Sermons
24th December 2007 - Midnight Mass
Someone said to me the other day ‘Are you going away for Christmas father’. I have to say it was a nice idea, a few days on the beach in Tahiti or some such place, but then there are so many things to be done at Christmas. And that applies to all of us not just vicars. Christmas in our culture seems to accumulate things that we feel have to be done. We have to do the tree, buy the presents, cook the food, drink all those drinks, write the cards, have the office party, listen to the Queen’s Christmas message or Carols from King’s, oh and welcome relatives you would prefer not to see or go on long journeys in cold weather to visit other ones. There are endless little rituals that become ingrained as each year we do them again and again, often with a receding sense of why we are doing them. It is no surprise really that Christmas is a time of difficulty for so many people, particularly those who look around them thinking ‘why is everyone else so happy, this is a nightmare which will only end when I get back to work in January’. So with all these things to do, all these pressures on people and families, how might you use church to step outside of your world for a moment tonight?
Rather than Tahiti, try taking a trip in your minds over a huge space of time, over two thousand Christmases, to the actual birth we celebrate tonight. When Jesus was born, virtually nobody knew anything about it, and there weren’t any cards or Christmas trees or mince pies; just a few shepherds, some wise men, Mary and Joseph, and some dim animals looking on. This birth that we celebrate, the birth of the one who would be called King of the Jews, took place not in a capital city and reported to the great and good, but in a little hill-village in an obscure part of the Roman Empire. We don’t have an exact date or year for this world-changing event and Luke emphasises the poverty of the baby’s parents, the fact that they were migrants without friends in Nazareth and that the birth takes place in a dingy cattle shed. The word, kataluma, means a large open dwelling room on two levels with humans on one level slightly higher than the animals on a lower level. The place is so crowded with folk that Mary has to lean over to place the new born child in the hay-filled feeding trough of the cattle. And the first visitors to this new king are simple shepherds bringing nothing much more than their amazement and puzzlement at what was going on.
And if you can take that imagined journey into that crowded cattle shed, what is it that’s going on there that will transform the world’s knowledge of God in such a dramatic way? What is it that takes us from the cattle shed with half a dozen bemused people to a religion with a billion followers? It is the identity of that child, an identity sung gloriously by the angels in Luke’s gospel. This birth that we celebrate is the result of a completely fresh divine act, a unique and utterly transforming intervention by God in the physical world. The central truth of the Christian religion is contained in the identity of this child for he is fully God and fully human but without sin. In this birth all humans are invited to see that God is so intimately involved with his creation that he is willing to become physically part of it, that he is so intimately in love with each one of you that he is willing to take human flesh in order to redeem it.
And in the identity of this child God issues of each of us an invitation, an invitation to allow God into our lives afresh. It is not an invitation that will be forced on you, God will not coerce you or cajole you into accepting his gracious offer, but that offer will never be taken away. In acknowledging the identity of the Christ child we are assured that God’s invitation to us is permanent, it is secure, it is unbreakable and it is an invitation that finds fleshly substance in that cattle shed in that little village on a hillside in Judea two thousand Christmases ago.
So as you travel back in your minds from the cattle shed in Judea to Fulham, to the presents to be opened tomorrow, and the food to be eaten and the drinks to be drunk, the relatives and the endless stuff of Christmas, take with you into your hearts and homes that invitation from God to accept the identity of the child in the manger. In the midst of all the business of life and all the business of Christmas the quiet and loving voice of God calls you into relationship through the identity of the baby whose birth we celebrate. But remember the invitation is gracious, it will not be forced on you. It is in your hands and - metaphorically - you can put the invitation on the shelf for a bit if you like, you could put it in the section of your mind that is labelled ‘To-do in January’ along with more exercise and less of whatever your particular vice is, or you could even disregard the invitation completely, many do. But think what you would be missing. The world and everybody who lives in it was offered an invitation to utter transformation on that first Christmas night. Is that really something you want to risk missing out on?