Christmas Day Sermon 2022
25 December 2022, 11:00am Eucharist.
I’m not sure how many car drivers could ever have claimed to genuinely understand the workings of the internal combustion engine, let alone today’s hybrid and electric vehicles. And I can’t imagine that many of the passengers on the multiple ferries and cruise ships passing us in the Solent have ever seen the engine room of the vessels they trust to get them to their destination. Perhaps it’s better that way; more reassuring not to know how it all works and therefore what might go wrong!
This is where the great festival of Christmas, with all its ‘comfort and joy’, is potentially rather worrying. Edward Benson’s famous introduction to the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols speaks of it being ‘our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.’ But when we accept the invitation to enter the stable and gaze upon the holy child, we are really being invited below decks into the engine room: God’s engine room. This is how God works; this is how God is. Here is where it might all go wrong, because God has given himself away so completely that we meet him in poverty and weakness, in the frail beauty of a new born baby, entirely dependent on others for survival.
There is something shocking about this: the Creator of the Universe, of all that is, often referred to in prayer as ‘Almighty God’, giving away all strength and power as they are usually understood. In the engine room of the universe, God is revealed through the kind of love found in a helpless child in a cradle, and then in later life through death on a cross. In a turbulent world we human beings are all too often focussed on our own safety, our own success, on being in control as much as we can. We are used to power being used coercively or corruptly. But this festival of Christmas tells us what Good Friday and Easter tell us, that God freely chooses to give himself away in love. The world we live in exists because of the overflowing love of God, who has given us autonomy and freedom, and sent us the gift of his Son to whom we are invited to respond. God has given us something of his own life, inviting us to be so caught up in the self-giving life of Jesus that we want to live this way ourselves.
For a number of years I taught a third year undergraduate module on theology and film, and in the final December session I asked my students to critically assess the current crop of Christmas adverts. One of the criteria was the extent to which they reflected anything at all of the actual Christmas story, as we have heard it today from Luke’s Gospel. Ever since, when I see a new crop of adverts, with their animated carrots or bears, their tables overflowing with food and towers of presents, I find myself continuing to do the same kind of evaluation.
My personal winner for this year involves a middle aged man and a skateboard! The advert opens with him awkwardly putting on a helmet, falling off and hurting his knee. You wonder if he is going through some kind of mid-life crisis, as he persists in trying to master his skateboard, gradually improving along with a whole series of bumps and grazes. You see his surprise the first time he actually completes a particular move. In the background you are aware that preparations for Christmas are taking place, and that he and his wife are excited at something that is about to happen.
And then, as they are peeling the sprouts, their door bell rings. It is a care worker with a young girl named Ellie – who is clutching a skateboard. She is meeting her new foster parents for the first time. The man shows her his bandaged wrist, points to the board just inside the door, and says, ‘I skate a bit too’. The girl comes in, talking about how the man’s board would look better with a few stickers, as on the screen text tells us that more than a hundred thousand children in the UK are currently in the care system.
Yes, this is an advert, which is ultimately about marketing and making money, but it well judged for our current economic climate. There are no extravagant food tables or piles of presents. Rather there are people who care about the wider society around them, who are ready and willing to do something to make a positive difference, and a man who is prepared to make a fool of himself, and hurt himself, in building empathy and solidarity with a vulnerable young person.
At one level skateboarding is trivial, but the point is that the man is prepared to try something new, to have his ordinary habits of life shifted a bit, out of compassion and love. Costly effort is made so that a new relationship may be built, so that new love may be born and given in return. Here is a glimpse of what the engine of the universe looks like when it is reflected in an ordinary human life.
At Christmas God reaches out to us, ready to be hurt and even to die, so that new love may be born in us, our ordinary habits knocked sideways, as we learn to return that love by allowing it to shape our lives and actions.
In this season, it is not only the makers of adverts who have a field day, but also cartoonists, who often find clever ways to link the Christmas story to current events. I was struck and challenged by one that pictures a scene from this morning’s Gospel, in which Mary and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem seeking accommodation, only to be told, ‘I’m afraid the nearest available inn is in Rwanda.’ One parliamentary sketch writer infused his commentary on last week’s debate about deporting refugees to that country, with satirical references to this all being just what the baby Jesus would have wanted.
The Bishop of Durham has led the church’s response on this one, speaking of our responsibility as a nation to treat refugees with dignity, to listen to their cases carefully, here, before those who have no right to claim asylum are safely returned. For saying this some have castigated him, and other bishops, for inappropriately straying in to politics. But once you have seen the engine room of the universe, and learnt about costly love in solidarity with others, whether a child in care or a refugee fleeing persecution and war, you cannot see the world in the same way again. God has given us something of his own life, inviting us to be so caught up in the self-giving life of Jesus that we want to live this way ourselves, and for our society to better reflect what we have seen in him.
In our current context, as the Ukrainian conflict continues, and domestically there is widespread industrial action in the midst of a cost of living crisis, the temptation might be to hunker down, and concentrate on self-protection and personal survival. This is understandable, and the problems are real enough, but it loses sight of so much: that the best kind of life is not shaped by worry and fear; so much better if we are orientated around a positive vision of human life, and what we are capable of if we use our God-given gifts for the benefit of those in need. If we are ready, not necessarily to take up skateboarding, but to have our day to day habits shifted in some way in taking compassionate action. Not so much self-protection, as self-giving.
In the manger in Bethlehem, in the frailty of the Christ-child, we have seen the engine room of the universe. It is a wonder, and it is worrying. It is consoling, and it is challenging. Here is the life of all things, full of grace and truth, the life of the everlasting Word of God. This Christmas and subsequently, we are all invited to share in this life, and to kindle on earth, in our local circumstances, in our nation and the wider world, the flame of this incredible, vulnerable, self-giving love. AMEN.