Gathering 

A sermon for Midnight Communion, Christmas Eve, 2020

The topic for my sermon tonight is gathering.  This seems to be an appropriate topic this Christmas given the prohibitions on gathering because of the Corona Virus.  And to start with I want to remind you of that verse from Matthew’s gospel where Jesus is talking to his disciples about how the church community should act and be.  Jesus says, ‘For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’   Gathering has a human dimension but also a spiritual one.  Tonight I want to suggest that God gathers us and gathers with us in ways we might not expect.

The Christmas story is full of gatherings.  Mary and Joseph are required to gather with other members of their tribe in Bethlehem by the Roman authorities.  This is for the purpose of a census.  Meanwhile some wise men, hundreds of miles away, are gathering together to embark on a journey to Bethlehem because they think a new star heralds the birth of a new king of Israel.   And on the night Jesus is born some shepherds are gathered together on a hill-side, just outside of Bethlehem, until their chatting around a fire is interrupted (as we heard in our reading - Luke 2: 1-20) by some angels.  

These are the sort of gatherings that are the consequence of humans being social beings and which, until recently, we took entirely for granted.   When you are watching tv programmes filmed last year, don’t you find yourself thinking: how come those people are gathering in such large numbers without any attempt at social distancing?   Now, when we are restricted from gathering, how much we miss it?

Gathering has or had a purely practical function.   Meetings of 10 or so people in one room were until last March a routine part of my work.  We gathered together to discuss and agree what work needed to be done before the next meeting.   The shepherds outside Bethlehem were gathered together presumably because it is easier to watch sheep if there is more than one of you and also a lot safer.  Gathering is useful for all sorts and types of work. 

But gathering is also part and parcel of celebration.   When Jesus was born some angels – as the carol ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ says – ‘were gathered all above’.  The shepherds once they had been told by the angels that something wonderful was happening in a stable nearby – that that very moment a Savior was being been born, the Messiah, the Lord – all rushed together into Bethlehem to see the baby – and to celebrate his birth, returning to their sheep ‘glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told’ by the angels.  Just like the shepherds we gather together at services like this one to celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas.

 And we also gather together at Christmas meals and parties whether we believe in the story that originally prompted the celebration of Christmas or not.  This need to gather together in celebration also seems hard-wired into our very beings and is why the restrictions on gathering together this year because of the Corona Virus have been felt to be so cruel.

Now of course shared meals are central to celebration.  In a little while we are going to remember a Passover meal celebrated by Jesus the night before his crucifixion.  For 2000 years Christians have gathered together to share bread and wine to remember the story of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection and what God has done for us through him.   Now gathering at the Communion meal, while it is physical with real bread and real wine, also has a spiritual side.  At Holy Communion we gather with all Christians alive today, across the ages and across the globe – virtually if you like.  At this very moment Christians throughout the UK are celebrating Midnight Communion but also they are also doing so in Iceland, Portugal and Ghana and other countries in our time zone   And at Holy Communion we don’t just gather with one another we gather with God. 

Now this sermon is a sequel to the one I gave at the Carol Service at St Luke’s the Sunday before last.  In that sermon I expressed the view that it was absurd for the Daily Mail or anyone else to think that Christmas could be cancelled.   I reminded people that Christmas cannot be cancelled because of that first Christmas more than 2000 years ago when Jesus was born.   When God became a human that Christmas it was a defining moment in world history.   It meant that Christmas is going to happen forever whether we like it or not.  

That birth in Bethlehem meant that God is still here with us this Christmas.  So however different and difficult it will be for us this Christmas it has not been cancelled, it cannot be cancelled because it not in our power to cancel what God has done for us.

In my sermon at the carol service I reminded people that in C S Lewis’ ;The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' the White Witch had tried, ineffectually, to cancel Christmas in Narnia by making it ‘always winter but never Christmas’.   Here is an extract from near the middle of the book when the White Witch is pursuing the three Pevensee children, Peter, Susan and Lucy, in a sledge drawn by reindeer with Edmund the fourth Pevensee child on board.   At this point the Witch’s power to stop Christmas coming is waning because Aslan the Lion has returned to Narnia.

