This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

Wonderful. Well, thank you for that introduction. Good evening. It's great to see so many of you here at All Saints this evening and of course, what an evening we've had so far. And most importantly, especially for the younger ones in the audience, how many days till Christmas?

What's the countdown? You can be interactive. How many days till Christmas? Three. I make it.

I think three till Christmas. Something like that. And I love Christmas. I don't know about you guys, I absolutely adore Christmas. I adore everything about Christmas.

We've talked about the food just now. I love the food. I love the carols. I'm a big carol singer, so I love the carols. I love a Christmas jumper, by the way.

I don't know if you noticed, there was a memo, obviously went round this evening. Everybody up front. This evening, many of us have got Christmas jumpers on. I see some epic ones in the audience, so I love Christmas jumpers. But the thing I love the most I have to say about Christmas, my confession to you this evening, actually, the food is probably my second favourite thing, but I didn't want to steal the thunder from the talk.

My most favourite thing about Christmas is it's the most epic opportunity to. To engage and indulge in dad jokes. I love a dad joke. And every year I subject my family to new ones. So I have a new repertoire this evening.

So I thought I would try out on you some of my Christmas dad jokes and you could tell me by your laughter or your groans whether my family are in for a happy Christmas day or a terrifying Christmas day. So here's the first one for you. What do you call a snowman with tummy ache? What do you call a snowman with tummy ache? Any ideas what you call a snowman with tummy ache?

The answer is abdominal. An abdominal snowman. You're a tough, tough crowd. Okay, all right, all right. It gets better or worse.

Why do you. Thank you. Why do you need to be good at grammar to work as one of Santa's little helpers? Why do you need to be good at grammar to work as an assistant to Santa Claus? Any ideas?

Well, the answer is because you will be a subordinate clause. Oh, come on. That's Daily Telegraph, Guardian level, that is. Okay, maybe we need to go lower. Maybe we need to go more.

I don't know, Sun Express, whatever. Okay, so let's take it down slightly for my last one. Why does Father Christmas have three gardens? Why does Father Christmas have three gardens? So he can hoe ho ho really bad.

I reassure. Yes, thank you. Brilliant. You'll be pleased to know those that are the only dad jokes in this evening's message. But I love the humour.

But the other thing I love about Christmas, and I think many of us love about Christmas, would have to be, of course, the Christmas movies. Have any of you got favourite Christmas movies this evening you can beat? Yes. Yes. The Grinch over here.

Any others? Any want to shout out any favourite Christmas movies? Yes. Home Alone. Home Alone.

You can't beat Home Alone. Absolutely. Home Alone. Epic movie. Any others?

One or two others. We got anything out there? Yes. The Snowman. Yes.

And back here there was a. The Muppet Christmas Carol. Absolutely. The Muppet Christmas Carol. Well, there was a recent survey carried out by the Radio Times.

I think it was trying to find the top 10 Christmas movies of all time. We're not going to go through them all this evening, but it was interesting. They surveyed about 5,000 people and the one that came top is interesting. No one's mentioned this evening. Number one Christmas movie of all time, according to the Radio Times recently, was no.

Not Die Hard. Not Die Hard. It's A Wonderful Life came number one. Interestingly, if you haven't seen an epic movie, number two on the list was interesting. Number two was A Christmas Carol came number two on the list.

And someone's already mentioned, of course, the definitive version of that movie is, of course, the Muppet Christmas Carol. We watched it again with the kids last night, I think Michael Caine. Absolutely superb. That was number two. Number three on the list, interestingly enough, was Love.

Actually, no one shouted that out. Love. Actually number three on the list. Number four on the list, according to the Radio Times, was Home Alone. Great.

Always warn families when you show your kids that for the first time. It is not a how to guide. This is Survive Christmas. Do not try it at home. But it's a good one.

And then lastly, I think someone yelled out at the end, number five on the list, we'll leave it here for now, is Die Hard. I think one newspaper article I read recently said that's really Christmas Adjacent, I think is perhaps a better description for that movie. But there we go. Christmas movies are interesting, but what strikes me as interesting about those movies, when you look at that list on the screen, have you noticed what the themes are in those movies I find interesting? So, for example, it's A Wonderful Life.

It's about hope and joy and the triumph over despair, you might say A Christmas Carol. It's all about redemption, right? The redemption of Scrooge. At the heart of that story. How might you sum up love actually in a couple of words?

