Sermon on Midnight Mass and Christmas Day - Fr Sam Rossiter

May it be given to me to speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please do be seated.

One of the most personal things we're ever given is our name. It's usually the first gift that we get. Long before we can speak or choose or even understand, someone looks at us and decides how we're going to be known.

Over time, our names gather meaning. They become tied with who we are, what we've done, how we're seen. Sometimes our names carry love and affection.

Sometimes they carry misunderstanding, disappointment, even hurt. But names are important. And the readings that we've just heard tonight are full of names.

Not just names for people, but names for God. St. John begins his gospel not with a birth story, but with a name. In the beginning was the word.

When John uses the word, the name, word, he's translating a rich idea. In Greek, he says logos. It doesn't just mean word, it means reason, meaning, order.

It names the sense that in the beginning, reality wasn't random, but held together by something coherent and alive. St. John is saying that at the very heart of existence is meaning. And more than that, meaning that can speak, that can be known, that has a name, that can call us by name.

The logos, the word. St. John continues, all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In other words, this meaning is God who made us and everything around us.

To him, we're not an afterthought, but beings lovingly crafted with desire and intention. God isn't some distant force who occasionally intervenes or who we might say a prayer to to make sure our football team wins. From the very beginning, God has been involved in the world that he made.

And then St. John says the thing that changes everything. The word, the logos became flesh and dwelt among us. What St. John is saying is that God knew that to be fully involved, he had to become one of us.

So God became a baby boy, and he took on a new name, Jesus, the name which means the Lord is salvation. So two words right at the beginning of the account of Jesus's life, two names, the word logos meaning Jesus, the one who is salvation. But there are so many more names for God.

One of the earliest names for God, one of my favourites, was given by a woman called Hagar. It happens in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Hagar was enslaved, mistreated, abandoned in the wilderness by the people of God, by Abraham and Sarah, who were acting cruelly towards her in their own confusion and misery.

In the wilderness, God met Hagar, and he turned her desperation into blessing and abundance. And so she named him El Roy, the God who sees me. That name tells us that God doesn't just observe us, he sees us, not the version of us that we present to the world or that goes on social media, but the tired, complicated us, the us that carries regret, fear, unfinished business, maybe the us that we only ever let out in the mirror.

God saw Hagar when no one else did, weeping in the wilderness alone, sure that she and her baby were about to die. And he loved her, and he blessed her, and he made it so that the evil that she had suffered wasn't the end of her story. But God also saw Abraham and Sarah.

He saw their brokenness and the wrong that it led to, how much they had hurt Hagar. And when God had brought about that wrongdoing to good and showed them how wrong they'd been, he kept on walking with them. Because being seen by God doesn't lead to rejection, no matter who we are or what we do.

Repeatedly, the God who sees is the God who also stays. Hagar was abandoned, but God stepped in. Abraham and Sarah did something cruel and terrible, but God didn't give up on them.

And so another name given to God by Abraham's family was El Shaddai. It's often just translated as God Almighty, but it's more fully translated as the God who sustains. Eventually, Abraham and Sarah had children, those children had children, and so on and so on, until they became a people, God's people.

El Shaddai was their sustenance. Even when they messed up, which they did a lot, he brought them back to himself. The Bible is a very honest book.

Even when we try to be good, what the Bible explores again and again is that life gets in the way. Trying harder to be good isn't enough. Believing harder isn't enough.

Trying and persuading yourself that you'll just be better tomorrow isn't enough. The Bible is a set of human stories, human histories, and they're stories that show us that everyone, from king to peasant, everyone, including us, carries a sort of bag on their backs. It's full of the things that we wish that we'd done differently, the things in our lives that have hurt us, the things that we can't forgive, that we can't put down.

And we carry that bag into our relationships, into our work, into our attempts to be happy, into our attempt to be good. But every time we try to be perfectly good, that bag ends up dragging us back down, just like it did to Abraham and Sarah. Their fear made them cruel.

The Christian claim isn't that we should just carry that bag a bit better. It's that the God who is meaning, the God who created us, the God who sees us, the God who sustains us, knows what we're carrying and offers to carry it for us. And that's why the Christmas account looks the way it does.

Because when the time was right, God came himself. The word became flesh. A baby born into vulnerability and poverty, into a family that would flee to safety, into a world that would misunderstand him, reject him, and eventually kill him.

As St John so poetically told us, the word became Jesus, who ate with other people, the people who others avoided, who touched those who no one else wanted to touch, who empowered women when no one else was doing it, who welcomed foreigners when they were excluded, who honoured sinners when they were reviled. Because he said that no matter what anybody else said, people matter. Jesus knew grief and anger and exhaustion and the pain of the world, but he refused to turn away.

Because he was there for the pain of the world, right in the midst of who and what we are. And then at 33 years old, he was killed by people who hated his teaching. But that too was part of the plan, because in dying, he, God, took that bag that every human being has carried and has ever carried, and he took it for himself.

Every regret, every failure, every wound, he said, give them to me, and I will put them to an end on the cross. And when he died, that bag full of stuff ended with him. But then three days later, he came back to life, and he left that bag of pain and regret behind.

He said, it's dealt with, it's done. Now follow me and find out what it means to live a life without that burden weighing you down. That's what a Christian is.

Just somebody forgiven, trying to live into forgiveness. Midnight mass, Christmas, church, faith. Whatever has brought you here this evening, let me encourage you.

None of this is about having everything figured out. It's not about having anything figured out. Being religious isn't about being certain or being a good enough person.

Being a Christian is just an invitation to discover what it means to live by being known, known by the one who is meaning, who made you, who sees you, who sustains you. It's an invitation to discover that if you'll let him, he'll also save you and carry you and call you by name. Amen.