by CCW | 24 December 2021 20:00
Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Vespers & Ante-Communion for Christmas Eve[1]
“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.”
It is our task to attend with holy reverence and joy to what is shown to us and which lies at the heart of the mystery of Christmas. Something great and profound is shown to us through all of the confusion of images that swirl around the Bethlehem of Christmas night. What is shown is the wonder of God’s great gift of himself, the one in whom and through whom we and the world are made. This night shows us the will and purpose of God for our thinking about the world and ourselves in ways that counter the darkness of our uncertainties and confusions. Such is redemptive love, the love which comes down at Christmas and enfolds us in that divinum mysterium, that divine mystery, of God’s love and very being. Without that vision, we are dead in ourselves and dead to one another, dead in our fears and worries, unalive to the life and light of God. At the very least, may these words enliven our hearts and minds and bodies.
God, “in these last days”, Hebrews says, “has spoken unto us by his Son … by whom he made the world”; a point which is further expressed in the Christmas Gospel. “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Christmas brings us face to face with the deep reality of God as Creator and to the wonder of God with us. Everything unfolds from the center whence it came. The question is where are we in our hearts and minds?
In the darkness of our world and the darknesses of our troubled hearts and minds, we are being led and fed by the God who is the center and the circumference of all things. Bethlehem imaginatively and aesthetically recalls Paradise. It is Paradise restored. All of the seeming confusion of images is really about the harmony of God and nature, of God and our humanity, the unity of all creation with the Creator. It is not our doing; it is God’s doing, but it belongs to our seeing and feeling. The strong intellectual qualities of tonight’s readings speak to our hearts and not just our minds. The sensual and the intellectual cohere and belong together, a counter to the merely instrumental logic of our technocratic world. But recalling Paradise in Bethlehem is not the same thing as returning to Paradise. For there is no going back. There is no wisdom in technology but that doesn’t mean that we can ignore it or deny it either; neither does it mean that we must succumb to its dominance. To reclaim “the wisdom we have lost in knowledge”, and “the knowledge we have lost in information” (Eliot) is to begin to ponder the mystery of Bethlehem which speaks so directly to the mystery of our humanity at one with God.
“‘Leading He feeds us, and feeding He leads us’”, Andrewes says, “till he bring us whither?” Where? Where are we in our hearts and minds? He answers that he brings us “even to a principio”, to the Word which was “in the beginning with God and was God”. We are brought “back again”, he says, “to where we were at the beginning, and at the beginning we were in Paradise. That our beginning shall be our end. Thither He will bring us, – nay, to a better estate than so; so that whereunto, even from Paradise, we should have been translated, to the state of eternity, to the joys and joyful days there; even in glory, joy, and bliss eternal. To which He bring us, even our blessed Guide, that this day was in Bethlehem born to that end, Jesus Christ the Righteous.”
Christ gathers us to himself in whom everything holds together and in whom all things cohere. Such is the wonder of Christmas night. It is found in what we are given to behold even if it is only by words heard. It is wonderfully expressed in the sestet of Guite’s sonnet:
And shall I see the one through whom I am?
Shall I behold the one for whom I’m made,
The light in light, the flame within the flame,
Eikon tou theou, image of my God?
He comes, a little child, to bless my sight,
That I might come to him for life and light.
(Everything holds together, 2016)
Such are the rich blessings of this holy night in “the poorest and emptiest season of nature” and at the place of “the greatest gathering that ever was or will be”. The blessings are found in what we behold on Christmas night. For “here the true hearts are” at least in mind and intention.
Fr. David Curry
Christmas Eve, 2021
(under lockdown restrictions imposed by the Bishop[2])
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2021/12/24/sermon-for-christmas-eve-13/
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