Sermon for Christmas Eve
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”
Christmas challenges all the absurd certainties of our worried and weary world, a worried and wearied world, perhaps, because we are too much “assured of certain certainties” and only too “impatient to assume the world” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes). A virgin and a mother, a child who is God, a night that is eternal day, the Word and Idea of God made flesh, God with us and towards us and for us without ceasing to be what He is in himself – God. These are surely the ideas that challenge us. Christmas speaks powerfully to all our fears and worries, to the anxieties which arise from the absurd certainties and arrogance of the vanities of our reason when left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” It challenges all of the absurdities of power and domination in a world of violence and destruction, a worried and weary world, indeed.
“O weary, weary were the world / But here is all aright,” as G.K. Chesterton’s lovely poem, A Christmas Carol, puts it. Christmas proclaims the redemption of our humanity in all of its fullness, the redemption of our hearts and minds, of our souls and bodies. It is all found in God. That we might know this wonder and mystery, we have the wonder and mystery of God with us, Emmanuel. “The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart, / His hair was like a fire./ (O weary, weary were the world,/ But here the world’s desire.)”
No doubt, it may seem de trop, all too much. And there have even been times when Christmas was banned by Christians, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, not simply because people seemed to be having too much fun (and we can’t have that, can we?!), but because all of the images that came to surround the celebration seemed to be idolatry, mistaking God himself for the things which God has made, confusing the Creator with the Created. Christmas seemed to be mere superstition, “painted-over paganism” and anti-religious, a betrayal of the holy.
The first Book of Common Prayer (1549), too, was mocked as being “but like a Christmas game” by traditionalists, particularly in Cornwall, who wanted to retain the mystery of the Latin Liturgy and a sense of the holy as mysterious and incomprehensible. The association of the English liturgy with “a Christmas game” suggests something frivolous and not serious, something not really real. How to think the mystery of Christmas, it appears, is not a new challenge; it is the challenge for every age.
