus is God. “The word was with God and the word was God… [God] became flesh and pitched his tent among us”
If we follow what the bible says and agree Jesus is God, then that means that God loved you enough to be born in really unpleasant circumstances, that God touched people whom no one else would touch. And that when it came down to it, God loved you enough to suffer and die on the cross. For you. “Hey - I love you so much I’ll send [pick member of congregation] to die for you” NO God didn’t send anyone else. God loved you enough to come himself and go through it all himself for you. Anything else would make God a cruel distant tyrant. But that is not God. God became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood. God became flesh and pitched his tent among us.
And that’s why the early Christians picked a party and brought Jesus to it. They picked the existing 25 December celebrations and made it the day when they would celebrate that God loves you enough - not to send someone else, but to be born himself, and do all this stuff for YOU.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
