This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

Getting on for thirty years ago, many thousands of people watched wide-eyed with horror as a crisis loomed. At a remote but sensitive location on the Russian border, a nuclear explosion was within minutes, if not seconds, of occurring – an explosion that would destabilize world order, and precipitate a sequence of greater disasters.

The only hope of avoiding such a fate lay on the shoulders of one man – a man who could easily have fled to save his own skin – as many of us would, I am sure, have felt tempted to do. But not, of course, James Bond – personified back in 1997 in Tomorrow Never Dies by a relatively youthful Pierce Brosnan.

As senior military and MI6 operatives watch anxiously from afar by live video relay, an arrogant rear admiral played by the late, great Geoffrey Palmer cannot believe that Bond is staying put, attempting to avert the impending catastrophe. Incredulous, he barks at Judi Dench’s ever-unflappable M, “What on earth is he doing there?” To which the simple, two-word reply comes straight back: “His job!”

Whether they are terrorists or tyrannical government regimes, Bond’s job, across 27 films, has been to save us, and often the whole world, from the bad guys. And ever since 1962, we have enjoyed 007’s brand of excessive indulgence, fast-living, and deftly executed violence, that has kept him popping up in places both unlikely and downright dangerous.

But the incredulous question of Palmer’s self-serving admiral fits more scenarios than just the world of James Bond, as we might realize on this night  – the night when we are offered, once again, that familiar sign of a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger. For if we look past the tinsel and sentimentality that has come to be part of the backdrop of Christmas, if we look at the reality of the story crafted for us with such care by Saint Luke, we might well be tempted to echo the admiral’s incredulity, and ask  “What on earth is he doing there?”

Even the setting of tonight’s narrative should startle us, for, as Luke has already gone to pains to make clear in his gospel, Mary and Joseph are Nazarenes, who live nowhere near the ‘little town’ of Bethlehem. Their presence in the ‘city of David’ is a necessary response to an exploitative census on the part of the Romans – a census inflicted on the population simply to ensure the occupiers can grab as much ‘taxation’ as possible from the people they are subjugating. This is not taxation levied to ensure any kind of common good, but merely to line the pockets of those who rule by fear and force.

And the displacement that Mary and Joseph must endure – and endure just as Mary reaches the full term of her pregnancy – only underscores for us how the Holy Family exist on the very margins of society. Hence not only the paucity of their temporary accommodation, but the improvised clothing for the new-born baby, and the announcement of his birth to a bunch of shepherds – shepherds generally perceived as outcasts on account of both dirt and dishonesty in the eyes of the society of that era.

And the irony, of course, is that this extraordinary narrative is written by Luke, so we learn in the very opening verses of his gospel, to offer a Roman nobleman he calls ‘the most excellent Theophilus’ an ‘orderly account’ that explains that God is interacting with humanity to bring it glory, exaltation and even salvation. An account which must surely have caused this elevated member of society to cry out, “What on earth is he doing there?”

And if the beginning of the story Luke recounts makes us ask such a question, it has got no better by the end. For not just in birth, but also in death, this Jesus will rest, once again, in a space far from his real home – a space once again provided by a stranger, and will once again have his body wrapped, this time in a linen cloth. At what appears to be the end of the story, just as at its beginning, Luke leaves us thinking, “What on earth is he doing there?”

For the sign of a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger  – this sign is a sign that confounds a world that has, across the centuries, reveled in the familiar, James Bond-like stories – the stories in which victory is achieved by the strong at the expense of the weak.

Instead, we are offered the story of love incarnate – incarnate and active, in birth and in death – active in the unlikely places of the world, standing the established way of doing things on its head, and making a difference… making the difference to those, who whether weak or strong, have come to believe that the world can only work on the ‘might is right’ principle.

Some years ago, I was privileged to hear a talk by the inspirational Baptist minister Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis Trust. He spoke of having visited the 16^th Century Pinkas Synagogue in the great city of Prague, inside which are inscribed the names and dates of the 77,297 Czech Jews murdered by the Third Reich.

Chalke explained that on these poignant walls, not merely do you find the names of thousand upon thousand adult Jews slaughtered in the death camps, but that the names contain many small children – some aged five, or four, or three, or even two years and under – Jewish children of the same age as those slaughtered when King Herod tried to kill the baby Jesus.

“What made them do it?” Steve Chalke demanded of us, his audience. “What made them do it?” Mistakenly, I thought this rhetorical question demanded that we try and explain the genocidal motives of the Nazis… but I had missed the point of his question.

“What made them do it?” he demanded …. “Why did they still have babies by then?”

For, as he pointed out, even by the mid 1930s, let alone the end of that decade, the Jews of Europe could see what was coming.

“There is only one reason”, he said, “why you can possibly carry on having babies in such awful circumstances” – and that is that you know – that you know – that you have something in your life that is stronger, that is bigger, that is more important, and that will – ultimately – be more triumphant, than anything that the forces of this world can muster.

“You can only”, he said, “carry on having babies at that point, because you know you have something that makes a difference.”

And that is what we are gathered to celebrate tonight. The God who makes a difference in a manner that, even for God, is personal and costly. For tonight, we celebrate a God who makes that difference by choosing to stand with humanity not in the places of power and strength, but in the margins occupied by the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

Which is why God gives us this precious sign of the child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.  For it is this extraordinary, counter-cultural sign that tells us that, in the words of the prophet, we will, indeed, be ‘redeemed, we will be ‘sought out’, and we will be called ‘a City not Forsaken’.

For this is the nature of the God who is born right into the midst of human sinfulness and violence, born there, and not in a royal palace, to undertake a job which only God could undertake – the job, as we just sung, of being ‘born to save us all’.

So do not be surprised by the sign of the child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger, for, in birth and in death, this is the sign of the God who, in the words of Steve Chalke, makes a difference. And if, on your way home tonight, or at any point in the coming year, if they should turn to you and ask “What on earth is he doing there?”, I hope that you will remember that he is there to make that ultimate difference, and I hope that you will look them in the eye, channel your inner M, and reply “His job.” Amen.