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Christmas Eve
[caption id="attachment_308237" align="alignnone" width="1500"]
The Nativity depicted in the South Stall Woodwork of Saint Thomas Church[/caption]
Eternal God, who made this most holy night to shine with the brightness of thy one true light: bring us, who have known the revelation of that light on earth, to see the radiance of thy heavenly glory; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
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Christmas Eve
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A Sermon by
The Rev. Canon Carl Turner
✛
Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last Christmas Eve my, now, Son-in-Law proposed to my youngest daughter on his knees in an Italian Restaurant around the corner of the Rectory. It was a very special Christmas for us and spent with their newly-born Son, my first grandchild. Mind you, it nearly went awry: He had secretly placed the engagement ring inside a Christmas Cracker (you know – the things that you pull apart that have a paper hat and novelties inside) – he had placed this on the table during the afternoon with the help of the waiters who guarded it like hawks. The trouble was, my son-in-law had not made allowances for the fact that my daughter is very competitive, and used to play hockey, and was going to pull that cracker as if she were in a tug of war contest! When they pulled the Christmas cracker, instead of the ring in its box falling neatly in front of her, it rocketed through the restaurant, almost taking someone’s eye out before landing in someone else’s dinner!
It’s a ridiculous memory but it is amazing how Christmas brings back so many memories for each one of us. Why is that I think more about my late parents at Christmas than any other time of the year? And my dear friends or colleagues with whom I grew up or worked with, and whose company I cherished when I was young, but who have died tragically? Christmas is a time for poignant memories and, I guess, most of us here at some stage tomorrow will notice the empty chair, or pause and reflect wistfully on things that were never meant to be.
In our city, as we gather for this Midnight Mass, many will have no place to call their own. As we walk back from mass no doubt we pass lonely people on the street and not just the homeless, but those for whom Christmas is a sad not a joyous time.
My friends, we are all on a journey – whether we are homeless or have the privilege of a second home; unemployed or hoping for that all-important promotion; with a diagnosis from the doctor that we always feared or a clean bill of health; lonely or with friends who care; we all have something in common – we are all on journeys.
The Bible is filled with examples of journeys – and many of them were arduous and even frightening, often fraught with danger. The journeys undertaken by the Hebrew Tribes – the Exodus from Egypt; the 40 years in the desert; the exile to Babylon. Those journeys involved hundreds of thousands of people, all on the move together. Then there are the other individual journeys that we read about – Abraham, Isaac, Jonah, for example and, at this celebration of Christmas, of Mary and Joseph. The journey to Bethlehem of a man whose wife was heavily pregnant must have been stressful for both of them and, once there, they found themselves homeless and could only shelter with animals. Later, to escape the infanticide of Herod, the Holy Family became Refugees – fleeing to Egypt and living as aliens before another long journey back home to Nazareth.
After 30 years, Mary sometimes journeyed with her Son in his ministry – from Nazareth to Cana to Capernaum and, eventually, to Jerusalem where she witnessed the most important journey that Jesus took as he walked the way of the cross.
What memories there must have been for Mary! What hopes and fears. The Gospels tell us that she pondered and reflected – the words of the angels; the visit of the shepherds; the worship of the wise men; the prophecies of Simeon and Anna in the Temple. We are told she kept these things in her heart – as another translation puts it so beautifully, “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (NRSV) Memories are that important, are at the heart of the great mystery of the incarnation, and journeys bring them home to us as Mary knew only too well.
In our own time, there have been (and still are) these similar kinds of journeys – of people on the move – whole groups of people, whole communities of displaced people, sometimes forcibly removed or packed into trains and treated as worthless. Other journeys are made by individuals as they search for something missing from their lives.
And just as in the journeys of the bible, just as in the journeys of the Holy Family, so it is today – that God journeys with his people and journeys with you and with me.
Sometimes our journeys are figurative – we are not even physically moving, but we are searching, and pondering, and remembering, and we can think that we are journeying on our own. Particularly in the darker moments of our lives, we may even want to be alone, to be far from others – and from God – because those dark moments of our lives are frightening or embarrassing. At such times, we forget that God is still there, by our side journeying with us; that God has experienced all of this through Jesus and through the Holy Family. We may think that God is not interested in us – in our individual (and what we might even see as) pitiful journeys, but God yearns to be close to us. Indeed, the irony is that he is there in the darkness as much as the light of our lives.
The late Cardinal Basil Hume once said, “What does it mean to love God? I suggest we understand it something like this: If I have experienced love or affection for others, I can comprehend dimly, inadequately, incompletely, not so much what God should mean to me, but what I mean to God.” [1]
I know that is where I go wrong on my own journey; I think of what God means to me – the object of my love and my affection; the reason for my existence and the one who tests the choices that I make. But God is not an object – God has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ and journeyed with us and shared our memory-making. What a shock it is to discover that I need to reflect on what I mean to God in spite of my inadequacies!
Listen to these amazing words form the First letter of John – may they be our inspiration tonight and on our journeys, wherever they take us: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1 John 4:9-10)
That, my friends, is how much he is interested in us and loves us
_______________
[1] Searching for God, Page 158
