Manifest - a brief Christmas sermon

 

You may have seen various reviews of the year begin to appear already in the media.

Of course we have books of the year features in the papers in time for our Christmas shopping.

And the various Dictionaries also like to come up with their Words of the Year.

 

The Cambridge Dictionary word of the year for 2024 is “manifest”.

“Manifest” is actually an old word which first appears in English in the 14^th Century via French and Latin, but it’s been given a new meaning.

 

I’m sure you all do nothing but spend your time on the Tic Toc.

And there to manifest means "to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief doing so will make it more likely to happen".

You kind of visualise your triumph, in the hope that this might bring it about.

Perhaps I might think myself thin or musical or fast or something.

 

The pop singer, Dua Lipa, had been manifesting about headlining at The Glastonbury Music Festival – and so it was.  

“I’ve written this moment down and wished for it and dreamt it and worked so hard,” she said.

 

The US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, the England striker Ollie Watkins and many others have also been manifesting their success.

 

And to some people Christmas can feel a little bit like that:

We have to kind of manifest the joy and sparkle – sort of somehow conjure up the Christmassy feeling from within ourselves.  

To put it negatively, isn’t there a kind of make believe and wishful thinking about the Christmas story?

It seems like an impossible dream – a sort of fairy story.  

Could we really bring ourselves to believe it’s actually really true?

True true?

 

But the original meaning of the word manifest, and of Christmas, is really the opposite of these newer versions.

The word “man” in “manifest” is the word hand, as in manual labour, work you do with your hands, or a manual, a handbook you can hold in your hands.

The “fest” bit of manifest means something you can seize or grab.

 

So that which is manifest is something that you can seize or grab in your hands.

You can actually touch it and get hold of it.  

And that, it turns out, is exactly the meaning of Christmas:

God made flesh, God made handleable, grabable, tangible.

 

The disciple and Apostle John, who wrote our Gospel reading, also wrote a letter in the New Testament which he begins by saying:

 

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 

The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.

And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 

We write this to make our joy complete.”

 

The extraordinary Christian claim is that Jesus is God made manifest – God made plain, revealed, made genuinely knowable.

Jesus can say, “if you have seen me you have seen God the Father.”

Jesus is God made visible.

 

Later in his letter, John says:

“In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”

 

The Bible writers would say to us that if we want to know God, we don’t need to manifest.

Rather, Jesus has already done the manifesting.

Jesus is both God made man and God made manifest – God made clear, knowable, graspable.

And what’s more Jesus makes manifest that God loves us and has come to save us, to give us new and eternal life.

Whoever we are, whatever we’ve done, God is for us.

He steps down from heaven into the real world of our mess to rescue us from ourselves.

 

As we come to celebrate this first Holy Communion of Christmas shortly, and we take the bread in our hands, it is a tangible, edible sign of Jesus the bread of life who became flesh for us, and who is given to us in the word and sacrament to be received, not by make believe or wishing it so, but in our hearts by faith – by a firm trust in God made plain.

 

I hope all your godly dreams for 2025 manifest themselves.

But perhaps a necessary pre-condition of that is the receive God made manifest, and have a very merry Christmas.