Samuel Beckett’s mysterious play Waiting for Godot was running again recently at the Old Vic. It is not a play greatly renowned for its action; just two tramps sitting on a bench waiting. Waiting for what? It transpires that the waiting has something to do with God. It also transpires that both men are troubled by universal questions like the meaning of life and death.

They trouble us too. Most of us ask from time to time: Has life got any point to it? Is everything so random, so pointless, so utterly a-moral, that when your time comes- phut! That's it.

I'm sorry if that is a discordant note to strike this Christmas morning. You have every right to expect a cheerful sermon - and you will get it presently - but it does no harm to acknowledge some of those discordant notes which at times drown out the music of life. My ministry this year has again taken me into places where there has been much human grief and problems seemingly too huge to resolve. Situations which force us to ask: What is the point to it all? Where is God when things go wrong? And what is he like anyway?

The Bible approaches that last question in two major ways. From one perspective it says: ‘No one has seen God at any time’. In other words it tells us that God is beyond time and space. He dwarfs all that we can imagine and all we can know. Our finite minds cannot take in the awesome size of the universes that encompass our tiny planet. This God we have to do with is one whose being is in many respects ‘incomprehensible’. We need a big view of him.

As the poet Lawrence Housman put it so well in his 'Christmas Carol' :

‘perfect love, outpassing sight
O light beyond our ken,
Come down through all the world tonight
And heal the hearts of men’

But from another perspective the Bible says he can be known. And known supremely in the child whose birth we celebrate today: ‘Immanuel, God with us’. Yes, with us. No longer do we have to wait; he is here, now, accessible and knowable. It was he who took the initiative and came to live among us.

I have often wondered what kind of God Estragon and Vladimir, the two tramps in that play were waiting for. Would they have recognised him if and when he had turned up? Was it an intellectual deity they were seeking; one who would satisfy their minds? Or were they looking for someone they could experience?

Would they have recognised him in the face of that child? I doubt it very much. But it is there that the Christmas story directs us : not out but in; not above but below. To a shabby manger, to a relatively poor family, to a sleeping child. The story powerfully challenges our conventional ideas of deity. Here is God coming to us not with trumpets, not with the splendour of royal courts nor the trimmings of power - but in weakness. Meekness and majesty; the majesty of weakness and the meakness of true divinity.

This year I have seen God at work in a number of new ways. I recall meeting a middle aged man in New York dying of AIDS: that man had found God in his illness and now faced his imminent death with cheerfulness. Or again I think of the letter I received from a Ugandan Bishop whose wife had died as a result of stepping on a land-mine. In it he expressed his intense grief but also a triumphant, confident faith. The kind of faith that humbles you when you meet it and leaves you questioning your own unfaithfulness. The same faith displayed by Mother Teresa whose remarkable life could only be explained by being overwhelmed by God. No wonder the book about her by Malcolm Muggeridge was entitled ‘Something Beautiful for God’. She brought God near to thousands of people.

But how does one bring these two perspectives together? How can this great unknowable God, beyond the reach of our finite minds, come to us in the form of a tiny child? Is this one myth too many?

Surely not. For if God is so great, his capacity for humbling himself must also be great. It is a curious logic which says ‘God is so great he can't possibly enter human existence’. The Bible is clear that it is precisely because he IS so great that the incarnation becomes possible. William Temple once observed that Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions. He meant by this that Christianity gives dignity to our humanity and the world we live in because of the fact that God became one of us. For it is in that child that we find him. As Paul Claudel, the French Playwright exclaimed, on becoming a Christian: ‘O God, you have become a person’. Not an abstraction, nor a great ‘question mark’, but a person.

Immanuel; God with us. Still with us. Not absent from the poor, the broken-hearted, the refugee and the homeless. Not absent from the single mother, the person living on the bread-line and the unemployed teenager. But with them, as with all of us.

And God being ‘with us’ is the inspiring centre of the Church's witness and its basis for its mission. Because, if God came to us in the person of Jesus Christ it means that he came to stay. It means too that life has meaning and a purpose. That remains the heart beat of the worship and work of the Church. ‘God is with us’. He stays with us when the going is tough and when the questions are hard. Such knowledge gives us the confidence to go on.

And that also has implications for our society. There is a lot of talk at the moment about making our society a more caring one. I agree with that; it is something we can assent to whatever our politics. I suggest, however, that we will only become a more caring society if we get back to some of the values that Christmas enunciates: that every person is valuable and precious and that every person has something to offer to others. Christmas asserts the importance of family life and living in community with each other. It tells us that there will only be peace on earth and goodwill towards one another when we rightly balance our demands for our rights with the recognition of our responsibilities to our neighbour. Above all, the Christmas message, tells us: We are made for God. There is something eternal about our nature that reaches out for the God who is always here with us.

And this is essentially a cheerful message. We can join the angels’ song :'Glory to God in the Highest’ because God is with us. I feel sorry for those people who still wait for God to appear, because they are missing something so wonderful and thrilling. God is here already. In all the difficulties and joys of life. In the midst of the devastation, horror and misery as well as of renewal, celebration, and hope, we find this tiny child waiting for us to respond to him. And it is that belief which can provide the strongest foundation for a caring Church and a caring society.

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