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