Sermon for Christmas Eve
“And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father”
“Let us now go unto Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass which the Lord has made known to us,” the shepherds say one to another. Yet in our readings tonight there is not a single mention of Bethlehem at all! Instead we hear the strong and profoundly meditative words of John’s Prologue who only mentions Bethlehem once elsewhere in his Gospel and in a context of controversy. Mark in his Gospel never mentions Bethlehem at all. The imaginative centrality of Bethlehem is left to Matthew and Luke whose story is amply captured in the hymns and music of this season.
Yet everywhere is Bethlehem tonight. But what is Bethlehem, we may well ask, and what does it mean that “everywhere is Bethlehem tonight”? We may be somewhat cynical about Bethlehem. After all, what’s so great about Bethlehem? Christmas? And where is the glory, the peace, the joy, good will towards men in a world distraught and dangerous, a place of terror and foreboding, of violence and abuse? Where was the glory, the peace, the joy, the good will and all that jazz in the School in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the Lindt Café in Sydney, Australia, on Canada’s Parliament Hill and in Quebec in November, in the bewildered and bedeviled communities of Africa striken with Ebola, not to mention some of the examples of moral turpitude more closer to home? And that is only to make a beginning of all our woes, our confusions and uncertainties, globally and locally.
Is not Bethlehem itself a place of confusion and chaos, of violence and strife, of hatred and blood, of blood shed, quite literally, in the holy places? As the journalist, Neil Lochery, once observed “modern day Bethlehem is little short of a rundown dump of a town, located in the middle of a war zone, troubled not only by war but by the incessant hassle of local souvenir sellers desperate to peddle their goods, the place of the tyranny of conflict and the tyranny of consumerism,” caught between consumerism and terrorism, it seems, between Walmart and Jihadis, trampled in the aisles or blown up by terrorists! O joy!
