Carol Sermon

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

John 1:1-14

People sometimes confuse the reading we are shortly to hear for the beginning of the Bible. It famously, and deliberately, begins with the same words: “In the beginning”. In the beginning was the Word: The word spoken by God, beginning Genesis:  “Let there be light.” As the Gospel continues:  ‘What has come into being in him was life and the life was the light of all people.’ Creation begins with life and light. 

So like Genesis, John’s Gospel is speaking about creation, an act in the past. ‘In the beginning was the Word… the Word was with God, the Word was God.  All things came into being through him… What has come into being in him was life and the life was the light of all people.’

 Then we have the one line in this whole passage, the famous prologue of John’s Gospel, the one line written in the present tense: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ Not a statement of the past. A statement about our present darkness. There is a light, shining, That light of creation: ‘let there be light’.

 Christmas gives us a different way of telling time. We think of it first of all as an event that happened 2000 years ago. The far-away past; that Christmas is getting further and further away. But Christmas is celebrated every year. As our parents, our grandparents and great grandparents did, we ‘delight to hear again the message of the angels and in heart and mind go even unto Bethlehem’.  Every carol service deliberately builds from the moment of promise, ‘the root of Jesse’ to the Christmas reading, to celebrate a new moment of Emmanuel – which means ‘God is with us’. That even today, ‘a light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’

There have been some very dark times. The first Christians facing the lions in the arena in the persecutions of Nero and Diocletian. The Black death, which wiped out between a quarter and half of the population of Britain. The Reformation and the burning and decapitating of Christians by Christians. The death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec. And the atrocities go on. Across the world people still suffer for their faith. And if you find each year that like Harry from When Harry met Sally you’re saying: “Every year I just try to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Year’s”, That can be difficult too.

 But the capacity of humans for resilience, for courage, for hope, is the reflection of that light that shines in the darkness. In every age and situation there are women and men of courage who shine as lights in the darkness.

Our times are hopefully not as dark as these, but the 2020s will doubtless bring problems of their own. For now though let us celebrate Christmas this year, In the cosy candlelight, amid the familiar carols, reflecting on how that hope still shines today, and how we can reflect that light in Putney and London. Let there be light.