Christmas Carols: Tiny, Hidden Things
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Tiny hidden things. Everything begins with tiny hidden things. The paralysis and trial of the world in a sweeping pandemic: Tiny hidden things. Hope, where it arises, tiny hidden things.
The news we hear is always big things. Politicians – usually going down with COVID – Or ruining people’s Saturday night. Multinational Pharmaceutical company breakthroughs – Captain Tom raising £33 million. But for every Captain Tom there’s a hundred thousand volunteers quietly fundraising, quietly helping. Fetching their neighbour’s groceries every week, month after month. Dropping off a piece of cake; making a phone call. Tiny hidden things.
Christmas is a visible noisy thing. Lights, carols, live-stream! Which is why our story starts in March, like most tiny hidden things. Our first reading is the annunciation, 9 months before Christmas. Rhiannon, my wife, is convinced that human gestation is 10 months, something to do with when they count the first day of pregnancy from. This is why our baby is due on Easter Monday. It’s a hard way to begin life: on a mathematical error.
But the annunciation is the tiny, hidden moment on which creation turns, the Gospel starts to spin. There is not even a second heart beat yet. But there is life, and that life is the light of the world. And now, at Christmas that tiny hidden thing is ready to be revealed to the world, though he will still be small and wrapped in swaddling bands. In a poor family, in a remote part of the world. Tiny. Hidden.
The thing that people usually find hardest to reconcile in Christianity is its particularity. A bit of ritual and music, love thy neighbour, a higher power, gratitude and forgiveness, mindfulness – we can all get behind that.
But a God becoming human. That sounds like a cult.
But if you wanted to say, as most people do today, that bodies matter, as much as mind or spirit. If you wanted to say that God is not some remote, uninterested, mechanical, logical astral-computer, but involved in humanity and all its struggles; if you wanted to say that God is not knowledge or power but love – reciprocal, self-giving love – such as is first found between a mother and child; if you understood that to communicate to humans, you need not a set of laws or a rational proof, but a story; if you wanted to bring meaning to suffering, not by removing freedom or adversity, but by enduring through love, and promising redemption in love; if you wanted to show that within humanity, and most especially our relationships, our fragility and the incredible miracle of birth, are the most holy and sacred traces of the divine; and that in the divine can be found what is most precious within our humanity; then how else would you reveal to the world who you are. How else than by this Incarnation; this tiny hidden thing.
Whatever good that comes out of this pandemic will not justify it. There may be yet further stings in the tail. But for all the present darkness, I have seen daily the twinkling light of human kindness.
Each year we return to Bethlehem, it looks a little different. We may understand the anxiety of the couple a little better this year; their poverty, the difficulty of travel; the quiet of the empty sky, fear and wariness of others; loneliness. The gentle hope of “we’ll meet again” sustained us through March. The melancholic sadness of “have yourself a merry little Christmas” is the sobering reality for this week.
But we are here to greet God with us, God within us. And if we can grasp that God has embraced humanity in order to tell a story of a body given over for love; then perhaps we may find those traces of the divine, the twinkling lights of heaven; in those we love: from those we have sought this year to protect, to this broad new generation which are even now coming into the world, just as he did. Tiny. Hidden. Amen.