Article
- Date:
- Wednesday 25th December 2024
Christmas Day - Service:
- Midnight Communion
- Readings:
- John 1.1-14
Against the current fashion, I love big, fat books, the longer the better; and this particularly applies to biographies. But I would not dream of putting a life story aside just when the infant and its mother are discharged from the maternity unit; and as I am somewhat sceptical about the Freudian view of childhood, I tend to rush through the content dealing with early life; I want to read about the great achievements of the adult.
Tonight is a time for great rejoicing but without the adult context the wondrous birth of the child tends to become indistinguishable from pantomime: with faithful Mary and Joseph shut out by a stroppy innkeeper; rustic shepherds, shiny angels, exotic kings; and the baddy, King Herod. And, if you're really lucky, a real donkey.
But what makes this night special is not the wondrous prose of Luke with dark shadows from Matthew, it is a night of promise, of the promise of Christian hope. As a self-standing story it is little more than picturesque.
And for most people in our country, it is simply that; picturesque. It exists right outside the eschatological arc of Christian hope which begins in the promise to Eve and the serpent and ends with the union of God's realm and our realm in the timeless adoration of the lamb on the throne.
So what has gone wrong? The answer is long and complex but it boils down, I think, to two connected theological misunderstandings, largely attributable to the late writings of Saint Augustine and amplified by Catholics and Protestants alike in the 16th Century.
The first problem is the erroneous notion of Original Sin and the quasi contractual means of escaping from it through Baptism: no baptism equals Original Sin equals damnation. The second problem is the shift from the idea of collective salvation to that of individual salvation which, in turn, leads us into another contractual tangle such that Western Christianity is obsessed with the terms of the salvation contract.
The fundamental mistake we make is to think that this eschatological trajectory, made concrete in incarnation, only applies to us as a reward for our faithfulness when the primary purpose of Christianity is not exclusivity but stewardship of the good news of Christian hope which it is our privilege to share.
But if you asked most people in our country what we represent it would more likely be judgment rather than hope; it would more likely be condemnation of the inevitable hypocrisy that arises from being self appointed judges, rather than praise for our charitable openness to the other; it would more likely be a critique of arbitrary power rather than acknowledgment of our humble service.
We often remind ourselves, more sentimentally than theologically I fear, that Jesus was born in a stable into a poor family - well, not so poor, actually - in an occupied land, was threatened with infanticide and went into exile, and we extrapolate what that represents for us. But, then, how highly does our Church value vulnerability? How suspicious are we of arbitrary power? How welcoming are we to the exile? But, in the context of this sermon, how comfortable are we with the notion that it is our created purpose to live holy lives, loving God and each other, which has no salvific implications for we live holy lives for God's sake and not for our own. Can we really rid ourselves of the hope that we are somehow special, worthy of something better than those out there?
But in truth this holy night is not about us; it is about the good news for the whole world, the good news of Christian hope, and the fact that the whole world does not know it is our sacred responsibility. When we sing it, we really have to mean "Joy to the world".