What Happened Next? 

Well, its all over folks. December is done and this weekend’s tasks included the packing away of Christmas before schools headed back on Monday. Now the shop shelves are full of Easter Eggs and we’ve had our first church team meeting planning lent and the Holy Week services! 

And yet, for some it isn’t over. It never was: Christmas was a sort of blur in the midst of other things: busyness and stress, loss and grief, health struggles, family turmoil, the various challenges life throws up. 

We script Christmas now as such a crafted season, carefully put together in a mass of glitter and sparkle. Of course the events we remember weren’t like that. Although the actual moment of Jesus’ birth probably wasn’t like most of your popular nativity scenes depict, having a baby is never easy. And for Mary this must have been a moment of so many mixed emotions. The first child is always a muddle, winging your way through the haze of exhaustion, trying to work out what on earth it means to live life this new way, as a parent. But for Mary even more there was the mystery over this child, conceived not by the decision of her and her partner but by God, foretold by an angel, promised to be the son of God, the ruler over the people of God in an kingdom that would last forever. The words used by the angel who shared this prophetic promise with her (in Luke’s gospel) echo the ancient language of stories she would have been familiar with, speaking of the moment when the historical people of God, following God’s instructions, constructed a kind of tent temple, and the spirit of God came down and filled the space, physically present on earth. Now once again the promise was for this physical presence but this time it would inhabit the child her body had grown. And the significance was for an eternal promise to be fulfilled, the change God’s people had been waiting and praying for for centuries. 

I often wonder how it felt for Mary in the days after Jesus birth. I remember well having my children - but especially the first. That bewilderment, the total transformation of my life, now entirely revolving around the needs of this tiny demanding human. Not knowing what on earth I was doing. But on top of that carrying the weight of this promise… and then looking at a tiny baby who must have seemed a million miles away from ever fulfilling it. 

Our carol service this Christmas featured two monologues by local writer Katy Holbird, exploring the feelings of Mary and Joseph, reflecting back on Jesus’ birth. You can listen to them - and my own talk which followed - on our podcast. Mary’s words captured so beautifully the apparent conflict she must have wondered at: the weight of promise, spoken over this baby spoken of as something far beyond human - but who also had her eyes, displayed human vulnerability apparently irreconcilable with those promises and the dreams so many had for the future this miniature person would bring into being. And in the days that followed, the strange visitors, odd gifts, the prophetic murmur of a future that wasn’t going to be the classic victory most people expected the Messiah to preside over. We think of epiphany slightly detached from the events of the nativity (though for many it is all bundled up together!) - but most theologians agree the magi visited a small child, not a baby. This confusion, this dissonance continued throughout Jesus childhood. No wonder she pondered, no wonder her mind was alive with questions. How would this ever come true? How could what she was seeing ever be part of the same story she had heard spoken over Jesus? In all she had heard and been led to expect about how God was going to bring about the rescue of his people, this matched nothing, it was in no way what anyone had been looking for. But it was her reality, her everyday, her challenge to keep things going, to bring up this child, to trust in the promise spoken even in days which felt far from it. 

We often forget the what happened next. The days, weeks, months and years of waiting and working. The moments of drama and anxiety - panic even, when twelve year old Jesus - the same age as my own boy is now - went missing.  Constantly living with those two realities: the child who was dependent on them but the Messiah, the Son of God in whom the world placed its hope. Having to adjust again and again, all the time wondering when will this start to look like it might actually happen? Will it ever happen? Did I get it wrong? Its hard to hold onto the supernatural in the all too human moments of life, stress and just getting on with the everyday.

What does this tell us, in the muddle of 2025? I know many people living in the hope and yearning for a promise of God to be fulfilled. Specific words of prophecy or a more general recognition that only God can bring what is longed for: healing, breakthrough, hope and life. As leaders we dream of a day people return to God, discover how loved they are, find in the ancient stories of the Bible we tell and recall everything they are hoping and dreaming for. Actually though we too sometimes get hit by the mundane. The numbers in our Sunday services. The latest flipping drip from the roof that was only just mended. The debates over heating: is our building definitely too hot or too cold? And that door should absolutely be open - or is it that it should be closed? We hold all the opinions, all the emotions and frustrations of a community who quite often don’t want to hear the things we long to tell them, and the dissonances of promises of hope and flourishing in the midst of such difficult times for the church, achingly awful media reports, conflict and disagreement amongst the very people called to personify love, peace and patience. 

And we do all this in the context of a world that echos a much greater groaning of pain and conflict. We all wait, for the promise of a time when, as the prophet Micah put it so many centuries ago, “He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth.” As a priest  and leader I have had so many conversations this advent with others about the many situations we support and become part of that, if we are honest, do not turn out the way we hoped. The marriages that fail, the tragedies that are not avoided, the illnesses that persist, the harms that continue to be done. We watch people’s lives unfold and we do all we can in our pray to see something better play out. We all hold that conflict between the promise we trust in and the reality we see playing out before our eyes. The messy mix of humanity and something beyond us, something great, something of God. But the promise is yet to be fulfilled or fully visible. 

In all this we can remember three things, ripples from the Christmas story that continue. Firstly, that the present of human mess does not mean the promise of God is lost or left behind. Secondly, that we too can trust in something that is slowly growing, maturing, becoming. One day it will come of age and the true potential of God’s promise and heavenly intervention will be our experience, on earth as in heaven. And finally, that the most important message of the incarnation holds not just throughout Christmastide but always. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.  

In the meantime keep playing your part. Keep doing what you can and what you are called to to nurture and protect that spirit of all that is good and of God, ensuring it has the space and potential to grow. And we wait and entrust to God for what happens next.