Sermon: Christmas Eve
2020 has been an amazing year, full of the unbelievable becoming normal. When we met for Christmas a year ago none of us would possibly have imagined the way that a virus would turn our lives upside-down over the next twelve months, yet here we are meeting virtually after a year in which we have been confined to our homes for substantial periods, our economy closed down and restarted, our livelihoods threatened (and for many lost), and life as we knew it so different to our experience tonight. And this experience has not been localised; it continues to be a global one.
Christmas
is a good time to reflect on what it is to embrace the unbelievable; after all
the Church has been doing this for 2000 years. Each Christmas we embrace the
unbelievable notion that God became human, that the Divine has been birthed as
flesh and blood[1]
as John’s Gospel reminds us this evening: “And the Word became flesh and lived
among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full
of grace and truth.”[2] Our
experience of Covid-19 is an important reminder that the unbelievable is not
impossible, and our experience of the pandemic offers us an opportunity to hold
the paradoxes of our faith with renewed insight.
John’s
Gospel begins with the seeming unbelievable, and recognising this brings
onboard the witness, John (whom we know from the other Gospels as the Baptist).
John here is the Witness, the one who testifies to the truth of what has taken
place and continues to take place. This testimony is given in the context of
unity and disunity: the unity of God in Jesus in the world, and the world in
Jesus in God; and the disunity of light and darkness that like water and oil
never really mix. John’s Gospel seeks to give us images that may help us make
sense of what God is up to in our world, and help us come to understand more
fully the purposes of God and our role in those purposes. During this past year
we have all experience the chaos and darkness that the Pandemic has thrust upon
our world, but we have also experienced the gift of light that our relationship
with God – our embrace of faith – brings us.
John’s
Gospel invites us to see beyond the physical birth of the Christ-child, and to ask
some searching questions about the nature of God’s involvement in our world,
and the nature of life itself. The Pandemic has forced us to live differently,
and it has been a year of recognising that everything we took as self-evident
in our pre-Covid lives can no longer be taken for granted. Some of us have
found this journey a little easier or a little harder than others, and we have
all experienced loss in some form, or at least had the meaning we had attached
to our lives challenged. This requires us to do some reconfiguring, an adjusting
of our story, a reassigning of meaning as we become more adept at navigating
the new global context demanded of us by Covid-19; and our faith is an
important resource for this journey.
While
John’s Gospel invites us to explore meaning, our reading tonight from the book
of Titus[3]
focuses us on purpose, and on God’s gift of salvation,[4] a
concept and word we throw around all to easily as Christians. Salvation is
about a journey into ever-growing wholeness, and offers space for new
beginnings particularly in the area of relationship. Salvation is the gift that
enables us to live increasingly as healthy social human beings. One thing that
the pandemic has done is to throw into stark relief the brokenness of our external
relationships, the darkness of our social environment where gender-based
violence and systemic racism mark deep chasms in our social fabric. In the self-isolation
of lockdown we have all been exposed to our own internal relationships with our
own selves, with God, and with life; and we’ve needed to explore our mental
health, and take remedial action towards greater self and community health.
Titus
reminds us that from a faith perspective the gift of salvation is experienced
through rebirth and renewal, marked in our Church rites by baptism and
confirmation, but experienced fully in relationship with self, with others,
with God; a journey into ever increasing relational health. While we most often
attach salvation to Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection, the inclusion
of the Titus reading in tonight’s lection reminds us that salvation is a primarily
a gift of incarnation, of this unbelievable notion that God became human, and
that we ourselves have direct access to the Divine. We’re reminded in Titus
that this gift of salvation is already fully ours, and yet we still hope for
its fullness. It is this already-not-yet nature of salvation that keeps our
commitment to acts of service and love focused and grounded. It is a wonderful
reminder that “… [o]ur lives with God have a present and a future.”[5]
In
the midst of the present Covid-19 surge – not to mention the effect of the
virus on our lives these past nine months – it is good to be reminded that life
goes on despite our increased awareness of its tenuous nature. It is the
paradoxical character of our faith that our physical existence is the theatre
of God’s activity, yet our confidence is in the less tangible nature of our
spirituality that takes our awareness beyond the known and the observable.[6]
My
prayer for us this particular Christmas, as we celebrate the birth of the
Christ-child in whom God became human, is that we may find it increasingly within
our capacity to accept the possibility of the unbelievable in the new context
that this past year has thrust on us; and that in this we may discover the
purposes of God and the meaning of life and faith anew and afresh.
Let us pray,
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