Sermon for Christmas Morn
And this shall be a sign unto you
The gentle quiet of Christmas morn is itself a Christmas blessing, a gift to the understanding. In the noise of our world and day we overlook what is wrought in the great silences of God. Creation, Christ’s Incarnation, and Christ’s Resurrection all happen “in the deep silence of God”; we know them only after the fact. Ignatius of Antioch, one of the Apostolic Fathers, second-generation Christians as it were who had first-hand contact with the Apostles, speaks wonderfully about the silences of God.
Mary’s virginity was hidden from the prince of this world; so was her child-bearing, and so was the death of the Lord. All these three trumpet-tongued secrets were brought to pass in the deep silence of God. How then were they made known to the world? Up in the heavens a star gleamed out, more brilliant than all the rest; no words could describe its lustre, and the strangeness of it left men bewildered … The age-old empire of evil was overthrown, for God was now appearing in human form to bring in a new order, even life without end (Ignatius’s Epistle to the Ephesians).
He could be commenting on this morning’s readings. “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,” Paul tells us in his letter to Titus. “And she brought forth her first-born son,” Luke tells us. Such are the quiet graces of Christmas morn.
They are there for our understanding, a challenge and a counter to our post-Christian world. How do we think God? Through the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology, the dance of negation and affirmation that distinguishes God as the principle upon which everything depends and so is not to be confused with anything in the created order. Without the dance of “this is thou and neither is this thou” we collapse God into ourselves and into all of the petty nonsense of our world and day. Such is our atheism. It is for that reason that the so-called Athanasian Creed with its sequences of negation and affirmation about the mystery of God as Trinity and the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation might well be our best Christmas contemplation. “Without forsaking what he was,” namely, God, “he became what he was not,” namely, man, as Athanasius himself says, providing the key insight that belongs to the Creed which much later came to be named after him. We cannot not think God and we can only think God in this way.
The mystery of the union of God and man is the heart of Christmas, its wonder and truth. Nothing is but what is in God and apart from God nothing is. The mystery of God with us is the mystery of God himself. All of the wonderful images of the Christmas scene laid out so wonderfully by Luke for us this morning are but signs that point to the wonder of God. Angels and shepherds come to worship and so do we. To worship is to contemplate what is worthy of all our attention. We are enfolded into the mystery which we behold. Through the dance of negation and affirmation we participate in the mystery of Christ, the Word made flesh, “wrapped in swaddling bands and lying in a manger.” The very contrast between such glory and such lowliness is the greater glory, the greater unity of God in whom all things find their truth and being.
