This is the basic text of sermons preached at Bradford Cathedral on Christmas Eve at midnight and at Ripon Cathedral on Christmas morning.
“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.” (John 1:14)
Like a stone on the surface of a still river,
Driving the ripples on forever,
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe.
That is Bruce Cockburn’s answer to the question that presses in on me every time I stand in a pulpit like this in one of our three cathedrals at Christmas: While our planet gasps for breath and millions of innocent people struggle for life – or yearn for a quick death – under the whoosh of missiles and the deliberate, systematic brutality of war, what are we doing as we sing our carols and muse on events in Bethlehem two thousand years ago?
This was a question brought home to me acutely as I sat here a couple of weeks ago and listened to the Ukrainian Choir, working with the Royal Opera House, and looked at the faces of exiled, bereft and, yet, hopeful people – mainly women.
In his song Cry of a Tiny Babe (from his 1990 album ‘Nothing But a Burning Light’) Cockburn tries to get behind the familiarity or cliché of Christmas language or imagery and surprise us by using words to shine a fresh light on the significance of this holy night.
Just as a weary couple from Nazareth in Galilee collapse with fatigue into the animals’ refuge of a house in Bethlehem on the West Bank; just as shepherds watch their flocks on the fields beyond the walls, seeing the same sky, telling the same stories, hearing the familiar sounds of a Palestinian night; just as powerful and corrupt politicians begin to think about protecting their own power by slaughtering the most vulnerable – babies; just as the world continues to pretend that tomorrow will be just the same as today and yesterday before it; just then – in what the Irish poet WB Yeats called “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” – redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.
For many people the night time is the locus of unavoidable solitude. The time when the questions of the daytime cannot be hidden from; when conversation and distraction can no longer fill the space; when the nakedness of hope and regret are exposed before they might reappear in dreams or nightmares; when we are alone in the darkness and wondering what it is all about, or why we matter; when we know our need of redemption; then, in this darkness, amid this solitude, there is the possibility of an irruption of defiant light.
For the story of God in the Scriptures is simply this: that God has an almost playful – possibly childish – habit of surprising earth with heaven … when heaven seems further away than even our imagination might allow.
Surprise.
I have only ever experienced total darkness once. It was March 1987 and I was on the island of Iona, struggling with whether to continue in training and be ordained a few months later or leave and, possibly, return to being a linguist for the government. I remember slipping out of the Abbey one night, closing the heavy door, and waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness outside. They didn’t. Aiming for the road, I found myself in the graveyard. We didn’t have mobile phone torches in those days and there were no sources of external artificial light on the island. But, even there, I discovered (when I eventually found the place) a party going on in the pub – which was actually also the post office and the local shop.
Light had a habit of creeping in, subverting the pompous defences of night, blowing the pretentious cover of gloom and obscurity.
And here lies the powerful mystery of Christmas. As the carol puts it with regard to the little town of Bethlehem, going about its normal business: “The hopes and fears of all the years are found in thee tonight.” Really? As a sort of fantasy? A mere religious sentiment for people who need a bit of moral support or emotional encouragement? An escape from the reality of life in a contested and conflicting world? “The hopes and fears of all the years are found in thee tonight?”
No. much more subversively than that: the hopes and fears do not blast their way through the pretensions of power and violence and uncontrollable uncertainty; rather, they find themselves surprised by the unexpected – not the invasion of a mighty army, but the cry of a tiny babe. As Rowan Williams put it in a sermon at Christmas 2003:
“When God comes among us, he doesn’t first of all clear humanity out of the way so that he can take over; he becomes a human being. He doesn’t force his way in to dominate and crush; he announces his arrival in the sharp, hungry cry of a newborn baby. He changes the world not by law and threat but by death and resurrection.” He then goes on to quote the poet Robert Southwell’s beautiful undermining of human fears and apprehensions: “His batt’ring shots are babish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes.”
Isn’t this, on the surface, just ridiculous? A world of nuclear threat and climate crisis? A world of military conflict and the slaughter of innocents? A world which, having survived a century of world wars and a very Cold War, now seems willing to embrace another Hot War? A world which, to quote Christopher Clark’s brilliant history of the origins of the First World War, seems to ‘sleepwalk’ towards disaster? A world in which ordinary people struggle with staying alive or making ends meet? A world in which refugees find no refuge, and the streets of England are peppered with sleeping bags and cardboard boxes – the closed inns of a contemporary Bethlehem?
