29th December 2024               St Peter’s               Luke 2:8-19                        

In our imagination let’s go back 2024 years and three days.

So it’s the morning of Boxing Day and Joseph has just woken up. There’s a blank moment when he’s still more asleep than awake, but then , as he lies there, yesterday begins to swim back into his memory. 

The baby’s arrived  - Jesus is here now - he looks over at the manger and he’s asleep - sigh of relief; he looks at Mary and she’s asleep as well. Double sigh of relief.

His memory carries on working. There is something about shepherds, and about celebrating with shepherds. 

He knew Jesus was special and Mary obviously did, but how did the shepherds know? There  was something about angels as well. What else? He’d found a midwife too late for the birth but he was just glad that there was someone for Mary to talk to who knew what they were talking about.

It had taken Mary a while to drop off - and then Jesus had woken up a couple of times - if the birth was a shock for Mary and Joseph it can’t have been a picnic for Jesus either - so it’s reasonable that He was a bit restless. 

A more recent memory comes back - she’s gone back to sleep now but Mary nudged him five minutes ago because she wanted a cup of tea -  which depending on how far the wise men had travelled might have been just about possible.

Joseph gets up and gets on with it whilst thinking about what’s happened and how special it is and how utterly unlike anything that’s ever happened before it is 

..but then the midwife comes back and shatters his illusions. Apparently most of what happened - in fact almost all the things that struck him whilst they were happening - the time it took, the pain of it, the work of it, his spare partness whilst it was going on - the joy of it when it had happened  the whole astonishment of it - turn out not to have been special at all extraordinary yes but they’ve been ordinary as well.

Further - all the things that the midwife says they need to do to look after Jesus aren’t because he’s a special baby but because he’s an ordinary one. In fact, the midwife doesn’t see anything unusual about him at all. When she’s gone Joseph wonders where did the specialness of Jesus birth’ end and the ordinariness begin - he can’t tell but perhaps he decides - it doesn’t matter.

What can we learn from a God who chooses to live a life that has so much in common with everyone else’s?

Jesus is a God not just for the crises or the great joys - he’s there for the every day as well. Jesus didn’t cheat - there for the shepherds, angels and wise men and then skipping onto adulthood - he went through it all - crawling, toddling, those difficult teenage years when his parents were particularly stupid - Jesus lived through it at the same rate as the rest of us - which means that though he understands the particularly good and the particularly bad he doesn’t specialise in them. He cares about us when we are flat and when we are exuberant. Which means that we can keep a running conversation going with Him about whatever is uppermost in our mind - good or bad, vital or trivial

God born into the ordinary understands the ordinary.

And then -  something the wonder of which we will never exhaust - there is no way that Jesus could have shown His dedication to us, His commitment to us , His love for us more thoroughly than this. He doesn’t come to us as an outside expert - experts don’t come more inside than he did. He came, God with us, to be so utterly with us, to sink himself into our situation so completely that to the midwife, to Joseph and Mary, to those around he seemed like any other one day old, one week old, one month old baby. This is the love of a Creator for His creation, for us taken absolutely as far as it can go and we here now, whether in crisis or in ordinary, can bask in that love and be touched by it.           

Joseph, and eventually Mary and Jesus, wake up on the day after Christmas Day and get on with all the things they have to do. To the observer their plans for the day wouldn’t have seemed particularly ambitious. But just because something is ordinary it doesn’t mean God isn’t there.