After a long day of putting on a wonderful Christmas meal, Mum was standing over the kitchen sink wearily washing the mountain of dirty dishes. In the middle of this monumental task, her teenage daughter strolled into the kitchen and saw what her mother was doing.

The thoughtful girl said, “Mum, today’s a holiday, you shouldn’t be doing that.”

The mother was taken aback by the seeming kindness of her daughter. She began to put down the dish cloth and take off her gloves. A sense of pride overtook her as she thought her little girl was now starting to show sins of maturity by helping her out with the dishes.

Her bubble was burst, though, when the teenager said, “Just do them tomorrow.”

You see, as the sermon title states, there are no miracles today! And because we don’t see miracles today, we don’t believe in miracles from earlier times, we struggle to believe in the miracle of God being born in a stable.

But I don’t think miracles are dead today. I think we’ve seen miracles, and in our hearts we know that they are truly miracles.

Two years ago, Constable Stephen Oake, a 40-year-old father of three and a respected member of his local Baptist church, was stabbed to death during a counter-terrorism operation in Manchester. His father, also a career policeman, said at the time:
“I am praying for the perpetrator of this killing and seeking God’s forgiveness for him – praying also that he may now seek God himself and find peace and forgiveness with him.”

Last month, the case of Abigail Witchalls, the 26-year-old mother of (now) two and a committed Catholic, who was stabbed in the neck and paralysed while walking with her young son in Surrey, was closed. The man who almost certainly committed the crime, Richard Cazaly, had killed himself shortly after the attack. Mrs Witchalls’ father said the family extended their sympathy and prayers to the Cazaly family for their loss.

This month, following the conviction of two young men for the racially motivated murder of Andrew Walker (an inspiring young man from a devout Christian family), his mother Gee forgave her son’s killers with these words:
“At the point of death, Jesus said: ‘I forgive them, they don’t know what they do.’ I’ve got to forgive them – I still forgive them. My family and I still stand by what we believe – forgiveness.”

These are miracles, miracles of extraordinary love, miracles of extraordinary grace, miracles of extraordinary mercy, miracles that are out of the ordinary, miracles that touch our hearts, miracles that bring a new light to the darkness we don’t understand.

They’re miracles because they are not how people usually respond. After the Anthony Walker trial, I heard a radio programme about two others who had suffered tragic loss.

One of the interviewees had lost her own son to a murderer who’s never been caught and sentenced. She commented on the forgiveness offered by Anthony’s mother:
“Personally, and I know from many other mothers, we don’t subscribe to forgiveness because those killers didn’t show our loved ones any forgiveness when they pulled that trigger …. I don’t know how easy or hard it is to forgive because I just don’t want to forgive.”

Which only goes to show that the forgiveness offered by those three people I mentioned is a miracle, it is an act of grace, a divinely made offer. It doesn’t naturally come from within us as human beings. We are much more likely to want revenge, or at least blame, and most of all in our world, we blame God when things go wrong.

We have now owned our first diesel car for 18 months and every time I fill up, I recall those poor unfortunates who have put petrol in the diesel tank. It’s a disaster. The repairs can cost thousands and there is nothing you can do as the owner of the car. You need a professional to sort it out.

Our world is just the same. It is crying out for healing, because it is broken. It is not working as it should. Not everything in the rose garden is lovely. There are wars and terrorists, there are broken families and damaged children, there are money-grabbing people and self-centred people. Most of the work we humans do to repair and to heal these things do not make matters better, but are like putting petrol in your diesel tank.

The trouble is that we humans get it wrong; we are sinners in need of forgiveness. Of course no-one here is a murder, at least not that I am aware of, but our wrong-doing, our sin, is just as bad as the worst murder. The Ten Commandments are not an exam: attempt any three.

Or to put it another way, if our lives were like a swimming race across the Atlantic, no-one would be able to swim all the way across. In fact, many of us would drown in the first mile, and only a few would get, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 miles before exhaustion and cold overcomes them. It may seem a big difference, but from an orbiting spacecraft, we would all have drowned right by the start line.

So we cannot help ourselves, for we cannot swim the Atlantic, or put right petrol in the diesel tank; we need help. So if there is a God, why doesn’t he come down and do something about it. Of course, if he did, it would be a miracle itself, just as miraculous as those acts of forgiveness we thought about earlier.

And it’s forgiveness that we need. If our greatest need had been information on how to live, God could have sent a teacher. If our greatest need had been technology so as to change the way things worked, God could have sent us a scientist. If our greatest need had been money to buy ourselves out of our problems, God could have sent an economist. If our greatest need had been pleasure to dull the pain of living, God would have sent us an entertainer.

But our greatest need is forgiveness for what we do wrong, knowingly and unknowingly, so God has sent us a Saviour. In doing that, God did not hold onto revenge or anger against us, but offered us forgiveness, a forgiveness that heals the breach, repairs the bridge, restores the relationship.

If Stephen Oakes’s father, or Abigail Witchall’s family or Anthony Walker’s mother held onto their anger and refused forgiveness, then there could never be the possibility of reconciliation, of restoration, of new life even.

It was at that first Christmas, some 2000 years ago, that God made sure that his love for his creation, for you and me, would be seen and would be reconciling and restoring. He doesn’t refuse forgiveness but offers it, and in that new-born baby whose birth we celebrate year by year, we find forgiveness, hope and purpose.

The gap between us and God is healed, the bridge has been built in and through that baby, the relationship has been restored. And today, God is here, waiting patiently for you to say “Yes, I know I don’t get it right and I need forgiveness and help and I know that comes from Jesus.”

Don’t let this Christmas be another year when you turn your back on God’s offer of forgiveness, God’s offer of hope, God’s offer of purpose. After the service, pick up one of these leaflets lying around and commit yourself to seeking this wonderful God, that miracle of forgiveness wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in a manger, this wonderful God wanting to meet you today and tomorrow and always.