Someone was telling me the other day that she had written to her friend and told her that she had found ‘The Leaky Cauldron’ in Moscow!
The Leaky Cauldron, for those who are not aware, is a pub in London in one of the Harry Potter novels. It looks very unimpressive; it is a bit of a dive. Few people go in. In fact to the non-wizarding community it looks like a disused shop front. But if you do choose to go in, you discover that it is in fact the doorway to another world, the world of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter saga.
Well, she said to her friend that she had discovered the Leaky Cauldron in Moscow.
But it wasn’t a pub. It was a church.
And you are sitting in it!
St Andrew’s is a doorway to a different, and maybe for some, a strange world.
It is a world where they do things in a different – rather odd way. Where they speak a different language and remember a different history. They do not play quidditch, but they do play cricket. They don’t have galleons, but they do have sterling. People do not travel through fireplaces by floo powder, but they do drive on the left-hand side of the road.
It is a doorway to a different world.
2000 years ago, a cave, a cowshed was another Leaky Cauldron.
If you walked past, you would not be impressed. You might be tempted to call social services.
You would look in and see a young woman who had just become a mother.
Her baby had been wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a cattle feeding trough
It was dark, cold, dirty and as far from cozy and safe as you could get.
But this dingy cowshed was the door between two worlds – between this world, and another world.
Some say it is a fantasy world, like the world of Harry Potter: a world that at best offers comfort to people, but that at its worst has crushed and oppressed people
But others say that it is the door to a world that is more real than our visible physical world, that this world is a shadow land in comparison to the other, and that that world is the source of true hope, authentic purpose, genuine love and real life.
You see, 2000 years ago, God stepped out of heaven and came to earth.
Jesus was Immanuel, God is with us.
And he came to a cowshed and was laid in a feeding trough
So often, we look for God in the dramatic, the powerful, the awesome, the miraculous
We expect to see the big writing in the sky. ‘I am God. Don’t mess with me’.We expect God to meet with us by giving us miracles and signs.
It is interesting that when Jesus was born, there were miracles and signs and astonishing events.
The child was conceived in a miraculous way.
But nobody knew about that – apart from a very few: Mary herself, Joseph, Elizabeth, probably Zechariah. And it would have been very easy to say that of course there was never a virgin birth. We could claim, as Joseph first thought, that the story of the angel was made up by Mary, who had no other witnesses, in an age when people believed anything, as a quite imaginative and novel way to cover up an indiscretion.
And angels appeared.
But they only appeared to a few individuals and to some shepherds in the field. And who can trust shepherds? They had, no doubt, been on the wine, or whatever else they might have drunk at that time.
That is the thing about miracles, or simply amazing events. If you choose to do so they can always be explained, dismissed or simply treated as remarkable coincidences.
But rather than looking for God in the dramatic and powerful, perhaps we should be looking for God in the Leaky Cauldrons of this world?
The broken-down old shops
Perhaps we should be looking for him in the cowshed.
Mary heard the word of God when the angel came and told her that she was to be the mother of the Son of God.
But she met with God when she was exhausted, in pain, when she was the subject of the village gossip, when all Joseph and her plans had failed, when - no doubt – Joseph is in the doghouse because he did not phone through and book a place in advance, when they were homeless and friendless in a strange town, and they find themselves in a cowshed.
That is when Jesus is born and God puts in an appearance
God shows himself first as love, and then as power
God shows himself first as one Who identifies himself with the poor and the powerless who had put their hope – not in revolution, not in standing up for their rights – but in Him.
At Christmas Jesus is born in a cowshed, and God comes to broken nowhere people in broken nowhere places. We call such places ‘God forsaken’, but perhaps if we look a bit harder, we may discover that they are far from being ‘God forsaken’
And at Easter, 33 years later, as Jesus is nailed to the cross, another broken nowhere place, God identifies himself with us in our failure, in our pain and in our sin.
And maybe our meeting point with God is not in the triumphs of life, when our causes are victorious, or something goes really well for us, and our dreams and plans and desires succeed, and we get promotion, or a pay rise, or recognition, and it seems that all our wishes and hopes (perhaps we sometimes call them prayers) are answered.
Often that is the time when we forget God.
Rather our meeting point with God is when we are broken and crushed and exhausted and vulnerable; when our causes have failed, our plans have failed and we have failed and we have come to the end of our resources – and we find ourselves in the cowshed.
And we realize that we need a savior.
And it is there that he comes to us, he identifies himself with us and we meet him.
I love the fact that St Andrew’s is, for many people, a door between two cultures – a sort of Leaky Cauldron (although I hope with our new roof, not so Leaky!) which still remains open in this time of great difficulty.
But I also pray that this place here and now can be for you a door to another world.
You see this is the place and the time when you don’t have to pretend.
You don’t have to prove anything. You don’t have to bring anything.
You can be very real – with yourself, with God – not coming to him holding high our victories and triumphs and achievements and status and the great things we have done, wonderful no doubt that they are – but with our fears: our fear for the present, for those we love – maybe far away overseas, maybe even serving in armed forces, our fear for the future.
We can come here with our sin, uncertainty, compromises, failures; our lostness, brokenness, weakness, mortality; we can be vulnerable.
And we bring him our need a Saviour.
And the wonderful thing is that then we can meet with God. Who loves you very much, and who came to meet us first in a cowshed.
