Nine Lessons and Carols – Christ Church St. Lucia – 15 Dec 24
Libbie and I can well remember when our son, our first child, was born – how could anyone who was so small, so fragile, so vulnerable be capable of utterly disrupting and turning our comfortable lives upside down? Our son had his 50th birthday three months ago, so you could say he’s made his mark on our lives.
The Child whose birth among us we celebrate at Christmas is especially disruptive. The stories of his birth show that it was not only a cause of great joy to many but was also a source of consternation. King Herod certainly wasn’t overjoyed. When Mary sings her “Song of Mary” she extols the nature of God whose son she will bear - a God who lifts up the lowly and hungry, scatters the imaginations of the proud and brings down the powerful from their thrones. The events vents of the past couple of weeks in Syria spring immediately to mind. Mary sings of the kind of world God wants, and God confirms it through the birth of a child – one who in due course would be a disruptor, would turn accepted ways upside down, would infuriate the powerful, both religious and secular, but would speak the good news of justice, peace, love, forgiveness and tell stories about how people could live after God’s pattern, if they had ears to listen.
Mary and her cousin Elizabeth were two women whose lives were disrupted by God. They had a choice of course. They could have turned their backs on the calling of God in all its strangeness and unknowing and understandably decline to be part of what was coming. Or they could say “Yes” and say, as Mary did, “I don’t know exactly what you are doing in all of this, God, but I’m willing to be a part of what you’re doing.”
And I guess that’s the choice before us all as once again we enter into to all the wonder and joy and celebration and distractions of Christmas. It’s good, even comforting, to be caught up in the familiar carols, to be, in a sense, lost in wonder, love and praise. But lest we get too comfortable, we’re reminded that this is a service of lessons as well as carols. As I read on behalf of us all at the beginning of the service Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child. Shall we attend to the disrupting words scripture as we hear listen to the history of our salvation in Christ, from the story of creation in the first lesson, to the re-membering and re- creation of that story by John in the ninth lesson as he writes of the one who became flesh and lived among us full of grace and truth. Shall we have the faith to come and worship the Child of Christmas. Shall we be willing to be a part of what God is doing and to follow him wherever he leads.
Following God’s leading can be risky and uncertain – it’s human nature to want to step back from that a bit and want some certainty, especially in the world we live in now with all it’s uncertainty. But for me, for Christians the world round, there is one certainty we celebrate at this coming Season of Christmas. The English poet John Betjeman, a former poet laureate, calls it a “single Truth”. He wrote a poem in 1954 simply titled "Christmas".[1] The final verses are:
And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
And may Christ live in you too as we approach the celebration of his wondrous birth. Or, in the words of the invitation in this service let it be our care and delight in this holy season to prepare our hearts and homes for the coming of our Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Lord be with you.
[1] https://allpoetry.com/poem/8493411-Christmas-by-Sir-John-Betjeman
© The Reverend Bill Crossman