Christmas Eve 2023

And so may I speak in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Please do take a seat.

Rowan Williams was a former Archbishop of Canterbury, and he has these he has an interesting way to describe the Christmas story.

He says that we shouldn't get distracted by the beauty and the joy and particularly the sentimentality of this season and miss the, and this is in quotes, miss the disturbing and incomprehensible meaning which remains underneath and throughout this time of year.

Disturbing and incomprehensible.

Now I know what you're thinking.

I've spent a year working with Peter as Dean.

There must be lots of things I've seen that were disturbing and incomprehensible.

That is most certainly the case.

But there is one thing that has happened to me this year that continues to disturb me, continues to feel completely incomprehensible.

That's the birth of my son George ten and a half months ago.

Tonight, we are symbolically and liturgically at the moment of Christ's birth.

We're here with Mary in her labor pays.

And I'd like us to imagine ourselves into that moment and reflect on what it might mean for the world and for our lives.

But I know that there are a number of midwives in the audience.

There are plenty of mums in the audience.

And so as I've been writing this message, at times I felt like this is exactly the image that came to mind: a gerbil trying to explain astrophysics to Elon Musk.

Nevertheless, that's what I'd like us to do.

Imagine ourselves into the moment of Christ's birth, be there with Mary in her labor pains, and ask what it might mean for us and for our world.

Here's the verse we just read from Luke.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son, wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger.

Please, this evening, let's not sanitize that verse.

Let's remove from our imaginations what we might see on a Christmas card at MS before it closes down and go into the story.

Disturbing and incomprehensible.

Firstly, I'd like us to reflect on the disturbing vulnerability of Jesus.

The majesty and glory and the power of God were found that night in defenseless love, small and poor.

This is not, is it, what we expect for the birth of a king, the birth of a god, the ubermensch, as Nietzsche describes in his famous phrase.

We live in an era of gods and goddesses, of superheroes and of demigods.

You may well have your favorite Marvel hero or DC demigod.

Maybe that's not your thing, maybe that's more what your grandchildren are into.

But let's not forget, shall we, that only in the last couple of years has Stephen Fry published not one but three books on Greek myths.

So this is something that all of our culture is reflecting on.

Might be Jason and his Argonauts, Zeus, Hercules.

Or maybe you're more interested in those secular heroes, those towering giants, titans of industry and politics.

Elon Musk or Barack Obama.

We are in the era of strong man politics.

And yet, in the manger this evening, we witnessed something quite different.

No power, no special abilities, just a baby, small and poor, crying in a manger.

The power and the majesty of God made small and vulnerable.

And this makes me think about our world today and the lives that we live.

We might be tempted, and it might, given the circumstances, be reasonable to imagine that the problems of our world, that the problems of your life are best solved through a show of strength and power, through the exercise of control reaching in from the outside.

If only God would show up and take charge of the situation, you might be tempted to pray.

Sometimes I think our prayers sound a lot like, Superman save me.

But the disturbing and incomprehensible truth that arises from the baby in a manger tonight is that God has shown up, and He did so in weakness, in defenseless love.

I, like many fathers before me, took my baby in my arms for that first time and was astounded by the fragility of the being I held.

The smallness of his fingers and his toes.

God was once that small.

Disturbing and incomprehensible.

I honestly do not know what to do with that fact.

Secondly, and this is related, the disturbing and incomprehensible transformation of humanity that has taken place on this night.

I'd like us to notice and remember that the baby lying in a manger is an actual human baby.

There have been lots of groups and plenty of theological arguments over the last 2,000 years that have tried to find ways around this fact.

They basically boil down to different ways of saying this.

Maybe Jesus was a strange mixture of God and man that makes him extra special and therefore not quite like us.

There are plenty of well-meaning reasons why you might want to think that about Jesus.

He was special.

There was something unique about him, and so maybe there's a unique mixture going on there.

But the truth is more disturbing than that.

Jesus was a human baby, like George, and like you were, and like I was, who had a normal birth with all the blood and all the crying and all the hard work, the pushing and the breathing that Mary did that comes with a normal birth.

When we say and sing that God was the incarnate deity, the word made flesh, the God found in human flesh, we are announcing something quite spectacular.

That when God came and dwelt among us to heal our brokenness and the brokenness of all creation, he used the same stuff that you and I are made of.

The same wet matter, the same physical material, the same flesh and blood that you and I are made of.

And what this means is that Christ in God remakes human nature from the inside.

God didn't add new material to patch up the brokenness.

He works with the ordinary stuff of life, the same stuff that you and I are made of, and he remakes us from within.

The awful darkness, the worst of human nature for all to see.

But equally and in some ways more painfully, in my own life, I see my incapacity to do the things that I know I should do and my unwillingness to not do the things that I know I shouldn't be doing.

Please don't allow the warm glow and fuzziness of this season to stop you from taking a quiet moment to reflect and admit to yourself there's something in here that needs fixing.

And if that's the case, the question arises: how does God go about fixing the thing in here that needs it?

Rowan Williams again uses this analogy quite wonderful.

Imagine a beautiful instrument that has been broken.

Anyone could come along and fix that instrument by using some synthetic materials, a bit of gorilla glue, and some careful thinking.

But it requires the creator of that instrument with all the original materials to work with the grain of the wood, and so to refashion the instrument such that it can sing with all its intended resonances and harmonics.

The addition of synthetic materials will only dampen the natural frequency of the instrument itself.

So the disturbing and incomprehensible truth that arises from the baby and a manger tonight is that Jesus was a human being, just like you and me.

And that means that you are transformable, you are fixable.

The way you are, you don't have to become someone else or pretend to be something you're not.

Right now, God in Christ can work in and through you, transforming you from the inside, as it were.

God associates himself intimately with you and I should add with your enemy.

This is why I think the superhero Jesus is so tempting, such as tempting misunderstanding.

Because if Jesus is actually different than us, then we can hold on to all the differences that we artificially impose on one another.

But if Jesus is truly the same as you and me, then God associates himself with me and with the refugee and with the homeless, with the drug addict and the Russian and the Uyghur Muslim.

This association at the center of creation should press upon us and draw forth a change in our social life together.

And I'm not at all trying to offer easy solutions to extremely difficult problems, but I believe our conversations would be very different if we really felt the push of God's association with humanity in its entirety.

I've been trying in this reflection this evening to open up our thoughts to an incredible connection that is made tonight in the manger between God and his people, between you and me and the creator of us all.

It's an openness at the center of creation, the birth of Christ, we see creation and God open up to one another, like the opening of a flower to the sunlight, or the breaking of a smile between close friends who haven't seen each other for many years.

The opening of an embrace.

If that's the case, then you're very welcome to join a series of conversations that I'm holding in the new year.

It's called Tri Alpha, and you can find flyers dotted all around the place who'll come and speak to me afterwards.

I'd love to hear what you think about this faith that I've been talking about this evening.

On the 15th of February this year, George was born and utterly transformed my life and my wife's life.

Disturbing and incomprehensible.

The birth of Jesus in a manger two thousand years ago.

More disturbing, more incomprehensible.

The God would associate himself with you and me.

Amen.