And then at last the Witch said, "What have we here? Stop!" and they did.

How Edmund hoped she was going to say something about breakfast!  But she had stopped for quite a different reason. A little way off at the foot of a tree sat a merry party, a squirrel and his wife with their children and two satyrs and a dwarf and an old dogfox, all on stools round a table. Edmund couldn’t quite see what they were eating, but it smelled lovely and there seemed to be decorations of holly and he wasn’t at all sure that he didn’t see something like a plum pudding.

"What is the meaning of this?" asked the Witch Queen. Nobody answered.

"Speak, vermin!" she said again. "Or do you want my dwarf to find you a tongue with his whip? What is the meaning of all this gluttony, this waste, this self-indulgence? Where did you get all these things? "

"Please, your Majesty," said the Fox, "we were given them. And if I might make so bold as to drink your Majesty’s very good health—"

"Who gave them to you?" said the Witch.

"F-F-F-Father Christmas," stammered the Fox.

"What?" roared the Witch, springing from the sledge and taking a few strides nearer to the terrified animals. "He has not been here! He cannot have been here! How dare you—but no. Say you have been lying and you shall even now be forgiven."

At that moment one of the young squirrels lost its head completely.

"He has—he has—he has!" it squeaked, beating its little spoon on the table. Edmund saw the Witch bite her lips so that a drop of blood appeared on her white cheek. Then she raised her wand. "Oh, don’t, don’t, please don’t," shouted Edmund, but even while he was shouting she had waved her wand and instantly where the merry party had been there were only statues of creatures seated round a stone table on which there were stone plates and a stone plum pudding.

Now we might think that our plum puddings, this year, have been turned to stone.  

But CS Lewis’ story doesn’t end with the animals and their feast being turned to stone.   Aslan the Lion, towards the end of the story, releases all those who have been turned to stone by the White Witch and restores them to life.  He restores this Christmas gathering to what it should be: a glorious celebratory feast.

Of course gathering is easier in person – whether it be for Christmas Dinner or Holy Communion - but as I must keep on saying, gathering also has a spiritual dimension that transcends the physical.  Remember those angels at the first Christmas.   And we clearly do not have to be physically present to gather, as this year of Zoom meetings, Zoom social gatherings and Zoom services, like this one, demonstrates.   At the end of the day the Corona Virus cannot and does not prevent us from gathering. It certainly cannot prevent us from gathering with God.

That verse from Matthew’s Gospel again ‘Jesus says, for where two or three are gathered in my name, two note not even six, I am there among them.’     

 

Love came down at Christmas

 

A sermon for a carol service at St Luke's Church, Oxford, 13^th December 2020

The theme of my talk today is ‘Love came down at Christmas’.  This, you might remember, is the first line of a carol with words by Christina Rossetti.   The carol starts:

Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, Love Divine,

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and Angels gave the sign.

 Here Christina Rossetti is saying something amazing.  She is of course talking about the birth of Jesus, with angels bringing the good news and a star over the stable, at that first Christmas more than 2000 years ago, but she goes beyond an evocation of the scene to an explanation of what it was all about.

Our first reading from the opening words of John’s gospel – sometimes called it Prologue - is a traditional reading for Christmas carol services and also talks about love coming down at Christmas albeit in a slightly different way.   If Jane had carried on reading our first reading this evening she would have come to the verse ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ 

It may not be immediately obvious who or what John is talking about when he talks about ‘The Word’ in this and previous verses in the Prologue but from the context it is clear that John has in mind two different persons: Jesus and God.   A bit odd I know to think of a word as a person but there it is. 

So ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ can either mean ‘Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us’ or – more surprisingly - ‘God became flesh and dwelt among us.’   That Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us is hardly surprising: a human person when they are born, if not before, becomes flesh, and so too with Jesus.  But John saying that ‘God became flesh and dwelt among us’ still, after all these years, has the power to shock us.   Surely the one thing we can assume about God is that he is not fleshy, he is other-worldly, he is beyond us, up there in Heaven?  But this is not so.  God really is down here with us.

