Midnight Mass 2023

  

Heb 1.1-4, Luke 2.1-14, John 1.1-14

 

It came upon the midnight clear/ that glorious song of old/ from angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold; “Peace on the earth, good will to men, From heaven’s all gracious king/ the world in solemn stillness lay/ to hear the angels sing.

 

Every Christmas night service I have taken since I arrived in this parish 18 years ago has begun with that carol. I inherited the tradition from my predecessor here, and I have no idea how far back it goes. But, working on the principle of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, I have never felt the urge to do something different. It’s a good place to begin, a profound prayer for peace, calling us all to “hush the noise, ye men – and women - of strife” so we can hear God’s message.

 

It was written by a Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, in Wayland, Massachusetts.  Sears imagines angels singing not just to the shepherds, but to the whole world, announcing a new way of peace to any who will listen, but it’s a carol tinged with sadness, because men – and women  - “hear not the love-song which they bring”.. Sears wrote it in 1851, a decade before the American Civil war, at a time when tensions were already mounting as states took different positions on the abolition of slavery: it didn’t take a genius to see that trouble was brewing.

 

This year, once again, we are confronted daily with scenes of warfare, nearly 175 years after Sears wrote his carol; nothing much seems to have changed. It’s as easy for us to despair, in our “weary world” as it was for people in his times.  

 

The fact that one of today’s wars is being fought out in the lands where Jesus was born seems to have added an extra edge for some people.  Some churches have decided to mute their Christmas celebrations this year, in solidarity with the Christians of the Holy Land, most of whom are ethnically Arab. Bethlehem’s own world famous public services in Manger Square have been abandoned this year – no one had the stomach for them -  and one Lutheran church in Bethlehem, instead of their conventional crib scene, has created one out of rubble, like the rubble in which so many children – Palestinian and Jewish – have died this year. The Christ child lies in the midst of the ruins, as vulnerable as them.

 

Some churches across the world, too, have decided to leave one of the candles in the Advent wreath, the second one, which traditionally symbolises Peace, unlit this year. How can we light it, they said, when there is no peace in the land where Jesus was born?

 

At Seal, though, that wasn’t the decision I made. In fact, if anything, it seemed even more important to light that candle of peace this year. Firstly because the candle is a prayer for peace, not a self-satisfied statement that we already have it, but also because if we didn’t light it this year, when could we light it? There has never been a Christmas when men, and women, haven’t been at war with each other. Should it have stayed unlit last year, because of the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine? What about Yemen, where the fighting has lasted 9 years, and shows no sign of abating, or any of the other places in the world where people are maiming and terrorising and killing each other, and have been, in some cases for decades.

 

And, of course, the world into which Jesus was born was no less war-torn. He was born in an occupied country. According to Luke’s story, it was an arbitrary ruling by the Roman Emperor which sent Mary and Joseph on the trek from Nazareth to an overcrowded Bethlehem to be counted. And Quirinius, the Roman Governor who implemented the census locally, was a brutal military leader, not a pen-pushing civil servant.

The Romans promised peace to the nations they conquered, the Pax Romana, but all it really consisted of was a clamping down on internal divisions or skirmishes between neighbouring countries under their rule. That might have been welcomed by some, especially those whose economic interests it served, but peace which is enforced at the point of a sword, peace which is maintained by keeping people in fear through public demonstrations of cruelty like the gladiatorial games, isn’t really a peace worth having

 

The peace which the angels proclaim is very different, and the fact that it is proclaimed first to a bunch of shepherds out in the middle of nowhere tells us that. They are ordinary people, nameless people, people with no influence in the world, no seat at the table of power, no voice in international diplomacy. All they can do, when they hear the song of the angels, is to let it change their own lives, which it seems to do. And yet that is enough. In Luke’s Gospel they stand for and point towards those whose lives will be changed by the adult Jesus. He will continue to spend his time disproportionately with those who have no worldly influence; a rather random bunch of fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes will form the core of his followers. He will welcome children; telling people that they have vital things to teach us about the Kingdom of God. He will choose women to be the first to bear witness to his Resurrection, despite the fact that women weren’t trusted as witnesses in a court of law.

 

It seems like a ridiculous strategy for changing the world, and yet, here we are 2000 years later, and far away from Jesus’ homeland, still telling their stories, still finding inspiration in them, still being changed by them. People are still challenged by the Jesus they meet in the pages of the Bible, the Jesus they meet in worship, the Jesus they meet in one another, challenged to love their neighbours as themselves, to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them, to see themselves, and all people as beloved by God, to feed the hungry and work for a world in which no one is hungry. We don’t always manage to live up to that challenge, which is why the global peace and justice we long for is so elusive, but it’s Jesus’ words we keep returning to, Jesus’ words which so stubbornly challenge us, not the decrees of the Emperor Augustus or Quirinius the Roman Big Shot about whom most people, let’s face it, now know nothing at all.

 

Confronted with the pervasiveness of the human suffering and sin we see around us, we feel despair. What can we do about it? We feel swallowed up by the darkness. Yet, as the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. The Christmas story is a powerful reminder of that truth.

 

Anonymous shepherds, foreign Magi from distant lands, a peasant couple, only just married – too recently to be respectable – and at the centre of it all, an infant – infans literally means unable to speak. What hope is there that their stories can make a difference? None, humanly speaking, and yet, with the help of God, by the grace of God, they have made a difference, and will continue to do so. The light of Christ isn’t one big, blazing fireball, it is billions of tiny, flickering flames – held in your hands, held in mine - kindled whenever and wherever we show the love of God. And in the end, the darkness can never overcome that kind of light.

Amen