It is difficult, I know, at times, to make sense of it.
Year after year it comes around and moves on, and sometimes we take from of it some of that joy that is promised and sometimes we don’t. Christmas—this hallowed feast, still celebrated everywhere, still so misunderstood; still a source of joy but still also for many a stale relic, a cultural form with little to show for itself—more in its present form cheap than deep, commercialized beyond any sort of authenticity. Christmas—this hallowed feast, this feast which brings us here to worship this silent and small God, creator of heaven and earth, this baby, this child, this deity.
And I’ll be honest with you, as a preacher, I am aware of the varied hearts which rest and beat among us here now in this place. Some of you are faithful; you burn with that holy joy of which even I am envious. Some of you are just here, by either custom or coercion; some looking for a reason either to stay or leave; some just looking the part like always—smile, remember to smile, don’t let them know, don’t let them see. As a preacher I am aware of this; I know. I’ve played all these roles myself.
And again, I’ll be honest with you, I do wonder what to say to you. To the saints here there is little I could say sweeter than the secrets of the Spirit already given. To the hardened and to the supposedly sophisticated as well, there is little my words can do, for only the humble can see anything here; there are very plain reasons you get nothing out of it. Most of the world didn’t get Christmas either, didn’t see anything in that mother or that child either—your bemused skepticism is nothing new. As a preacher I wonder what to say; this is a feast of love and silence, a feast better hallowed in silence, and so I wonder what to say. I’ve never wanted to be a preacher of trite clichés, you see; that’s why Christmas has always bothered me as a preacher because that’s the tradition—jingles and shallow wit, marketed simplicity designed to make you feel good, come back, and maybe even pledge some of your income. I know the game, and I’m not very good at it—which, as I said, is why I wonder just what to say to you on this holy night, a night so much holier than us.
And also, as then, so too now, ours is a loud and violent and vitriolic age, a frightened and saddened age too in these strange pandemic days. Divided more than united, we’ve become a people—so many of us—not just unwilling to listen but unable to listen, conditioned by the personal noise each of us has purchased, downloaded, streamed; comforted each of us by our own brand of lies—all of us: left, right, it doesn’t matter. We have become a people unlikely to hear God, unlikely to recognize him, because we can’t hear anything anymore, having become “enemies of everything,” as Paul said, “reckless and demented by pride.”[1] What can a preacher say? What words will work in this unsettled age and on this angelic night, this truly beautiful night? Again, I never wanted to be a preacher of sentimental nonsense; I really believe in God; I want to preach his birth, his truth. But how can we talk about truth in such an untruthful world? Christmas is about truth; that’s all it’s about; that’s why it’s hard for me to preach today and hard for you to hear. Merry Christmas. What else? What else can I say?
Yet speak I must—whether laughed at, hated, ignored, or praised; it matters little. I must speak. I am a preacher. So I will tonight be brief and speak plainly about Christmas, about what it means—simply and without the conventional stock religious phrases of false faith, the truth—so at least I can tell my God that I told you and that you can’t say that you didn’t hear it.
God the almighty, the creator of you and me—above time, above even eternity, above even infinity—God: he became flesh, born of a virgin some millennia ago. Fully human and fully God, he assumed fully our human nature which we all share, as we say, in Adam. Like us he suffered the contingency of being, the violence of all things; he died a common bloody death. God the almighty, the creator, above time and eternity: he entered our world as one of us—God, a human. Quietly, simply, little noticed: God came to us. That’s the mystery, the revelation, the incarnation. That’s what we celebrate, what I need to tell you—that God has become human.
And what this means—and what this means for us even today in this bitter and divided world—is simply this: to quote that obscure, and in many respects unlikable, French poet and diplomat, Paul Claudel, what Christmas means is this truth, that “God is not above us but beneath us.”[2] God has drawn close to us in his becoming man; the infinite is finite; the eternal is now contingent; simple peace now rests quietly within our violence; knowledge is silent within ignorance; God is in the world—as a child, a tiny baby. This, a scandal to believe still for so many.
And what this should put within us, each of us, in our hearts—the true moral gift of Christmas—is this: sympathy, the bond of love which is sympathy. That very thing we all seem to have lost, this is what Christmas can give us if we’ll stop being such fools—sympathy. God created the world, you and I, and we made of it a wicked world, a world of bigotry and blood. But what did God do? St. Bernard of Clairvaux put it simply: “The Only-begotten of God wanted to have brothers and sisters.”[3] He was sympathetic; he drew near in love; he wanted us as family; he became human and suffered and died. He bound himself to us in the love which is sympathy.
And in doing so, he bound us in sympathy—all of us together. Now—even in the person you hate—now, God is in them, and in you. And because of that, sympathy has become the law of mankind, the law by which we will all be judged, by whether we treated each other with sympathy. Christmas is the judgment of our hatred, the perfect hatred of our bitterness, the indictment of our indifference. In sympathy God has come to us; in sympathy we must go to each other. There is no other law, no loophole, no escape. This, and this only, is what love looks like—sympathy, just like God’s sympathy, for everyone, even enemies. Here we come to the relevance of Christmas, which, of course, only fools will fail to see.
It’s a sympathy which begins small, small as a babe—weak, vulnerable, overlooked. This then is the final lesson of Christmas—that God didn’t come fully grown, but was born, like us, a weak newborn babe. Sympathy begins small. We must look for sympathy, we must be sympathetic, in the small places of our lives, in those small moments, with the people nearest to us. We can’t really sympathize with the world, or even with a nation, but only people, individual persons—your neighbor, your spouse, your sister, that stranger, the person in front of you. God has become human, binding us all in sympathy, but binding us together in intimacy and not ideology. We—if Christmas means anything—must see in each other Christ and bring him gifts and a good word, pondering the mystery of Christ in our hearts—the mystery that he’s in other hearts too, and that that is God’s plan for the salvation of the world. Again, that’s Christmas—the word from heaven to look to earth for our first sight of God—in our neighbor, in bread and wine, in beauty, in enemies. Here again is the relevance of Christmas: beauty in our ugly world, people willing still to sing even today in this darkness. And again, we’re fools if we don’t see this; fools, so many of us.
And this, my friends, is my Christmas sermon. My apologies if I have failed to sing the lighter songs of this wonderful holiday. I wish you no gloom, no joyless sobriety—instead rejoice! It’s Christ’s birthday! Come, let’s celebrate this feast! See in your children the beauty of God. See in your hardships hope. See in this world the beginning of redemption. See in hatred the slow work of peace. See in all things Christ—God become human. My prayer is that at some point we hear the gospel of Jesus Christ together, the true gospel of the prince of peace. And that we come truly to love each other. And that you come to know the deep love I have for you as your priest and your brother, and what I really mean when I say to you, “Merry Christmas!” These words are my hope for you. Amen.
[1] 2 Timothy 3:3-4 (The New Jerusalem Bible)
[2] Galen A. Johnson, The Retrieval of Beauty, 133
[3] St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “On the Proclamation of the Lord’s Birth” in Sermons for Advent and the Christmas Season, 3
© 2020 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