Well, perhaps you might say love triumphs over all obstacles and then we laugh at them on the list. But of course, Home Alone and Die Hard, arguably the same theme in those movies. The theme of those movies is, of course, that good overcomes evil, that the bad guys ultimately get defeated. And I find it interesting, in fact, have you ever wondered, to borrow a title from a popular book, have you ever wondered why it is we're drawn, especially at Christmas to those kind of movies? Why do they keep making the top 10 lists?

Why do we love those kind of stories? Well, I think the answer is very simply because those themes are profoundly themes of the Christmas story, aren't they? Those are all profoundly Christmas themes. In this Christmas story that we've been singing about this evening, God steps into space and time and history. He is the author.

He writes himself into his own story. And then he comes to earth to deal with our brokenness and our shame and our mess ups and our hang ups in order that we might know his love and his forgiveness and adoption into his family as a son or a daughter. And in the story of Jesus, God with us at Christmas, all of those themes that we see reflected in those lesser stories can be seen in that big Christmas story that we're celebrating this evening. But there is a question hanging behind all that, though, and it's the question, is it real? Is the Christmas story that we're thinking about this evening or is the fair?

Is, is the Nativity just another fairy story, no more real than the characters in our favourite movies? Well, another popular Christmas movie that often turns up on the most watched lists would be the epic movie, the fun movie Miracle on 34th Street. Don't know how many of you have seen that movie. My kids love that one as well. If you haven't seen the movie, well, I won't do too many spoilers, but in a nutshell, that movie tells the story of a little girl called Susan and she doesn't believe in Santa Claus, she doesn't believe in Father Christmas.

But then one day she meets this wonderful old man called Kris Kringle and she just begins to wonder whether actually Santa is real and has been made incarnate in the person of Kris Kringle. Well, as the story goes on, he's eventually threatened with being locked up in a mental asylum. The authorities think he's a nutter unless he can prove in open court that that he is in fact Father Christmas. And the authorities throw challenges at him like make A reindeer fly. And he has explanations for every challenge, like, well, I can't do that.

It's not Christmas Eve. And the whole movie turns on. Is he going to be found guilty and locked up or are they going to rule the as Santa Claus? Well, at the end of that courtroom scene, at the end of that climactic scene, there's a moment where little Susan gives the judge a $1 bill. And circled on it, she's circled on it the words In God we trust.

And the judge looks at this and he announces, he says, well, if the government can decide based on faith that there's a God, we can decide based on faith in this courtroom that Kris Kringle is indeed Santa. Cue Christmas music credits. And everybody lives happily ever after. It's a wonderful movie, but every time I watch Miracle on 34th Street, I worry slightly about that ending. That ending worries me slightly with its suggestion really that we can equate God with Father Christmas, that we can bring the two side by side.

And if we're not careful, the conclusion from that movie is believe in God if you want, believe in Santa if you want, but there is simply no evidence at all. In fact, Santa is like God and that people believe in him without evidence. And that view is fairly widespread. One of the most famous atheists in the country, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University a few years ago wrote this in a best selling book. He said, father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are part of the charm of childhood.

So is God. Some of us grow out of all three. You can see what Richard is doing with that statement. But immediately as I look on that on the screen, I think there are a few things wrong with that statement. First thing of course that is wrong with that statement is most people who come to believe in God do so in adulthood, not in childhood.

Whereas the reverse is probably true of Santa. Most people come to faith in God in adulthood. Around this time last year, a woman called Ayaan Hirsi Ali was making headlines in many of our major newspapers. If you're not familiar with Ayaan, who is she? Well, she, it was.

She is a very, very well known public intellectual, brilliant public intellectual, former Dutch politician. She was also for many years a high profile atheist. She wrote a book called Infidel which sold about four and a half million copies in which she laid into belief in God. Highly critical of belief in God. Well, around this time last year, she made headlines around the world by publishing an essay on an online newspaper titled why I Am Now a Christian.

She come to faith in her late 40s, early 50s. By contrast. I have never met anybody who disbelieved in Father Christmas as a child and came to believe that in Father Christmas as an adult. But there's another problem as well, with the kind of snarky temptation to compare God and Father Christmas. Those comparisons, like the one from Richard Dawkins I shared with you a moment ago, they miss something.

