Sermon for Christmas Morn
“For unto you is born this day in the city of David,
a Saviour which is Christ the Lord.”
It is an intellectual challenge that I sometimes like to set for myself, namely, to take a phrase from Scripture and see if one could tease out from that one phrase the essential teachings of the Christian Faith. Crazy, I know, but it means giving serious consideration to the words of Scripture and to what can be found in them, realizing just how much is revealed or at least suggested in them. There is, of course, the obvious problem that such an exercise probably means reading a whole lot more into things than what is there; the problem of isogesis rather than exegesis.
But in the ‘alt fact’ or ‘post-fact world,’ there is the need to pay close attention to interpretation. There are no facts independent of interpretation, even to say what the facts are involves interpretation as to why something is a fact that matters and to what extent. There are lots of ‘facts’ that are merely incidental and in a way meaningless. Despite the claims that are sometimes made by some physicists and some atheist philosophers, we don’t and can’t live in a purely random world of contingency. If everything is contingent, meaning that everything could be other than what it is, then logically there could be nothing. “Nothing is but what is not,” after all, as Shakespeare intuited! Interestingly, he was talking about the nature of evil.
Yet, as Averroes and Aquinas knew, the very idea of contingency requires the existence of the necessary, a necessary principle of being. Aquinas puts the argument in the most extreme case: if all is contingent, then everything potentially could not be therefore there would be nothing at all and if so, then no way for anything to come to be unless there was a principle which necessarily exists and cannot not exist. In short, there can be no contingency without necessity. Contingency in the finite world depends utterly upon a necessarily existent first principle which we call God.
What has any of this curious speculation have to do with Christmas? “For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour which is Christ the Lord.” A powerful phrase that illumines the great mystery of Christmas, it captures the sense of wonder and excitement of the infancy narrative of Luke, the quintessential Christmas story, full of details and apparent facts. It is a familiar story and scene which has moved the imaginations of poets and artists throughout the centuries. Its images are still deeply embedded in the psyche of our contemporary culture.
