Swallowsrest

Christmas 

Children 

I wonder what you would do if you were God?

Some people would like to punish all the bad people in the world.

Some would like to stop the wars and cure all the disease.

We wonder why God doesn’t do these things.

God is full of surprises. God comes to earth as a tiny baby and lives alongside us.

God shares all our good times and all our bad times. God shows that God care for us and understands us.

God knows that this is how the world will change – not by waving a big stick and threatening to punish us, and not simply by making the bad things go away. God knows that if we change the world will change.

We will change the world if we learn from Jesus. If we learn to try to understand other people, if we are sad with them and happy with them. If we show other people that we care they will change and the world will change!

We need to let the baby Jesus be a part of our lives. Jesus will change us and we will then be able to change the world.

Christmas – 2020 Midnight

In the name of God who does not force us to conform to God’s will, but who enters our world in solidarity with us. Amen.

It might surprise you to know that I’m one of those people who thinks that they know how to solve the problems of the world – well now that I’m older I settle for slightly less ambitious goals. But I do still think I know better than some people. For example, there is a part of my brain that believes that Trump would not have won the election four years ago if only I had been able to share my brilliant insights with Clinton and her team. They would have stopped trying to confront irrational ideas and instead focused on the fears and anxieties that Trump was latching on to. Needless to say, I have no credentials to back up my ideas and no contacts in the US who could have passed them on! On a smaller and more local level, I feel that I have the solution for the new businesses in the street.  So, when I observe a new business owner sitting expectantly in an empty store or barber shop, I think to myself: if only they had had a grand opening and given everyone a free drink or if only they had offered the first ten customers a free haircut or shave. Of course, I’ve never run a business let alone started one from scratch, but believe you me, I think I know what would work. In fact, you wouldn’t believe how many amazing ideas I have to share with an unsuspecting world! 

I suspect that there are times for all of us when we imagine that we could do a better job – than government departments, than schoolteachers, than employers and corporations – maybe we even think we can do a better job than God.

We’ve all heard people say: “Why does God let that happen?” “Why does God allow corrupt governments to flourish?” “Why is there evil in the world?” A part of us expects an omnipotent God to break into the world brandishing a big stick and putting all to rights. When the world seems to be going awry, we long for an interventionist God who will impose God’s will and will bring an end to poverty, war and disease. 

But God does not conform to our expectations or behave as we might want. Instead of forcing God’s will on us, instead of dramatically and violently entering our world to punish the wicked and to put everything to rights, God surprises us by joining us in our struggles, by taking on human form and by showing us how it is really done, how change and transformation really happen – not by force, but through love, not by being over- bearing, or even by being right, but by being present with us and in us and living in solidarity with us through all our triumphs and all our failures.

We will not change others or the world through force, but we might just bring about change them by standing alongside others, coming to understand their struggles and their fears and by demonstrating compassion and understanding. 

It is only when we open ourselves, to the God who enters the world silently and unobtrusively, to the God who arrives among us in a cradle and who stands in solidarity with us, that our lives will be transformed and through us the whole world.