Now when John told us that the Word became flesh he was saying something that had never been said before.   Other Jewish theologians has said things like. ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God’ and ‘by the Word God created the world’ but to equate Jesus – a human being – with that Word was truly shocking, then as it is now. 

This idea of God becoming flesh and dwelling amongst is not only shocking but mysterious.  How can it be?   Now a mystery is something which is difficult if not almost impossible to understand but I think it is at least worth trying to understand this mystery because unlike some other mysteries it has such importance for our lives.

Poems sometimes have the power to reveal mysteries that prose cannot.   Christina Rossetti says that ‘Love came down at Christmas’, not that ‘God came down at Christmas’ as John had said: his  prologue doesn’t mention love at all.   Christina Rossetti however is on safe ground when she says ‘Love came down at Christmas’ because John tells us elsewhere in the Bible that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4: 8) and that ‘Love is of God’ (1 Joh 4: 7).

And the idea that love came down at that Christmas over 2000 years go and indeed is still with us this Christmas is, perhaps, a tiny bit easier to understand than God becoming flesh in the shape of a baby.   Even in these commercialised times Christmas is surely a time for love and for expressing love.  Love within families and between friends as expressed by giving and receiving presents and sharing celebratory meals and indeed sharing our love of God at services like this.    But also, hopefully, extending that love to people less well off than ourselves.  Of course some might just see Christmas as a time to indulge ourselves but I don’t think many of us really do.  

Christina Rossetti, in her poem, makes the connection between divine love coming down at Christmas and our earthly love for one another in the second and third verses of the poem.    John tells us that love is of God i.e. that God is the source of love – all love – and when we love one-another we, like the miracle of that baby born with angels singing and a star overheard – reveal something of God’s love for us and the possibility of our love for him.

Now I was struck by reports in the press about a month ago that our Prime-Minister was intending to cancel Christmas as if that was in his power to do so.  And of course there have been attempts to cancel Christmas in the past – famously by Oliver Cromwell.   The most telling example of someone trying to cancel Christmas, I think, is in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis.  Bear with me for a moment: this does connect up with love coming down at Christmas I promise.

You may remember that, in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy was the first of the four Pevensee children-to get to Narnia through the wardrobe.  There she finds a world all covered in snow and meets a fawn called Mr Tumnus who explains to her that’s it’s a witch – the White Witch - who seems to control everything that goes on in Narnia including the weather

Here is Lucy explaining to her brother Edmund what Mr Tumnus has told her about the White Witch:

‘I’ve been having lunch with dear Mr Tumnus the Faun, and he’s very well and the White Witch has done nothing to him for letting me go, so he thinks she can’t have found out and perhaps everything is going to be all right after all.

The White Witch?’ sad Edmund; ‘who’s she?’

‘She is a perfectly terrible person’ said Lucy.  She calls herself the Queen of Narnia though she has no right to be a queen at all, and all the Fauns and Dryads and Naiads and Dwarfs and Animals – at least all the good ones – simply hate her.  And she can turn people into stone and do all kinds of horrible things.  And she has made a magic so that it is always winter in Narnia – always winter but it never gets to Christmas.'

But we know from later in the story that the White Witch is only seemingly in control.  And here, incidentally, we might think of Covid-19 really only seemingly ruling our lives at the moment.   In the end Aslan – the lion – comes to Narnia and frees the world from the White Witch and one sign of this is the return of Christmas.

We can be assured that Christmas cannot be cancelled whether by Oliver Cromwell, our Prime Minister, should he have wanted to do so, or the corona virus.   This is because love came down at that first Christmas when Jesus was born.   When love came down that Christmas it was a defining moment in world history.   It also meant that love is still here with us at Christmas.  So however different and difficult it will be for us this Christmas it has not been cancelled, it cannot be cancelled.  Love came down at Christmas 2000 years ago and still is with us today.

Here is the complete poem by Christina Rossetti:

Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, Love Divine,

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and Angels gave the sign.

 

Worship we the Godhead,

Love Incarnate, Love Divine,

Worship we our Jesus,

But wherewith for sacred sign?

 

Love shall be our token,

Love be yours and love be mine,

Love to God and all men,

Love for plea and gift and sign.