Sermon for Christmas Morning
“When all things were in quiet silence
and the night was in the midst of her swift course,
then, thy almighty Word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.”
These wonderful and wise words from the Book of The Wisdom of Solomon capture prophetically the wonder and the mystery of Christmas night and bring us into the holy quiet of Christmas morn. They refer, in their context, to political judgment; the Word of God is the heavenly warrior who comes to bring justice and peace. But theologically, the leaping down of the Word of God who takes flesh and is born of Mary is our peace and justice. “The Lord our Righteousness,” as Jeremiah says. He is our redeemer. He is Jesus our Saviour. Christmas morn holds us in the quiet wonder of God’s being with us in the intimacy of Christ’s holy birth.
Bethlehem is the humble scene of the redemption of our humanity. It is judgement, inescapably. It is the divine judgement upon our wounded and broken humanity, torn apart by sin and pride, bloodied and terrible in the cravings for power and domination. The occasion of Christ’s holy birth, as St. Luke makes clear, is entirely political – a census dictated by the Roman powers, a census taken for the purposes of taxation and control, as all censuses are. Yet God uses the powers of the world to effect his greater will and purpose for our humanity. All the wheels of the great power of Rome are turned by God to bring Joseph and Mary, heavy with child, to the lowly stable in little Bethlehem. A myriad of prophetic statements begin to find their newer and deeper truth in what unfolds in the birth of the Child Christ.
It confounds the politics of the world. A child born to be king, not in any worldly sense of power and majesty, but in the far greater sense of overruling ourselves in our selfishnesses and self-preoccupations, in the far greater sense of overturning a world turned in upon itself, and in the far, far greater sense of turning the world back to its truth in God. God wills to engage our humanity to bring redemption, a redemption that is cosmic in scope.