Well, yes, it is ridiculous. But, only if you have been seduced by the sort of pathetic fatalism that insists on business as usual. This is the way of the world, so just suck it up. Yet, it is precisely this apparent absurdity that Christmas exposes and celebrates. The world does not have to be this way! Death, violence and destruction do not have to have the final word!
What if … just imagine … what if it is this way of seeing the world that is a sad and feeble sham? What if there is another – a radically different – way of seeing and being in this world? Because Christmas is about God opting into this world with all its complexities and cruelties and beauties and immense joys – not exempting himself from it. This is the gift of Christmas: that “God surprises earth with heaven, coming here on Christmas Day” (as John Bell put it).
The Word became flesh and lived among us. The gift God gives is his word. And his word – enfleshed in someone like you and me – is not the empty, self-serving promise of political powermongers or ego-merchants; it is the promise that will now be lived out, in this real world, in material terms and on this physical earth. God among us as one of us. God for us and not here to condemn us. Or, as the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, famously put it in his formulation of the Christian creed: “God is. God is as he is in Jesus. So, there is hope.”
We will see God not in an idea or an ideology, but in a person who lives and grows and speaks and listens and brings light into the lives of people who have come to accept, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, that “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
No, in Jesus of Nazareth we are offered a brighter, more controversial, vision: God gives his word that the light has come into the world, and the darkness of this world can never extinguish it. And people who are caught up by – grasped by – this vision of a God who makes himself at home in the world we all know … become a people who, however falteringly and feebly, are riddled with an inescapable hope. Hope that spots the light that will not be snuffed out by the pretensions of darkness. Hope that, fired by the joy of a God who shockingly enters this world as a baby, cannot be supressed by the latest horrors.
This is why Christians continue to spot the signs of God’s presence in those things and people whom the world often seems to discard or despise. Christians – that is, people whose worldview is shaped by this subversive Christmas story – see themselves as a company of people who, like the God they serve and the Jesus they follow, defy those visions of the world and expectations of ideology … and dare to look for and see God present and attentive amid the turmoil, being drawn to think differently about God, the world and us in order that we might live differently in the world with God and one another, refusing to give the darkness the power it so greedily craves.
The Christmas story tells us that we don’t need to bargain with God. We can’t do deals (as, one day, even Donald Trump will find out). Like the young boy who, with some trepidation, went to his bedroom to draw up his Christmas list. He started to write: “Dear Jesus, I’ve been really good this last year, so please can I have a bike for Christmas?” He knew this was being ‘economical with the actualité’, so he screwed it up and threw it into the bin. He tried again: “Dear Jesus, I know I’ve messed it up from time to time, but I’ve tried hard and …” But he knew this wasn’t right either. So, a third time he started: “Dear Jesus, you know and I know that it hasn’t been a great year…”. He gave up, threw it in the bin and decided to go out for a quick walk to clear his head. He walked round the block and then, looking through a neighbour’s gate, saw a nativity crib scene set up in the garden. He looked around to check no one was watching, then ran in, grabbed Mary, stuffed her under his coat and ran back to his house and up to his room. Then he took his pen and wrote: “Jesus, if you wanna see your mother again, gimme da bike!”
No bargains. No deals. No competitions for goodness. No virtue signalling. No tired calculations. Just an open-handed, open-minded, and open-hearted willingness to receive a gift that is beyond price – almost beyond our imagining – and is spelled G-R-A-C-E.
When I wish you a happy Christmas, I am not simply passing on a sentiment. I am not offering a fantasy or a placebo. I am not asking you to believe something you suspect isn’t true. Rather, I am urging you to open up to a bigger vision, a wider horizon, a deeper discovery – that Christmas means we can be drawn by hope (the hope that comes to us and does not wait for us to pursue it), not driven by fear. And then, having been grasped – surprised, even – by this hope, rooted in a baby, to commit yourself – body, mind and spirit – to what you now see in the manger in Bethlehem.
For, as Bruce Cockburn put it:
Like a stone on the surface of a still river,
Driving the ripples on forever,
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe.
Amen.
Rt Revd Nicholas Baines
Bishop of Leeds