Emmanuel Church, Bungay, Suffolk

The Minister's Sermons

"We Light the Candle of Love" by Revd Bruce Waldron - 19th December 2004
Love is a catch all word in our culture that can run everywhere from physical attraction to the kind of kindness that a brother will show to his sibling through to a child hugging a pet rabbit. So, to light the candle of love, might mean anything at all, and probably does if we just tie it to the common use of the word love without giving it some content.
I wonder what you are thinking it means right now. Most probably we define love in terms of the most powerful experience we have had of love. For some people, that can be a terrifying image. For others it exudes warmth, security and stability. For others, the word love can evoke a great deal of pain. Others will immediately affix it to an image of indulgence. To some it will create an image of a stern and uncompromising boundaries.
So, we can't assume that this word has some cash value that everyone understands. I think its helpful to spell out what sort of content is being placed on the word love when we use it to light a candle in the name of Christ.
In the Christian context, we understand a number of givens that define what we mean. Love is an echo of God's love. When we speak about love as Christians, we can only explain what that means by reference to how God loves us in Jesus. Jesus love is both God's love and human love as it ought to be. The incarnation means that they are one and the same. God's love is not different to human love but rather, it defines what love really is.
When the ancient creation story says that people are created in the image of God, it means that there is a similarity built in. So if we say that God is love, then what falls outside of that description is not really love, from a Christian point of view. So there are a lot of things that our society will call love, that we won't, because we know that love means something else.
Love is not self serving. God's love shown in Christ was self giving. It wasn't the sort of love that is trying to satisfy its own needs by loving. Many years ago I remember a young girl, desperately deprived of love by her parents, who was internally driven to get pregnant, and she did. When I asked her why she said she just wanted a baby to love. She wanted an object to love to satisfy her own unmet needs. Love like that is very demanding; not so giving. Christian love comes from a simple imperative; to emulate God's self-giving love for the sake of the other.
Mary's love for God was very self giving. She risked everything for what she did for God. Joseph would have had a hard time too. He would have known how people would talk about him, and his wife. It wasn't an easy row to hoe that he chose.
I sometimes wonder how much I am prepared to give for God and how I would rate against the sort of self giving that God has shown to us. There is a danger that we can sink into the trap of thinking that our faith is there simply for us, so that we will have a nice safe environment in God's care.
But the love of God is prepared to sacrifice for the sake of a great vision.
To understand the events of Christmas, we have to read Matthew's account of the gospel with the same attention we give to Luke's. Last year we focussed on Luke's account of the manger and the shepherds and the angels. It is a nice comforting image, until you think about having a baby in a barn. That's not so nice.
But Matthew's story doesn't mention the manger. It talks about a house, a much nicer place to be, with wise men from the East coming to bring gifts to the baby. Then suddenly we are propelled into the brutality of Herod's murderous paranoia, the fear and horror of being a refugee, fleeing to a foreign land, and the horrific knowledge of what Herod had done to try and get them.
Joseph and Mary gave up a lot for the sake of their love of God and their faith that God was going to do something amazing and wonderful with their baby. Christmas is about giving we say - so it begs the question of what we are prepared to give for God, out of love.
We light the candle of love. Love is a very powerful emotion. It is an even more powerful way of life. John's gospel tells us that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him might have life, and have it abundantly. Now, if the love of God is really in me… This Christmas story is an enormous challenge to me, to my faith, to my emotional, physical and spiritual resources, if I'm to really mean it.
May God grant us all the faith to be real in our worship and our faith this Christmas, as we let the candle of love burn in our chapel, and celebrate the light that this may bring to the world.