They miss something really important. And it's this. Father Christmas really did exist. St. Nicholas was a historical figure and in the 4th century, in fact, St.

Nicholas was a Christian bishop in a town called Myra, that's in present day Turkey, Very, very famous for his generosity, especially to children. In fact, one very famous story about him explains how he saved three girls from being thrown into slavery by providing money for their dowries. And after his death, his reputation grew and he became, in time, the patron saint of, of children, with his feast day, 6 December, celebrated all across Europe. But then something happened, of course, to St. Nicholas.

In the 1930s, Coca Cola were looking for a marketing idea to sell healthy drinks, sorry, sugary drinks to children. And they took dear old Saint Nicholas and they updated him slightly, they transformed him from this slightly more sober, religious saint into the kind of giant, larger than life, red coated, white bearded figure of fun that we know today. And that's the figure that we recognise. But underneath that, buried behind that, is some real history and a real figure. And I wonder whether there's a bit of a metaphor there for sometimes what's happened with Christmas.

You know, Christmas sometimes gets a little bit buried under the glitz and under the glamour, under the fairy lights and under the tinsel and the presents and the movies. And I just wonder whether, just as with Father Christmas, you can kind of strip away what's been added and find our way back perhaps to the original, whether we could do something a little bit about the story of Christmas. We can get back to the reality. Well, earlier this evening, a few minutes ago, we had Luke Chapter one, four verses from Luke Chapter one read to us very beautifully. And that reading, as I say, came from Luke's Gospel.

And what I find interesting is Luke is one of the writers, one of the four writers of the first century biographies we have of Jesus in the New Testament. And he's taken very, very seriously by historians. If you look at Luke's Gospel, it's full of eyewitness detail, it's full of things that we can corroborate from other documents as historians. It's things we can corroborate from Archaeology and other disciplines. And Luke is a very careful historian.

In those verses that we had read to us, he tells us in some detail how he did his historical work. In fact, he opens his gospel in a way very similar to how other 1st century Greek and Roman historians wrote. Luke tells you about the way he talked to the eyewitnesses. He read other documents, he cross checked. He was careful to figure out and find out the detail.

And he gives us detail. He tells us where Jesus was born and when Jesus was born, and lots of background information. Now notice, by the way, straight away how different that is from a fairy tale. Fairy tales don't tend to be very high on that kind of precise eyewitness information. If you were to ask a question like when exactly historically was Cinderella born?

Or if you were to ask a question like I wonder whether archaeologists could go digging in the woods and find the ruins of Snow White's cottage, I would suggest to you that you've got your categories mixed up slightly. You've confused fiction and you've confused history. By contrast, the New Testament gospels like Luke, they give us names, they give us dates, they give us places, they give us eyewitness detail. They are claiming to be history, they are not claiming to be fiction. And if you read Luke's gospel sometime, you discover that he explores a lot of information around Jesus birth.

He explores things like the how of Jesus birth. He tells us some of what happened, some of it, by the way, miraculous. Now, if you're a modern secular person, maybe you're here as a guest this evening, you find some of those miraculous bits, a bit of a trouble, right? We come to stories like the virgin birth of Jesus and some of us may be tempted to sit there and be that little bit sceptical and go, well, hang on a minute, I'm a modern person, I don't believe in miracles. Well, my pushback to you would be, if that's where you are this evening, you do actually believe in miracles.

You just believe in different miracles. You see, you have a choice really this evening. You can believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, or you can believe in the virgin birth of the universe. You can believe the universe just came into existence from nothing. That's a miracle.

It's just a different kind of miracle. And perhaps you haven't actually stopped there and thought about it. But you can't get through life without believing in something miraculous. But as well as the when of Jesus birth and the where of Jesus birth and the how of Jesus birth, Luke also asks us to consider One other question. There's one other question we need to think about this evening in my last few minutes.

And it's simply this. It's the question of the why of Jesus birth. Why would God step into history in the person of Jesus? Well, the simple answer is this. Because the God who made everything, including the universe, by the way, knows you better than you know yourself.

He loves you more deeply than anybody else loves you. He knows your mess ups and your hang ups and the mistakes that you've made. And he knows by the way that that the one thing that you want more than anything else is to be truly, truly loved. Not in some Hollywood glitzy kind of way, but all of us want to be loved for who we really, really are, unconditionally. And I would say that is what God has made us for.

