The Holy Night

 My brothers and sisters, we meet tonight to celebrate the most extraordinary of truths. We meet to proclaim nothing less than the reality at the centre of the universe, that God, the creator of all there is and was and shall ever be, who loved you and me into being and who continues to sustain us without cost, without favour, with nothing more than the beating heart of grace, that this very God was born in a stable, to a forgotten woman, of a despised and imprisoned nation. 

 

We meet to proclaim our faith in the Word made flesh – a Word that was in the beginning with God, a Word that was with God, a Word that was God. We meet here, in this ordinary place, in this ordinary time, to proclaim to the world that against all the odds, against all appearances, impossibly, even, that the extraordinary of God has burst forth into the ordinary of the world, burst forth not in rage or in anger, not in power or in might, but in the simple act of a baby’s birth. 

 

God incarnate, born of the woman who was herself made by God’s own hand, emerges not to tear the fabric of the world but to heal it, to whisper the possibility of new beginnings and – falteringly, perhaps, and slowly, and gently – to inaugurate a Kingdom out of which seeps justice and holiness, that deep within our hearts ignites that thrill of hope once again, calling our weary world to rejoice, to turn and to see the breaking of a new and glorious morn. For in the darkness of this night, in the silence, in and amongst the mess and the mistakes, the arrogance and the hubris, the war and the violence, the filth, the manure of human sin, the Word who has always been, is born into the world He created, with neither fanfare nor pomp, but in the cold and silent Bethlehem night. 

 

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace. And yet how we know that there is no peace in Bethlehem tonight. My dear brothers and sisters, on this night when we celebrate the birth of the One who is to be the Prince of Peace, how can we sing songs of joy or parrot our parodies and platitudes of peace when children are murdered in their beds. For my friends, there is not peace on Earth. There is no peace in Gaza, or Jerusalem, or Ukraine, or South Sudan. In our own communities, peace, too, feels so often intangible and out of reach, and at worst a mirage. Our streets remain plagued by violence, by the cheapness of life, by the ever-present and all-too-convincing beguiling tones of scapegoating, fear, and hatred dressed up in the Emperor’s new clothes of political rhetoric. 

 

For all we sing of those angels praising God, of the goodwill henceforth from heaven to men, death, and destruction, and anger, and violence, and hate, and enmity, and self-centredness, and resentment, and the whole host of human sins continue to mar God’s holy world. Man at war with man still will not hear the love-song of the angels; humankind, forgiven by God through the gift of the Christ child, will still not forgive its fellow humanity. Humankind, created in the Image and likeness of God, will not afford its fellow humanity the same dignity.

 

And yet – and yet. 

 

There is something about this night – this holy night, this beautiful night, this night when heaven and earth meet and in the face of a baby is seen the face of God – that tells us that all is not lost, that convinces us of the eternal truth that God loves the world and will not let it go, will not let us go. There is something about this very night which says that sin will never have the last word. There is something about this night that speaks of grace and truth. There is something about this night that speaks of hope – hope seeped in love. 

 

For it was on this very night that the angels sang, and it was on this very night that the shepherds – those cast out, those ignored, those cast into the dustbin of human existence – it was on this very night that the shepherds heard those angels. The mighty and the powerful, the rich and the self-absorbed, those who grasped after power, artisans of violence and destruction, did not, could not, would not hear those angels. And yet the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

 

My dear friends, those same angels are singing tonight, if we would but unstop our ears to hear them. That same promise of peace is being born into the world, if only we would make our way to the manger, to the outhouse, to the place of little worldly importance but to a place where the heart of God is beating against the breast of the created order. That same grace and truth is appearing again, if we would but see it.

 

Yet surely nothing will change if we do not ourselves open our hearts to the love that breathes truth into everything that has ever been or ever will be created. We are called, you and I, all of us here and all people of good will throughout the world, to dare to hope, to believe, to plunge headfirst into that love and to start first with the conversion of our own hearts. 

 

How easy it is to point fingers, to blame others, to work out our hurt and our anger and our frustration and our fury on the playing field of human relationships, yet to fail to see how we – in our own small way, perhaps, yet tangibly and tragically – continue the cycle of destruction and despair. And how easy it is to demand peace without justice, to load burdens onto the backs of others that we would never carry on our own. How easy it is to wait for the world to change, and refuse to step out into the grace of God that will change us too.

 

For that is what this holy night calls us to do – to put our own barge out into the channel of grace and allow ourselves to be transformed. This holy night calls us to rest into the gentleness and kindness of the God who breathed us into being, and in doing so to embody and live out that gentleness and kindness in our own lives. This holy night is one where our forgiven-ness is tangible and real and hopeful, a forgiven-ness that demands that we forgive in just the same way. This holy night calls us to remember that for peace to truly reign, it must surely start in our own hearts – in our own souls. 

 

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace. My friends in Christ, that messenger has been born in the person of a fragile baby in a manger, a baby who calls us to be artisans of peace – artisans in the workshop of the Father of grace. Artisans who know ourselves to be loved so deeply that words cannot express it, artisans whose life work is to participate in the grace-infused, beautiful, glorious, holy narrative of new life in Christ Jesus.

 

Let us dare to hope. Let us dare to believe. Let us dare to love. Let us dare to say that God – who had the first Word, will have the last Word, too.

 

For 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.