Sermon for Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf, Christmas service

admin | 30 November 2014

“Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, good will towards men”

They are familiar words that belong to the hopes and joys of the Christmas season. We forget, however, that they are Angels’ words, words conveyed on Angels’ wings to shepherds first and from them to us.

Christmas is far more than a one day wonder. Apart from the celebrated twelve days of Christmas, there is the interesting feature of Christmas itself, a festival that embraces three masses, three celebrations that emphasize certain distinct but interrelated features belonging to Christmas. The three masses are variously named but they focus on the Angels’ Mass, the Shepherds’ Mass and the Mass of the Divine Word, Mass here being a word referring to the liturgy. Christmas means simply Christ’s Mass, the celebration of the Incarnation, liturgically speaking, from which the term Christmas has carried over into the reality of the season and even into secular culture.

The Angels’ Mass focuses on the role of the Angels in bringing the news of great wonder to the Shepherds and rejoicing angelically in words which become the basis of the Gloria. “Glory to God and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.” Such commemorations by no means exhaust the rich and deep and beautiful meaning of Christmas but they order our contemplations and serve to underscore the great wonder and mystery of Christmas.

In the midst of all the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season which already surrounds us, there is something wonderfully quiet and angelic about our gathering. The Angels teach us heavenly things. They are the harbingers of great good news to the lowly shepherds. There is something profoundly wonderful in that juxtaposition of exalted Angels and lowly shepherds; it signals the special sense of the Christmas mystery as enfolding the whole of the created order, “rich and poor, high and low, one with another,” in the worship of the child Christ. It signals the harmony of the created order, a harmony found in God’s embrace of his creation in the humble birth of the child wrapped in swaddling clothes, designated by the Angels as Saviour.

The opening words of an Angel to the shepherds are powerful words that speak to us and our world. “Fear not, for I bring you good news of glad tidings.” Not just good news, but “good news of glad tidings.” The qualification is wonderful. The good news brings joy. It does not merely counter our fears and worries; it eclipses them in the light of grace and glory, in an abundant sense of joy and delight. Such is the quality of angelic words. They give birth to joy just in the telling without even our coming yet to Bethlehem.

The Angels, you may note, cannot keep the joy of their knowledge to themselves. In telling the good news of glad tidings, “the multitude of the heavenly host” break into song, the hymn of worship; the hymn which the Angels sing is heard by the shepherds. Is it too much to think that having been taught such songs by the Angels they, in turn, teach us the same heavenly songs? I think not. It is all part of the Christmas message, the good news of glad tidings. It is all about the quiet joys that compel us to sing, singing in Angels’ words the wondrous mystery of Christ’s holy birth.

What is that wonder? Simply this, that in Christ, God became man without ceasing to be God. “Without forsaking what he was, he became what he was not,” as Athanasius put it so long ago. Glory to God and peace on earth. The unity of God and man in Christ Jesus awakens us to the realization of the union between the Creator and his creation. Christmas opens us out to the hope and the joy of human lives lived in the presence of God. That makes all the difference.

May the words of the Angels touch all our hearts and teach us heavenly joys, teaching us to sing: