An upside down Christmas tree

It was the day before Christmas Eve and as a 12 year old boy living and growing up in Bermuda, my parents decided that it would be nice for me to visit my relatives in England over Christmas. So my mother and father put me on a plane on December the 23rd, and informed me that my uncle and my aunt would be picking me up at Heathrow.

I was taken care of by two very charming flight attendants. They agreed to place me in first class so they could keep an eye on me. I took my seat, waved farewell to my parents who looked, I thought, rather pleased to see me go. And then I got to know the man sitting next to me on the plane.

He introduced himself to me in a Southern American accent, and said his name was Chuck and that he was from Miami. He wanted to know my name and where I was from and where I was going, so we exchanged niceties. Then I asked Chuck what did, and he told me that he made money playing cards.

Well now, I was fascinated by this and I asked him if it would be possible to learn how to play cards. For the next six hours he taught me five card stud, blackjack, deuces wild. By the time I landed I could take you for everything you had!

I got off the plane, having thoroughly enjoyed my time with this incredibly intelligent man, and was greeted by my uncle. “What kind of flight did you have? He asked

“I had a great flight uncle, I have learned so much”.

“Really, what did you learn flying over the Atlantic Ocean?”

I said, “Whatever you do, never bet the ranch, never bet the ranch.”

He looked at me with wide eyes and thought, “What has happened to my dear nephew while he has lived in Bermuda?” I’m sure the phone lines were ringing that evening. I remember that time with Chuck and the things I learned from him. One of them was, never, never ever go ‘all in’ unless you’re absolutely sure you’re going to win.

That might sound like a strange lesson for a Christmas service, but it’s one that I think actually epitomizes the wonderful passage from the Gospel of Luke, The Magnificat. It seems to me that if Christmas is anything, it is God going ‘all in’ and holding nothing back. If the story of Christmas means anything and has any power to it, it is that God decided to throw everything that he could into humanity and for humanity. He gave his son.

As you read what Mary said in this incredible Magnificat, you get the sense that this God who is ‘all in’, who is committed thoroughly and totally and completely to the world, is doing it for a number of very good reasons. One of them is because God wants us to know that He keeps his promises.

Underlying everything that Mary sang in this great hymn when she knew that she was going to be giving birth to the son of God, to the Messiah, was she believed that God was keeping his promises that he had made to Abraham and Sarah - that the whole world would know what God is like.

All the nations would worship God and bow before him. The descendants of Abraham would be more numerous than all the grains of sands on a beach. This is the power that Mary felt when she saw that what was going to transpire in her and through her in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was this fulfillment of a prophet Abraham.

All the great monotheistic religions of the world, whether it is Judaism who called him Abraham, or Christianity who hellenized it to Abraham, or in Islam Ibrahim, God had made a promise through Abraham to the world to make himself known.

The apostle Paul believed so powerfully in the promise of God to Abraham that he said it was by Abraham’s faith that he was made righteous, and that it was that faith that constitutes the cornerstone of our covenantal relationship with God.

Mary believes that the child in her womb is the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham. She even says it at the end, “From generation to generation you have kept your promises, you have been true to your people, you have kept to your word.”

Something more dramatic is occurring. God is moving beyond the law, God is moving beyond the promise and the covenant. Now God is ‘all in’. The fulfilment of the promise is now in person, in the form of his son. What Mary understands God to be doing is coming in such a way that it turns upside down the way we conceive of God, of reality, of the world.

Some years ago I was given a copy of the catalogue for Hammacher Schlemmer. I don’t know if any of you get this. I always look lustfully at Hammacher Schlemmer. There are so many things that I want, it’s tantalizing.

There’s one thing that I’ve always wanted because it is so rare and particular, and frankly, weird, that it would be unlike anybody else’s. That is the upside down Christmas tree. It has 850 lights on it. It is shaped in a triangle with the pointy bit at the bottom, not at the top, and it costs you $599 for the privilege.

Why would they make something like this? So you could get more toys under the tree, and then if you filled it with toys, the tree would stand all on its own. Brilliant! I love these people at Hammacher Schlemmer, I could work for them, I really could. It’s brilliant. It turns everything upside down in order that you can get more.

The arrival of Jesus Christ is in a sense the turning of the tree upside down in order that the world would get more. But what it would get would not be at all what it expected. The rich would be turned away, the hungry would be fed. The lowly would be lifted up; the powerful would be brought down from their thrones. The violent would be dismissed and the peaceful would be exonerated.

Everything that Mary understood about the coming of her son was turning upside down the whole way in which we conceive of the world, and turning the world upside down is exactly what salvation is all about. Salvation is turning from what we expect and we want into what God wants. Turning from our understanding into God’s understanding of us.

I love the way that the great singer Bruce Cockburn, who himself as a Christian, put it. He wrote this, “Redemption rips through the surface of time, in the cry of a tiny boy”. This tiny boy has come to redeem and to change that world that is broken, and Mary saw the child in her womb as fundamentally changing the world.

Two thousand years later, it is not the upside down tree of Christmas what the world desperately needs but a reminder of why the Christ child came, why his redemption is so important. Why his grace and fulfilment of the needs of the hungry and the poor, and the mournful and the outcast need to be healed.

He has come to bring about the peace and the reign of God rather than the vindictiveness and the violence that so often besets our world. We need to think of an upside down tree. Those who follow must realize that he has gone ‘all in’ for us. It’s not as if God decided to spare his son, it’s not as if he came only as a partial revelation of what God is like. He is complete and he is here for us.

If we’re in need of an upside down tree, this Christmas, whether there’s room for us under it, then we find it in Jesus of Nazareth. This is a call to you: Are you all in or are you holding back? Are you truly committed to following Christ and all that he offers? Because if you’re all in as Mary and Jesus, then you are committing yourselves into the hands of God. And when you do that, you see the world differently.

Many years ago, I received a call from a friend of mine just before Christmas when I was living in Cape Town during the Apartheid era. He said, “Andrew”, you’ve got to come down to District Six”, an area that had been known for its racial tensions and the removals of people. “There is graffiti that you will never believe, it is of Mary, Joseph and Jesus, a manger scene.”

I went down thinking that I was going to see what one normally sees, with the cows and the donkeys and the hay and Mary and Joseph looking happy and Jesus asleep and angels in the sky. It wasn’t like that at all. In fact it was the most dramatic thing I’d seen in my life.

Why? Because Mary was black and Joseph was white, and the angels were Malay and the shepherds were Bushmen. All the people in the world that were being divided up and were being separated in South Africa were all of a sudden right there, right there looking at Jesus. At that moment with that image, I thought; “This is the way the presence of Jesus turns the world upside down

It turns it upside down because God is all in and he’s inviting us to be all in with him. He’s inviting us to receive him and asking us to accept him.

This Christmas, whatever you bring to the communion table, this upside down tree of his kingdom has room for you. It has room for you to bring yourself; it has room to bring your concerns. There’s room there for a broken world, there is room for your prayers for peace, there is room for your broken heart. There is room because God is all in, are you? Amen.