Sermon for Christmas Morn
“Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,
which shall be to all people”
Click here to listen to an audio file of the Service of Mattins & Ante-Communion for Christmas Morn
Wonderful words. It has been a kind of challenge for me to think about how various scriptural passages in themselves might be understood to lead us into the whole mystery of Christ. This is a counter to the kinds of literal and fundamentalist readings of Scripture which overlook the deeper logic of the understanding. It is about what is in principle universal revealed in and through the conditions of the finite and the particular.
Christmas is the greatest expression of this idea though not in a triumphal way. It is enough to say that the Gospel simply makes explicit in a certain way what is present and moves in the great ethical traditions of the world’s religions and philosophies; things about which technocratic culture knows nothing and has nothing to say. There is no wisdom in technology, in the technocratic culture which we all inhabit. This does not and cannot mean denying or fleeing from the techno-world which we have created. It means finding ways to overcome the idolatries of the human imagination and the will to power which bring before us such a confusion of good things and evil things. The question is about us and about what defines us.
The whole of the Christmas mystery speaks to this concern. In the celebration of the Word and Son of God made flesh, something powerful and profound is being said about our humanity. It is captured quite movingly in the Christmas readings such as those for Christmas morning. This year, owing to the restraints imposed by Public Health, and, then, even more, the complete suspension of ‘in-person worship’ by the Bishop, Christmas Eve was, sadly, a ‘silent night’ in empty churches; so, too, the quiet of Christmas morn is the almost unbearable silence of empty churches from which I am speaking to you. All we can do is to ponder the readings and pray the liturgy; we are reduced to reading and thinking about the great meaning of Christmas in our isolation and remove from one another. It is quite paradoxical that the celebration of Christ coming to us in the body of our humanity should take the form of our being disembodied and apart from one another. Does that mean a separation from the body of Christ?
