Sermon for Christmas Eve
And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father
Christmas is really all about what we behold, about what we look at attentively; in short, to what we think about in a serious way. How strange and counter-culture that must seem in the hustle and bustle, the stürm und drang, the storm and stress of the Christmas season. And yet, perhaps, nothing is more needed.
What we are bidden to behold is the mystery of God, first and foremost, and then the mystery of God with us. This is the necessary corrective to all the frantic pressures and hectic busyness of Christmas and to its opposite in the empty loneliness of so many in the world of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. We look out, I fear, on a world of lonely people, isolated and afraid. “Look at all the lonely people, where do they all come from, where do they all belong,” as the Beatles sang in ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ It may be, too, that I am simply like Father Mackenzie, “writing the words of a sermon no one will hear.”
What does Christmas mean in our post-Christian culture? Apart from the commercial aspects of getting and spending, I suspect it mostly has to do with a certain desire for a kind of coziness and comfort with family and friends, hyggelig, to use a Danish and Scandinavian term. But the pursuit of such material comforts paradoxically seems to create all of the anxieties of Christmas and turns hygge into something more like Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream.” Cozy comfort and hugs become nordic noir! Instead of a more profound sense of the unity of our humanity we retreat into our little cubby-holes of comfort over and against what has become a fearful, uncertain, fractious and disordered world. We are trapped in a culture of divisiveness and fearful animosities.
But why? In part, because we make the mistake of thinking that we can and must make Christmas for ourselves over and against the other whoever that other may be; that we can and must make the world comfortable for ourselves which is always at the expense of others. We forget the radical meaning of Christmas which is about God and God’s love for his creation and for the whole of our humanity. We forget everything that belongs to the wonder and the mystery of the Christmas scene. What is that scene? What do we behold? Simply this: Bethlehem is paradise restored. The images of Bethlehem in our churches and even in our post-Christian culture signal the mystery of God and man, of a mother and a child, of men and women, of shepherds and kings, of angels and sheep and, by extension and beyond the Scriptures, of ox and ass, of camels and peacocks, quite literally the whole menagerie of creation in the Christian imaginary of artists and poets. Bethlehem recalls us to the harmony and peace of the Creator and his creation, to something universal and yet intimate, a hyggelig that embraces rather than excludes.
