A sermon for Midnight Mass based on John 1. 1-14 and Hebrews 1. 1-4. Our Gospel reading tonight starts on the largest scale you could imagine. It’s like we’ve zoomed right out, wound time right back, and we’re standing in the void of nothing and there with us is God. God and the Word. And we know if we cross reference this passage with Genesis 1 that God creates everything, and he creates it by speaking, by speaking words. And so everything is created through this Word. And we’re still at this cosmic scale as galaxies and stars and nebula and planets and moons are created. All the way down to animals and plants, particles and sub-atomic particles. We’re watching as the universe in its infinite complexity is created. And what are its hallmarks? Light and life. And then we zoom in, we fast forward thousands of years through the story and we zoom in on a little galaxy called the milky way, we zoom in on the small solar system we call home, into a tiny planet, into the smallest of regions on the edge of an Empire and we meet a man. And he’s there with a message, something amazing has happened, the world, the universe has changed and will never be the same. That light, that life, in which everything has its origin, is here. And our reading ends with that wonderful truth that the word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Message translation of that verse says that ‘the word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood’. John starts the prologue to his Gospel on this cosmic, impossibly vast scale, and by the end of it we’re in an ordinary house, on an ordinary street. From the extraordinary to the very ordinary, but don’t let the mundaneness fool you. All of that glory and wonder and infiniteness and otherness is still there, if anything it’s more extraordinary because all of that now dwells in an infant child, a baby of flesh and blood. The infinite not just drawing close but come amongst us. He walks around, speaks to people on the street, gets the dust and dirt of our world under his fingernails, he has to cut his fingernails. He goes shopping, learns a trade, learns to be a carpenter, the God who created everything has to be taught to make chairs and tables, and I’d imagine the first few weren’t very good chairs and tables. But I’m getting ahead of myself because he cannot do anything much at all yet, he’s an infant, a little baby, he’s vulnerable and weak, dependant on the very creatures, the very people he created. He is the Word through whom all things were created and yet he can’t speak now, he’ll need to learn to speak, need to learn the words of a specific language, he’ll speak in a regional accent! The one whom the entire universe couldn’t sustain is now feeding on milk from his mothers breast, flexing his new limbs, testing them, interacting with our world. The infinite, vast, glorious, majestic, impossible to comprehend God, has become one of us, is now a new born baby boy. The glorious contained in the ordinary, the infinite become intimate. That’s the wonder and the glory of Christmas, that the God whom we cannot comprehend becomes flesh and blood and speaks to us directly. That the God we see in the manger, who will walk our earth for some 33 years isn’t a decoy, isn’t God putting on an act, instead, as the letter to the Hebrews reminds us, this is the exact image of God, we see Jesus, we see God, it’s as simple as that. The wonder that we can look at this human being, point at him and say ‘that’s what God is like, that’s God, right there’. That’s the glory of God, his radiance, we see it in the infant face of Christ. And do you know what we see in him as he grows? Those hallmarks he first put into creation, life and light. Because let’s be honest our world feels like a pretty dark place these days. We have the spiralling cost of living, we have war in Europe and people fleeing for refuge, we have people drowning trying to find safe harbour, we have a pandemic rolling on, we have a climate crisis which in all honesty we risk forgetting about with everything else going on. Everywhere we look we see crisis and tyranny and darkness. And do you know what we see in Jesus? Light and life. Wherever Jesus goes light overtakes darkness, death and disconnection are swallowed up by life. We see it everywhere in the Gospels, disease being overcome by health, poverty turned into riches, the dead restored to life, those who are dead inside finding living water welling up inside them, cleansing and refreshing, the darkness of tyranny and coercion and control overtaken by the light of freedom and hope. Jesus is not just God walking amongst us, he’s a walking talking paradigm of the world as it was always meant to be. We want to know what we were made for? What this world was before the fall? Look to Jesus. It flows out of him like water from a spring. What we see in him is the dawn of a new age, a new beginning, the light is dawning upon the darkness of our world and it’s a light that will never set, it only gets brighter as he walks and talks and acts. And in the darkness of our day it still shines, he still shines, the light is coming, that final sunrise is coming, if only we had eyes to see it. And it’s coming not through our own efforts, our own strength our own ingenuity, it’s coming as a gift. You see this God who walks amongst us, this living embodiment of the world as it should be is not just showing us what God is like so we can observe him, he’s not just showing us the world as it should be so we can dream bigger. No, he’s come so that we can call God our Father, experience that intimacy for ourselves, he’s come to make that new world a reality through his own actions. The crib is God entering the darkness, the cross is God plunging himself down into even the darkest of depths so that his light will shine there too. The cross is the place where the darkness tries to snuff out the light, where death tries to swallow up life himself. It’s the place where Jesus takes upon himself all our darkness, all our death, all our hatred and disconnection and plunges it down into the hell it deserves. The cross is the place the new world is forged, the place where we are reconnected to God, the moment Jesus takes hold of the steering wheel of our world and turns it around, away from destruction and back to home. God hasn’t just come as example, come to observe and be observed, God has come to change things, to rewrite the story of our world. Take us from the brink of oblivion and bring us home, this isn’t a scientific expedition, it’s a rescue mission. And do you want to know the most wonderous, mind boggling thing about Christmas. God is changed. God the Son, the Word, doesn’t just put on a skin suit for 33 years, die our death, rise on the third day, teach and preach and witness for another 50 days and then return to heaven shedding his humanity on the way up, becoming pure and ‘spiritual’ again, whatever that means. The God who becomes human is still human. The one seated on the throne in heaven is a human man. God the Son is permanently and irreversibly one of us now. Perfectly human, perfectly God. The one seated on the throne, the one we worship, the one who pleads our cause, prays for us, who will bring us home, is still one of us. And one day, we will be like him, one day, we will come home and be as he is, we will see God face to face in our perfected humanity, he has become what we are so that, when the dawn at last breaks, we will be as he is. What wonderful, glorious news, news that is worthy of that cosmic introduction to John. The God of the universe has moved into the neighbourhood, become our neighbour, so that at last we can come home. Amen.
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AuthorAn Anglican Curate in my 20's I was raised in an Anglican Church, went to a Youth Club run by an Evangelical Church, attended a Baptist Church while at Uni and was a member of a New Monastic Community after graduating. As such my faith has been influenced by these experiences and traditions into what I hope is a more rounded viewpoint. Archives
September 2022
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