This love will carry me

Here is the reflection from this year’s Carol Service…

If you’ve been shopping in town this week you may have had the joy of Christmas muzak – the tunes that some of us know all too well, which get stuck in our heads as earworms.

I’ve had an earworm all year, but not such an annoying one. It is a song that we sang in Everybody Sing last Spring, and which I find that I keep on singing to myself. The words are very simple:

This love will carry, this love will carry me: I know this love will carry me.

I’ve kept singing it not just because I love the simple tune, but because the words have meant a lot to me. Last Christmas I was quite unwell, and I ended up spending a couple of weeks in hospital. During those weeks of illness and recovery, what I experienced was just this – I was carried by love. The love and the kindness of my family, and friends… the love of people here at the uni, leaving get well messages on the whiteboard here and bringing me goodies – and underneath all of that, when I was up in my hospital room on the 9^th floor, looking out hazily at the sun rising, the sense of a deeper love that is always there, carrying us.

I wonder if you can remember a time when you have been carried by love? When you have been a place of need or vulnerability in your life, and you have felt the supporting love of someone or some people carrying you – maybe your family, maybe friends, maybe others… And I wonder if maybe you have sensed that we are always held, carried, by a love underneath all of this that is deep, and strong, and endlessly kind.

All of this is here, at the heart of the Christmas story. Mary carries the unborn Jesus on the journey to Bethlehem – as we have all once been carried – and then on Christmas night she holds her newborn son, carrying him with Joseph through more nights of uncertainty and days of fear, carrying him back to their home in Nazareth, carrying him with love through his childhood joys and tears, carrying him in her heart even when he left home to walk into all the challenges and dangers of his calling.

That steadfast love, and the greater love which he knew was behind and beneath it, inspired Jesus to reach out to those who felt that they were undeserving of love or that they had fallen though the net of human kindness – singing this song with his life – God’s love is there for you, God’s love will carry you – you are held in loving arms.

It isn’t always easy for us to believe that – life can be hard, people can be cruel, and love can seem far away. The story we have heard today begins with Jesus carried in loving arms but ends with him carried on a wooden cross. But even in all the agony and sense of abandonment, Jesus puts his trust in these words – ‘I know your love will carry me’. And on Easter morning he come to his friends to show them that even in the face of darkness and death, they can trust that love will always hold them.

The whiteboard her in the Chapel has been used this Advent by Josmi, one of our students from India. Each day she puts a different Advent message on it. On Monday she put this: Christmas – it is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, and hope for the future.

Tenderness for the past. We remember at this time of year, with thankfulness and sometimes sadness, those who have carried us with their love in years past, and all that that has meant to us.

Courage for the present. We can be inspired by the love which we have received, and by the love which Jesus showed, to be those who carry others with our love. I wonder who you are carrying at the moment… I wonder who you may be called to carry in the coming year… Can you sense that inside this love which you give there is a deeper love reaching out in you and through you?

And hope for the future. The reason this simple song has meant so much for me is because it has confirmed my often very tentative faith. When it came to the crunch, I did experience that I was carried by love. And even if things had gone in a much worse direction, I think that I would still have had this sense of being carried by the love of those around me, and held by a love which has always been there for me… God’s love, knowing me, accepting me, leading me on and carrying me home. That gives me hope for all that I may face in the years to come.

Christmas – it is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, and hope for the future. And it is the time when we are reminded of the love that carries us all, and will always carry us.