Christmas Night – Eucharist – 24.xii.2019
(Isaiah 9.2-7; Titus
2.11-14; Luke 2.1-20)
What’s
Christmas about? Lots of things - and I don’t really need to give you a list.
But if I wanted to sum it up in once sentence today, I’d say “Christmas takes
us to Bethlehem.” It’s there in the carols we sing: “O little town of Bethlehem;”
“Once in royal David’s city” (which is of course Bethlehem); and in the
Calypso Carol there’s the chorus, “O now, carry me to Bethlehem.” That’s where
we “see the Lord appear to men” - God comes to his people in Jesus at a
particular point in time and in a particular place.
“O little
town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…” How still! Let me try you
with this…
“When
peaceful silence lay over all, and night was in the midst of her swift course:
from your royal throne O God, down from the heavens, leapt your almighty Word.”
These are words which resonate with me, from the Book of Wisdom. I couldn’t
remember them exactly so I searched for them online, looking for the phrase “In
the stillness of the night…” What did I find?...
In the stillness of the
night. Imaginations run wild. Can't help to think about you and I. In a mental
paradise. Girl I need your love like the trees need the sun. Relying on your
touch. And only you can deliver. Water feels the herb and the herb's buds
sprung.
It's not
what I was looking for! And there were lots of other results before I finally
found the one I actually wanted.
Christ is
born into our world - but is it a world which knows what it wants? Or do we think we know what we want, but miss
what we truly need?
The
American priest and preacher, Fleming Rutledge, has said, “the significance of
the birth of Jesus Christ will forever elude us if we are unable to take an
inventory of the gravity of the human condition.” In other words we need to
recognise what sort of a state we’re in. “Humankind cannot bear very much
reality,” T. S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets. But the message of the
Incarnation - of God taking our human flesh when he comes in the child of
Bethlehem - is that God comes to us exactly where we are, in the midst of all
our concerns; God comes to us in Jesus - and that’s why he can speak to us and
bring us the healing of our most grievous wounds.
Christmas
takes us to Bethlehem. What will we find there?
A visit to
Bethlehem is a high point in any pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But what do you
find there? One of our pilgrim party a couple of years ago recorded how her
first impression was spoiled by the scaffolding which filled so much of
the Church of the Nativity - and then there were long queues in which we
had to wait. I remember on another occasion having to wait first for a service
to end and then as a monk meticulously swept the steps down into the shrine -
it was all part of the strict division of rights each different religious
community exercised over the building, but it had the effect of increasing the
anxiety of those (of us) who fear that they’ll miss their opportunity to
visit. And when you finally get in, you find the supposed place of Christ’s
birth marked by a silver star set in the floor… Another pilgrim photographed me
as I reached down to venerate it - the holiest of places but the picture shows
me looking very awkward with my bottom very prominently uppermost.
But that’s
the point… A prayer I use at Christmas reads,
Blessed art thou, O
Christmas Christ,
that thy cradle was so low
that shepherds,
poorest and simplest of
earthly folk,
could yet kneel beside it,
and look level-eyed into the
face of God.
A child can stand and look straight into the crib we have
prepared beneath the altar of our church - but an adult needs to bend and bow.
The Christ-child calls us to set aside our dignity. But at the same time this
is God putting aside the majesty of a heavenly throne to be born for our sakes
in poverty.
God comes to us in Jesus to find us as we are, without any
payment on our part, without any need for pretence, without any need to earn
his love.
And he comes to us in our deepest needs.
This year in Bethlehem the artist Banksy has created his
own version of a crib scene in the hotel he has built next to the so-called
Separation Wall. The Wall surrounds so much of the town to deny its people free
movement from the West Bank into Israel. The hotel itself he has called The Walled-Off
Hotel, not the Waldorf but an indication of the plight of the people who
live there, literally walled off from places they might want or even need to
go. The Wall itself is a horrible sight, and Banksy has incorporated it into
his nativity scene. He’s used very traditional figures of Mary and Joseph and
the child in the manger with the ox and the ass looking on. But the backdrop is
that wall.
It’s obviously at least in part a political statement. But
there’s something more. High up above the Holy Family, the artist has made a
hole in the wall and at the same time challenges us as to how we interpret
that hole. It could be a burst of light shining through a star, or it
could be the damage caused by the blast of a shell. It could be a sign of
hope in the darkness, that barriers can be broken down, or it could be a
reference to the violence by which so many people are oppressed. And
both interpretations are possible in the original story of Christmas. The birth
of the child of Bethlehem to bring new hope… But also his family are in Bethlehem
because of a census ordered by the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. As
Justo Gonzalez writes, a census was “an inventory of all the wealth of a region
- its people, its animals and its crops - so that the government would be able
to tax people to the maximum. A census usually announced greater poverty and
oppression.”
Bethlehem is a real place - now and 2,000 years
ago. And we live real lives in real places. Two years ago that artist,
Banksy, commissioned a Nativity Play to be put on in the car park of his hotel,
next to the Separation Wall. The main point was that the characters were all acted
by local people, young and old, people who lived in Bethlehem. It’s nativity
plays in our schools which so often make the deepest impression on people in
our own towns and villages in this country. In part that will be pride that
someone’s child is playing their part - and the love which that brings out. But
I hope it’s also because this is something being made real here and now.
The tradition of setting up cribs in our churches goes
back to the crib which St. Francis built at Greccio in his home region of
Umbria - and there he used real people, a real baby and an ox and an ass. In
countries like Italy and Malta the Presepe or Presepio can be
very elaborate incorporating the place of Christ’s birth into a whole village. The
buildings might be recognisable in the scene as the buildings of the village. People
go about their work as they do in the same jobs day by day in the real world.
You might have to look quite hard to find just where the birth of the
Christ-child is taking place. But he is there - and the difference he
makes is real.
Jesus is born into our world in the midst of all that is going
on in our lives. He may seem a world away. So many people know all too acutely
the reality of suffering, the loss of a loved one, the illness of a friend. So
many struggle to get by from day to day. Others have everything they want and
might not give anything else a thought. And at Christmas so many of us party on,
forgetting the meaning of the Feast - or are consumed by anxiety to get everything
just right.
To all of us Christ comes with the message of God’s love
for the world - of God’s love for us / God’s love for me.
I’d started by saying, “Christmas takes us to Bethlehem.”
But it’s God who takes the initiative, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say, “Christmas
brings Bethlehem to us.”