And that's what he's demonstrated, his love for us at the heart of the Christmas story, when he stepped into history in the person of Jesus and gave us that gift that first Christmas. You see, you can tell a lot about somebody from the gift that they give you. When someone gives you a gift, it tells you a lot about what they think about you. And when in that first Christmas, God gave the gift of Himself in the person of Jesus, that tells us a lot about what he thinks about us. And I would say to you this evening, that is not fairy tale, but is the deepest, truest reality.

Well, one final thought for you this evening. We began at the start of the message this evening thinking about Christmas movies. And another movie that's often played at Christmas that we haven't mentioned so far is of course the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a very famous story that's often played at this time of year. And most of you may be familiar with that story, either the book or the movie. And of course the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens, doesn't it, with the land of Narnia locked in what you might say is perpetual bleak midwinter.

The White Witch has Narnia locked up under winter. And as one character says, early on in Narnia, it is always winter, but it's never Christmas. And I often find myself when I read those words, thinking, what a perfect description of our modern world. We live in a world that offers us all kinds of promises, but they rarely deliver. Politicians offer us hopes and dreams that turn to ashes.

Marketeers tell us, just buy this product and your life will be amazing. We're told that romance or food or sex or love is all you need. And it slips through our Fingers. Furthermore, of course, in a godless universe, love doesn't win. Ultimately, death wins, beating all of us in the end, if we live in a godless universe.

All of those themes of those Christmas movies we looked at earlier, they are all ultimately lies. They might be lies breathed through silver, but they are ultimately lies nevertheless. But if the Christmas story is true, something very, very different is going on. The lie on the Witch and the Wardrobe was of course written by C.S. lewis.

He was the author of that book. And for the first 30 years of his life, CS Lewis was a deeply committed, cynical, hard nosed atheist. Hated God, hated anything to do with God. But then, as he moved through his life into his 30s, Lewis began to realise that all of the things that he cared the most about, love, justice, meaning, beauty, hope, all of those things made no sense at all. If atheism was true.

He realised they only made sense if there was a bigger, truer story behind the universe, a story with God behind it. And then one day, as Lewis took a walk in Oxford with a dear friend of his, A man called J.R.R. tolkien, another author known to many of us, Lewis expressed his doubts to Tolkien. He said, I've got this doubt, I've got this nagging doubt that Christianity is a story, it's just a story. Tolkien famously looked at Lewis and went, well, so what?

Has it not occurred to you that some stories are true, some stories are true. And the ultimate story, the biggest story, the Christmas story, the story of God and his love for each one of us this evening is, I would say, the ultimate true story. And it's a story reflected in tiny little ways in all of our small stories that we tell through things like our Christmas movies. And that conversation with Tolkien changed Lewis life. He became a committed Christian and went on to write classics like the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

So as we wrap up my message and we move into another song in a moment, the thought I want to leave you with is, have you ever wondered if there is more to life? Have you ever wondered if your life is not an accident? Have you ever wondered if your life is more than just a cosmic insignificance? Have you ever wondered if there really is a God who loves you, even you, and has proven it by stepping into history in the person of Jesus? And have you ever wondered what Christmas might really look like if you went into it with that appreciation?

And maybe Christmas is a perfect time to investigate that story for yourself. Well over 150 years ago, a man named Philip Brooks was standing on a hillside overlooking Bethlehem in the Middle East. It was a star filled night. And as he stood there looking over the town of Jesus birth, so moved was he by the scene that he took out a notebook and wrote down some words. And in time music was set to those words and they became a carol that we know today as O Little Town of Bethlehem.

Although we're not singing it tonight, it's known of course, to many of us. And the last verse I wrote, Little Town of Bethlehem, I think reads beautifully because it reads like a prayer. Let me read you these famous words. And for any of us this evening who want to think about responding to what God has offered us in Christmas in the person of Jesus, maybe you can, at the same time as I read these, you can make these words your own. O Holy Child of Bethlehem Descend to us, we pray Cast out our sin and enter in be born in us Today we hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell who come to us Abide with us our Lord Emmanuel to which I can only say Amen.

And may you have a thoroughly brilliant Hope filled Christmas 2024. Thanks for listening.