Midnight Mass 2023: Isaiah 52, 7-10, Hebrews 1, 1-12 and John 1, 1-14
+ Today, in between the hospital and the crib service, this song came on the car radio:
So this is Christmas
And what have you done?
Our hopes might lie with John and Yoko: having fun with our nearest and dearest, the old and the young.
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones [but]
The world is so wrong
Tonight, the atmosphere in Bethlehem is heavy with absence.
A smaller celebration this year. No tourists or pilgrims filling the Manger Square; no carols or market stalls. The city is empty from happiness, from joy.
There is a nativity scene: with the newborn Jesus surrounded by rocks and barbed wire.
A Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, the Munther Isaac, says: ‘the birthplace of Christmas is the place in most need of peace, justice and equality’.
The holy child is birthed amidst the rubble of Gaza; birthed in the rubble of the kibbutzim too.
The Dean of Jerusalem reminds us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem at a time of ‘terrifyingly brutal’ occupation by Rome and their ‘tyrannical client king, Herod’. He was born of a woman, born under the law, born a Jew.
In the words of Hebrews, the one who ‘sustains all things’ by a ‘powerful word’ comes to us in solidarity with pain and brokenness: the Word becomes flesh in a wordless infant.
God’s very being is with us in weakness and vulnerability. Not known or accepted - and yet in this new life the impossible is made possible. In the most unpromising circumstances a glorious light dawns in our world.
For John - the Evangelist rather than Lennon - this is Christmas: ‘light shines in the darkness: and the darkness does not overcome it’.
Fearful times demand defiant acts of faith: to scan the skies for a glimmer of light, however faint and flickering, which might just be enough to form the basis of hope.
The words we hear tonight are that spark; that fragile flame. It’s a story that invites us to let go of nagging fears, forgives old hurts and remakes our hearts and minds.
Writing in the diary column of the New Statesman, Jeanette Winterson acknowledges our struggle to live in and carry this light but she says ‘that doesn’t mean the light is not there or that we are not drawn to it’.
Dare we lay aside false gods - power that coerces, wealth that consumes, selfishness that makes life unsustainable? Dare we ask for what we need this Christmas - for comfort in grief, friendship in loneliness, acceptance that we are loved?
The story of this night in all its beauty and mystery offers us new life in our fears and hopes.
It invites us to be messengers announcing peace, good news, salvation, healing - the reign of God with us. It invites us to sing - for comfort in ruins, for redemption in cities, for all nations to see the peace that is the salvation of God.
A few nights ago, Noa and Mira Awad - a Palestinian Israeli and a Yemenite Jewish Israeli - performed together at the Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall. They sang the words Think of Others by the poet Mahmoud Darwish in Hebrew, Arabic and English with the refrain ‘if only I were a candle in the dark’.
The poem asks that in the midst of wars, we do not forget those who seek peace; that as we return home, we do not forget the people of the camps; as we sleep, that we think of those with nowhere to sleep; as we liberate ourselves, to think of those who’ve lost the right to speak.
Being a stubborn candle in the dark.
So this is Christmas
The fullness of God’s love in an infant - in a world such as this - drawing out of us a depth of solidarity, transforming us and stirring us to loving action.
So this is Christmas
The fullness of that same love in fragile bread, in rich wine, in words of blessing: Christ’s body given for us in our brokenness, calling us into solidarity - knowing the power of our voices, as messengers of peace, holding onto the light. Being a stubborn candle in the dark. This is Christmas. Amen.
