Christmas Sermon 2022

(Isaiah 9.2-7; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-20)

How do we celebrate Christmas? Straight away I want to say that Christmas is to be celebrated with joy and hope! “Christ is born again!” “Christ is born today!” That’s God’s love come into the world - and when we ask how God shows himself to us, we find that it’s in the form of a baby. That’s a message that has been proclaimed for two thousand years. And “Christ is born for us.”

At the same time Christmas is a marker in the way we live - a marker in our lives. We might find that we measure out time by our celebration of Christmas - the meetings with people we see only once a year, the time we spend with those we those we love and cherish most. And that’s why these last three years have been so hard with all the restrictions of the pandemic. Still hard for so many people. I was talking to someone yesterday who had made all her plans for having the family together but then her father-in-law was taken into hospital and palliative care. “You can visit him, can’t you?” I asked. But the answer was “no” - not because of Covid, but the hospital was locked down because of an outbreak of Norovirus. So many other causes for concern in our world still. So many people to hold in our hearts.

Christmas-time is a marker in the songs we sing too. Age-old carols, of course, but other songs which ask us just how we make sense of life. My ear-worm at the moment is George Michael singing Wham’s Christmas hit, Last Christmas:

Last Christmas I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special

And then he repeats the verse - several times! Christmas is about love and finding love, but how will we build on it?

Last Christmas I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away…

Is this a song of despair? Or a hope that love may be rekindled? A sort of pop version of O love that wilt not let me go?

Another Christmas perennial is John Lennon’s Merry Christmas (War is over). The man who imagined a world made better if only there were no religion, nevertheless asked,

So this is Christmas
And what have you done?
Another year over
And a new one just begun

“Another year over…” What have we done?

Trying to get myself organised for Christmas I’ve been having to pinch myself to think of how we’d celebrated Christmas before these last three years. Last year, I remember, we were singing carols in our churches - but wearing masks, and we had to limit the number of people who could come to services. The year before… and I don’t really want to think about it! Just last year at this time the Omicron variant of Coronavirus was emerging as an unknown quantity. The year before there were all sorts of rules as to how many people you could meet on Christmas Day - and you had to factor in all the other people they might have met. I said to my older son that I was afraid the maths might mean that when he arrived we would have to stay outside to see each other in the garden - but then he didn’t make it back to the north-east anyway because the area he lives in was locked down all together!

So we pray that this Christmas might be a time when things are better and stay better. Better for us at least…

But we know they’re far from better for so many people elsewhere in the world. I found it hard to believe that in today’s world one nation could threaten another, invade it and think it could annex its territory with impunity. But we’ve seen exactly that in the vicious invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in the continuing misery its government and armed forces seek to inflict. Not only there… A regime based on the wrong sort of religion continues its tyranny in Iran; another deprives women and girls of still more rights and freedoms in Afghanistan; repression remains a characteristic of government in China - and when it loosens its grip there is a real risk of chaos. And elsewhere in the world - largely unreported - millions of people have their lives and livelihoods threatened by starvation and climate change.

Sorry this sounds so gloomy. John Lennon sang, “War is over / If you want it…” but it seems so many people don’t want it.

But there is hope. Whether or not we want it, Christ is present with us - God has come into our human frame in all its complexities and contradictions. As Thomas Merton wrote:

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.

There was no room for Christ’s birth in the inn. But a place was found for him where he could be laid in a manger. A place might be found for him in our hearts.

Outside the entrance to the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, overlooking Trafalgar Square, the birth of Christ is depicted by a sculpture of the newly born Jesus, carved from a massive block of stone - the baby emerges from the rock, the child’s umbilical cord is still attached. This is God’s son born as any one of us. One of the clergy said that one morning, when he came to open up the church, he found a homeless man asleep in a foetal position, on top of the rock, his body curled around the body of the Christ-child. When he woke up the man said, “I was trying to keep him warm.”

The greatly-loved carol, In the bleak midwinter, has the line, “What can I give him poor as I am?” And the reply, “If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.” That poor homeless man was trying to do his part - and at the same time, finding shelter. What can we give? What dare we hope to receive?

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

Yet not only a hope based on what we and other people may or may not do. A very real hope. As our readings from scripture remind us today:

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all…

and

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.

May that hope, made real in the Christ-child, be born once more for all to see!