ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Christmas Day 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass

Readings: Isaiah 52 : 7-10; Hebrews 1: 1-4; John 1: 1-14

Unto us a child is born. Unto us a Son is given. Why give presents at Christmas? It's not just retail therapy. We give presents because at the back of our minds is a faint memory that this is what God does, this is how God works, by giving and receiving gifts out of love. As our choir sang at the Carol Service, we welcome into the world today a babe newborn "In love arrayed, a love so deep 'tis able To search the world for you". That is what the crib and the carols are all about: God living with us in a personal, straightforward way, as natural as a new born child coming into a family. And although we hear the story every year it is the last thing we expect to happen to us. The Prologue to St.John's Gospel, those famous words read this morning, is about something new in St.John's life, in our life, and in everyone's life. No one has ever seen God, he says. That was the Old Testament way, and it tends to be our way too: I hide my face, I don't look up, I rather hope God will leave me alone and go away. Today God comes to stay. If that scares me, then the mystery of Bethlehem reminds me that I need not fear God. Because God comes to us where we are, as a child. This is the irreversible fact. Unto us a child is born. It's happened. In Jesus, in all that he is going to say to us and do with us, we can see God with us. When God is seen our life truly begins.

In the beginning was the Word, and the word is the cry of a newborn child. The eternal meaning of the world has come to us in so real a manner that we can touch him. see him and hear him. What John calls "the Word" also means in Greek "the meaning". St.Augustine says somewhere that although God is older than the world itself, He is younger in age than many of his servants in the world. We travel through life with no end of baggage, what we've done and failed to do, what others have done to us, no end of chips on shoulders, grumbles and false hopes. God is born today, a new life. The new life begins now. He is born as one of us, so that we can become like Him, loved as a new born child is loved. It is at the crib that our journey to eternity begins. Here is a new language to be learnt, new words to be heard. The mystery of Christmas, it seems to me, is that as the story becomes more earthy, more human, more dangerous, more about people and what they do to each other, the whole scenario begins to fill up with the glory of God, and we know there are angels here. You would think it would be the other way round. Our busy earthy lives leave no room for God, he's elbowed out, no room at this inn. The message of Christmas is that that sort of me-only life is a shocking waste. When we meet the living God in Jesus Christ, in other words in our particular bit of the world, our slice of time, we know what life is about. We learn to give our lives to God, in the same way as he entrusts his life to us today, a vulnerable life, placed in our hands, like a little child.

Good news for us, and good news for everyone, for the whole world. That's the significance of the Virgin Birth. Jesus has no human father, so no tribe, no family, no country can claim him just for themselves. We belong to the Catholic, the universal Church. Tribal warfare, my idol against your idol, the programme of me and those who think like me against you and your lot, that is not the story of Emmanuel, God with us. We may not be on the warpath all the time, but you know what I mean: how easy it is to drift into a permanent state of crossness with other people, tied to the fantasy that we must be right all the time. That stops today; self-righteousness is driven out by gratitude for what God does for us. God so loved the world - not the Church, not my bit of the Anglican Communion, not the moral majority whoever they might be today - but the world. It's a thought which can literally enlighten us, and it is there in the first chapter of St.John's Gospel. Just as we all live in a world created by God, so we all walk in the same light. The light has been given to everyone, whatever they have done, this light by which we can see our way. We and many others might prefer darkness, but the light has come to banish that darkness.

The Christmas card we know so well, the Virgin and Child, is not just a record of something clever God has done. It is a picture of our relationship with God. Our relationship with God is as close as mother and child, as close as that. People often say, Oh how I wish I had more faith so that I could explain all this, the Virgin Birth, the miracles, the Resurrection, and so on, the whole Christian experience. A mother doesn't wait for an explanation before she loves her baby. When we try to explain, we draw back. Our relationship with God is too close for argument. It is often too close for comfort, and that is when we again want to draw back. But whatever our reaction is going to be, and it is up to us, God comes into our lives at Christmas, into the present, as he did in Bethlehem in the days of Caesar Augustus. And it's all in the story. Do you remember what the angel said to the shepherds? The very first thing the angel said to the shepherds was, 'Don't be afraid'. 'Fear not; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.' Do not be afraid of the glory of God. Don't back away when you see God's human face. Wonder, yes, but don't run away from God's glory, do not deny it, any more than you would think of running away from someone's love. The glory of God is now to be found, not in signs and wonders in the heavens, but in our own lives.