Christmas 2012

"And she gave birth to her first born son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn"

Perhaps it's strange that, among all the extraordinary sights and sounds of that far-off night, the new baby's first clothes are remembered. He is wrapped in bands of cloth, in swaddling clothes. It's rather quaint and romantic-sounding: in fact it means that he is trussed up like a Christmas turkey, a practice which has gone in and out of fashion over the years. When it's been in fashion it's been said to protect the child by ensuring that its limbs grow straight and strong. Swaddling exerts a measure of control over the changes that growth will bring.

Perhaps it's strange that his first clothes are remembered - but then perhaps it's strange that the clothes that were intended to be his last are also remembered. The lifeless adult body is taken from the wooden cross, just as the lively infant body was once taken from the wooden feeding trough. It is wrapped in cloth again: a final swaddling. It's intended, like the first swaddling, to protect the body and shield it from harm, to exert a measure of control over the changes that decay will bring.

Yet the babe of Bethlehem does not remained swaddled for very long. The bound limbs are flexed. The swaddling clothes are abandoned. He learns to roll over and crawl, to walk and run, to climb and sail.  The lifeless body does not remain swaddled for long, either. When his friends come to the rock-hewn tomb to honour him they find him gone. The sign that he has gone is that the cloths have been abandoned and are lying on the floor.  He has outgrown them, just as he has outgrown the swaddling bands. The layers of protection have been cast aside. He has been set free.

A brief look at the Mothercare catalogue suggests that swaddling is currently out of fashion: mercifully, the urge to protect children is not, and after the horror of Newtown Connecticut it's to be hoped that it will climb the political agenda, in the United States at least. Yet the urge to swaddle is not just something we experience in relation to children. We experience it in relation to ourselves too, from the airbags in our cars via the intruder alarms in our homes to the precisely drafted phrases of our prenuptial agreements. We swaddle our lives in protective wrapping as surely as Mary swaddles the child who lies in the manger.  And while airbags and alarms and agreements may be entirely sensible and healthy there is other swaddling that is not. The brief authority that we borrow from the job we do or the income we enjoy; the demands that we convince ourselves are made upon us by dependent families or needy friends; the personal tragedies that we constantly deny; the self-medication in which we we indulge as we reach for the wine glass or secure the adrenaline rush: all these swaddle us and suffocate us, with layer upon layer of deceit and obfuscation. All these conceal our true identities.

Christ may come to us swaddled, but Christ does not come to swaddle us. He does not come to offer us protection from the bumps, bruises, crises and conflicts that our lives will bring. He does not come to control the change that will befall us. He does not come to give us layers of clothing or layers of make-up, layers that disguise our reality. Christ does not come so that we might appear to be something other than we are. He comes so that we might fully be what we most truly are.

The bands of cloth are a warning. They show us the lengths to which we will go to cover ourselves up, to hide ourselves from ourselves, to control our surroundings and manage our futures. But for the child to grow and flourish the swaddling must be abandoned; for the risen Christ to walk free the grave clothes must be discarded. So what swaddles you? What keeps you from being the person you really are, the person God would have you be? Tonight God sends you a child to remind you that you are a child.

We are not the layers of protection we have accumulated. Life lived well compels us to strip these layers away, the layers we treasure, the layers we cling to so tightly, the layers that we think make us more intelligent, more interesting, more successful, more attractive. Life lived well compels us to peel away the identities we have constructed and the defences we have built. Life lived well compels us to abandon the habits to which we are addicted and the thought patterns into which we slip so easily. To live well is to know ourselves as God knows us, and to know ourselves as beloved of God as surely as is the child in the manger.  Life lived well begins tonight, as we gaze upon the swaddled Christ.

You are already the child of God. You do not have to be anything else. You have only to be who you already are. Amen.