A Sermon for Midnight Mass

Sermon. Midnight Mass 2012. St Olave’s, York.

Gospel: John 1.1-14

 

I wonder when it happened for you? I am thinking of surprises. I am wondering when you were surprised. And when you were surprised at how surprised you were? When did surprise spill over into amazement and delight? If you are the kind of person who is at all willing to be surprisingly surprised by what’s in the news, then you’ve had a good year. So, for you, was it…

·      the royal wedding?

·      the royal jubilee?

·      the Olympics?

·      the Paralympics (when we finally relaxed into the idea of the normality of disability)?

Or was it…

·      here… in the 2000+ knitted squares you gained, fully covering, as it were, your chancel roof (news of which did reach even sleepy old London)? 

Or…

·      were you surprisingly surprised by something much closer to home – an act of kindness you neither deserved nor expected?

Or all of these. It is, other things being equal, a good thing to be surprised, and surprised by how surprised you are.

You haven’t asked me, but indulge me, as I tell you when the moment came for me. It was the declaration of the new Head of the Coptic Church, His Holiness Pope Tawadrous II. Some of you may have seen it – the young boy, blindfolded, drawing out the tightly-wrapped ball of paper containing the beautifully written long Arabic name. I was moved by the high drama of good liturgy (of course!), and I realised I was moved that there is still a vibrant Egyptian Church. The cheers, the delight, the renewal, the hopefulness of the Christians of Egypt. Alhamdullilah! I for one was surprised how surprised I was.

*

And here we are, and here it is Christmas, a season of surprises. It’s customary of course for preachers to lament the loss of the real meaning of Christmas. Remember Bart Simpson at the end of one of The Simpsons’ (many) Christmas specials: ‘Let us remember the true meaning of Christmas… the birthday of Santa’. It’s a good joke. But of course, it works as a joke, only if most of us know it is false. And I tend to think that, even here and even now, in 21^st-century ‘secular’ Europe, most people do know, at one level of consciousness or another, that the meaning of Christmas is the birth of Jesus Christ. (It’s changing rapidly and I might be wrong. But, of course, here I am preaching to the choir. After all, you are here!)

What the Church struggles to convey is the sense that there is anything surprising about the birth of this Jesus. Even when the story is heard, there is little or nothing that is troubling, challenging or just plain moving about it. The story dissolves into a string of pretty images. Angels, promise, dream, stable, oxen, shepherds, star, wise men, journeys. All presented as comforting. It is the story of carols, and carols are nice. They do not - they cannot - surprise.

There is another way of telling the Christmas story. It’s one that exaggerates the degree of surprise. It says something like this: before Jesus, everyone thought that God was threatening, hostile, distant, abstract – some combination of all that. And the birth of Jesus brought something new to humankind – the idea that God is close, compassionate, concerned and involved. Let me be blunt. That way of dividing up the territory is nothing short of ridiculous. In the Hebrew Bible, in Judaism, as in other faiths, God just is closely involved with humankind, from the start. God can express apparently negative emotions, like anger, yes. But God’s anger makes sense only as part of an intensely and intimately close relationship. The relationship of the Lover to the beloved.

So I’d say something different. I’d say that the surprise - the surprising surprise - of the birth of Jesus is not saying that for the first time God is close, for God has always been close. It is saying that God has now ‘crossed the floor’, and knows what it is – from the inside – to be mortal, vulnerable, creaturely, needy, and at the mercy of others.

How to make this point? How about this…

·      It is not, now, that God speaks to us and articulates divine wisdom.

·      Rather, God in the baby Jesus becomes unable to speak. He giggles and gurgles and whimpers and whines.

·      It is not, now, that God radiates miraculous power.

·      Rather, God in the baby Jesus wees and poos.

Brothers and sisters, I am not trying to shock you. Or rather I am not trying to shock you for the sake of shocking you. I am suggesting that there should be something – something! – surprising about Christmas (even for Christians). And that, if we are to make the spirit of Christmas our own, we should expect to surprised how surprised we are.

*

It is time to attend to another claim which is surprising, and even surprisingly surprising. The claim that God loves us. God loves you. In a sense, this must be an easy claim to make - if only because it is made so often by so many preachers. In another sense, it is and remains a difficult claim. Think about it. It means that God – the cause, the heart, the source of the whole universe – is somehow intimately involved with… you. How can this be? We can know it only if God tells us (we could never ‘work it out’). We can know it only by the mystery of revelation. And of course, tonight, we have that revelation, full of grace and truth. The fullness of grace and truth reveals to us that God loves us. So, once again, we find ourselves surprised and surprisingly surprised to be the recipients of God’s love. But!...

But! But I am going to dare to suggest that, in fact, many of us can get at least some faint sense of God’s love. We long for that fullness of love so strongly (and we long, for it, whether we are loved by those around us or not)… we long so strongly for love, that the claim that God loves us falls on quite receptive ground. Half of us is ready to believe that God loves us (and that is good). But it might just be the case that, as we half-believe-and-half-disbelieve that God loves us, we do not even hear another claim. That other claim, I am suggesting, is implicit in the story of Christmas. It is part of the fundament and the framing of the story, and so is easy to miss. That claim is that God, who loves us, longs Himself to surprise us.

God longs to surprise us. Can God do this? I mean: what would the world be like, what would the past year have been like, what might the next year be like, if we started with the conviction that God, God who loves us, also longs to surprise us? To hear this, you need both bits. It is the God who loves us who is longing to surprise us (this isn’t about a will to shock). It is also the God who loves us who is longing to surprise us. I ask again: Can God do this?

Bluntly, if you are like me, your first thought will be: ‘Great! That means I finally get what I want!’ But your second thought will be: ‘Oh no! To be surprised by God does not, in itself, mean I get what I want. On the contrary, if God - the cause, the heart, the source of the whole universe - really does deeply love me, and wants nothing more than to surprise me, then… then I have even less insight into how things will unfold than I thought I had. But maybe the adventure will be worth it… But surely the adventure will be worth it.’

Full of grace and truth, the message of Christmas is that we can free ourselves, always and everywhere, to be ready to be surprised and surprisingly surprised, because God has revealed that God loves us and longs to surprise us. Brothers and sisters, I wish you the merriest of Christmases. May the surprises of the day to come be gentle, fun and to your liking. I also exhort you and me – me and you - to give it a try. The God of surprises be with you! Amen.