Christmas Eve Sermon from Llandaff Cathedral
By Fr Richard Peers, Dean of Llandaff Cathedral.
What is happening?
What is happening in your life? Take a moment or two to be honest with yourself. This may be one of the happiest days of your life; or one of the worst. You may be delighted at the people you are spending Christmas with; or horrified at the thought of so many hours with the most irritating people in your life; or heart broken at being alone.
What is happening?
What is happening in your family? All families are complex. Christmas often brings those complexities to the surface; sometimes just to the surface of our thoughts and feelings; often to the surface between us. The decisions about what to watch on TV or when or whether to go for a walk proxies for something much deeper.
What is happening?
What is happening in your work? There are no workplaces without difficulties; the difficulty of the current economic climate; of the NHS; or the difficulties in any situation where we, wonderfully complex human beings, interact.
What is happening?
What is happening in our city and nation? Where people are striking for pay to be able to afford heating, clothes and food; where children are cold and hungry.
What is happening?
What is happening in our world? War in Europe; invasion; homes, schools and hospitals bombed. The planet pushed beyond the limits of recoverability; the climate changing beyond survivability for millions, perhaps ultimately billions of people.
What is happening? is a good question to begin with.
It is the question asked by the writers of each of the three readings we have just heard from the Bible.
The prophets looked at what was happening in their world and saw a picture remarkably similar to our own times.
Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, the whole book in the Hebrew Bible a compilation of writings and saying from three prophets in the eight and seventh centuries before Jesus was born. The prophets looked at what was happening in their world and saw a picture remarkably similar to our own times. The invasion of a small state by a major power. They experienced the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, their holiest of holies.
In the second reading from the letter to the Hebrews the writer is reflecting on the birth of Jesus and what is happening in that.
In the Gospel, the great poet St John reflects on the birth of Jesus.
In all three of our readings the writers take that first question: what is happening, and they ask a second: what does it mean?
What is happening, I asked, in your life, in your family, in your work, in the nation, in the world.
That’s the first step, to be honest with ourselves, to be real.
But the second step is equally important.
What does it mean?
We human beings weave to make the fabric of our lives out of the stuff that God gives us.
Meaning doesn’t suggest there is a purpose, or a cause, meaning is what we human beings weave to make the fabric of our lives out of the stuff that God gives us.
One of my favourite books is the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Life can seem unbearable at times, is unbearable at this moment to many people in the world, it may seem unbearable to some of us here tonight.
It is unbearable. Unbearable that those we love die. That evil triumphs, that the innocent suffer.
For Kundera weight is the suffering that life brings, but lightness is the freedom we gain from recognising that and being rooted in reality.
“What then shall we choose?” he writes, Weight or lightness?”
For our God who is real, for Jesus who lived so lightly that he could die freely.
What shall we choose?
For Christians the choice is always for reality. For our God who is real, for Jesus who lived so lightly that he could die freely.
I began with words from Tennyson’s epic poem In Memoriam, a poem about grief.
A baby is born in the middle of the night; a baby cries because it has no other language.
Whatever you make of the stunning music here tonight; the beautiful words of our worship, the very fact that Christians have worshipped on this site for fifteen centuries. It is no more than a cry in the night.
But it is a cry worth living for.
A cry that comes from hearts that are free, that protest at the unfairness of the world and yet can still proclaim that all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God; that can puzzle at the mystery of our own lives and yet can still say that God sustains all things; that can howl at the suffering of the innocent and yet can still say of God in Jesus, that he lived among us; that he lives among us.
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying in the light:
And with no language but a cry.
In the unbearable lightness of our being God gives us a language:
In the beginning was the Word, and that Word is Jesus.
