Memorial Carol Service
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Luke 2:1-7; Revelation 21:1-7
Welcome to St Margaret’s. As we’re used to hearing Christmas is ‘the most wonderful time of the year.’ But for many it’s a very difficult time. It’s a time that gathers constellations of our memories: We’re closest to our own childhoods here – And those of our children. As we come to the end of the year we naturally reflect on the passage of time; Another year past and the changes it has brought; Christmas present is wrapped with the memories of Christmas past – And the faces that we love and see no more. As we begin our service we call to mind the happy memories of those who now worship on a further shore, in a greater light.
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The two readings we have had tonight, tell the stories of what’s known as the first and the second Coming; The first is ever familiar. You’ve probably heard it since you were an infant. Played the different parts in the Nativity Play. Perhaps seen your children take theirs. The story is very relatable. It’s an ordinary young family. The government is once again making them register. Though not vaccinating them at this point. They’re travelling at Christmas and there are the predictable difficulties. Donkey charges in the ULEZ and overbooked inns. What is unusual is the child. As the second reading describes it, second time around: ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; Now it’s easy to write this off as a folk tale. To enjoy the story performed by children in a sanitised mock-stable; All charming, light the candles, sing the carols; Enjoy the memories of Christmas past; With a mulled wine beside a Christmas tree.
Our faith, or lack of it, is all different. Trying to figure out who is God, where is God. God may seem like a twentieth century despot, A terrifying power far away with a somewhat arbitrary use of his power over life and death. Who wants to believe in that? Others imagine a curious scientist who has wound up this complex experiment and sits observing with his clipboard the struggles of the tiny creatures. I don’t believe in this God either.
The Christmas story tells us that this creator is not remote at all; But that God came and dwelt among us, ‘with the poor, the mean, the lowly’. That he shared our difficulties, our frailty; In order to share with us his divinity. And he feeleth for our sadness/ And he shareth in our gladness.
And the reason for this is to reveal God as love. Love requires vulnerability And so yes, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb, He comes as infant, so tender and mild, Little weak and helpless; tears and smiles like us he knew. Any parent knows that vulnerability – Of both parent and child. And with it the strange, powerful strength of connection. And that child in life and death was to teach and act out of love, As our childhood pattern, With the greater love that no man has than this – to lay down his life for his friends.
Christmas is the beginning of the story that puts love at the centre of the universe. Now you may call it a fairy tale and claim instead that there is no meaning to life, That the universe exploded out and will finish with every atom spread out across time and space in ever cooling nothingness. That’s one way of looking at the world. That death has the victory; in ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Or you may choose to believe this mystery of the incarnation. that ‘ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est’ that where there is love and charity, God is there. That in the vulnerability of this child, maybe God was there. The hidden meaning of the world. And that as God shared this life, its hazards, its suffering, As he, a young man, was killed by other men; he made a bridge that shows us the way to the Father. ‘And he leads his children on to the place where he is gone.’
The reality of death, we know. It may have caught us by surprise once, but the reality and finality of death once known changes us.
Christmas is about the reality of love. The enduring presence of our loved ones that doesn’t leave us. The hesitant knowledge that what loves and what is loved is never lost but endures eternally. Christmas is the bridge between these worlds. The promise that we have a friend who came to us with love, who is now with those whom we love and see no more. And that we too will thither, bend our joyful footsteps,
And that this child was born as our hope, not of something transient, like these Christmas tree that’ll be wilting by Boxing day – But born to show us the way of redeeming love; Born that man no more may die, Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth. Amen.