Uniting Church President’s Christmas message 2004

In his 2004 Christmas message, the President of the Uniting Church, the Rev. Dr Dean Drayton, says the story of Jesus’ birth calls us to look beyond the safety of our own situation and see those without a home, in this land and worldwide.

This Christmas, for the first time in many years, Bethlehem might be open to visitors. There is cautious hope at the Church of the Nativity and on the street stalls and in the inns around. In the last few years only a handful of people have been able to get through because of threats of terrorist violence, and military roadblocks.

In 2004 The Passion dominated movie theatres and did more than just gross record profits and receive critical acclaim: it served to put Jesus back on the public agenda. It reminded people of the power and humanity of the Christ story. The fact that Christ’s birthplace might be open this year is a powerful symbol for those who might want, perhaps for the first time, to make a Christmas pilgrimage in the steps the holy family took some two thousand years ago.

More than two thousand years after the birth of Christ, the Christmas story still connects with us on many different levels, capturing our hearts and imaginations with the story of promise and fulfilment that the Christ child brings. “God with us” there in that setting! This God could be anywhere. Such risk, and such vulnerability in a baby cared for by parents caught up in forces seemingly beyond their control.

Their first Christmas was had “on the run”. Isn’t it extraordinary that one can still ask, whether a modern day Mary would have an open road to Bethlehem as Mary and Joseph had two thousand years ago? How often have the borders been closed to ordinary people on the move in extraordinary circumstances?

Two thousand years later in this our “lucky” country how many families live on the run this Christmas? The story of Jesus’ birth calls us to look beyond the safety of our own situation, and see those without a home in this land or worldwide the tens of millions of refugees on the move.

Today if a displaced family was forced to flee their home, cross borders and return to Dad’s hometown for a census, would they make it to their destination or would they be locked out?

And if they made it there, when they were again forced to flee this place, would they be locked in and not allowed to leave?

For Joseph, Mary and the Christ Child, the first Christmas was a Christmas on the run – a story of displacement and struggle, searching to find a place to live in a strange new land.

How many families are there still searching today – living without a sense of purpose or a sense of belonging? Be they the families and individuals locked behind wire in detention while they seek asylum or the many thousands of families who through their crippling financial situation will have no joy this Christmas. Or those who seem to have it all, but whose lives are caught within webs of work and routine and self-doubts that crush the life they long to experience.

This year the Christmas readings, week by week in church, will keep before us the plight of those who suffer because of those alternate systems that promise but do not deliver. In the midst of all the perplexing and the unforeseen, the purposes of God unfold in and through the birth of this child, the Prince of Peace, thwarting the power plays his very coming engenders.

Yes, with this child and his life and death to come, despite what roadblocks are put in place, the road to Bethlehem is open every year.

http://nsw.uca.org.au/news/2004/drayton-christmas-message_02-12-04.htm