Sermon for Christmas Eve
“And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth”
Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Vespers & Ante-Communion for Christmas Eve
“The poorest and emptiest season in nature [has] become the fullest and richest in grace,” the poet-preacher Lancelot Andrewes remarks. Christmas Eve is a time of gathering, indeed, “the greatest gathering that ever was or will be”. In the Christian imaginary, we are gathered together at Bethlehem, at once “least among the thousands of Judah”, as Micah states, and yet “not the least”, as Matthew counters. The poorest place has “become the fullest and richest in grace” where everything is gathered together and where “everything holds together, everything”, as a contemporary poet, Malcolm Guite remarks for both time and place. “The end of all our exploring”, our seeking and our desiring, as T.S. Eliot suggests “will be to arrive where we started/and know the place for the first time” (Little Gidding). For not only is “here all aright” but, even more, is “here the world’s desire”, as Chesterton’s lovely poem about the Christ-child puts it.
Yet Bethlehem, then and now, must seem a strange and confused place, a place of obscurity and uncertainty. All our Christmas efforts to dress it up are like so much tinsel and wrap that hide its lowliness and insignificance. What a great confusion of images, a virtual menagerie of creatures, a great cluster of improbable things all gathered together! Bethlehem may but seem the mirror image of our own times of darkness and confusion, of fear and uncertainty, a place and a time where we are more scattered than gathered not just physically but mentally. Paradoxically, there is no mention whatsoever of Bethlehem in the readings for Christmas Eve; only in the hymns, which we are now not allowed to sing, even if the Bishop had not suspended our gathering together, is Bethlehem named, indeed, four times in three of the four hymns intended for use on this night. Yet Bethlehem captures our attention and at once shapes and controls our imagination through the great variety of creche scenes, ranging from the very simple and rustic to the exotic and artistically refined. They all seek to capture the humble scene of Christ’s lowly birth and its greatness.
Tonight’s readings give meaning and coherence to this range and confusion of images. “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”; “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” These are texts which remind us of the darkness of ourselves and our world, the darkness of ignorance and sin, that belongs to our betrayals of God and one another. And yet, they are essential to the greater gathering in the poorest and emptiest season and in the least of all places. And all because of what these readings tonight signify and hold out to view, namely, the one who is at the center of everything and in whom everything holds together. As Malcolm Guite puts it “everything holds together and coheres,/ Unfolding from the center whence it came./ And now that hidden heart of things appears,/ The first-born of creation takes a name.”
