Midnight Mass: Let there be light
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-4; John 1:1-14
The mind is a strange thing. Take the peculiar case of Jedediah Buxton in the eighteenth century. In most respects he knew less than an average 10 year old but he had a prodigious head for numbers. So when he was asked how many times a coach wheel, six yards in circumference, would turn on the 204 mile journey from London to York he provided the correct answer of 59,840, in only 13 minutes. His greatest feat was squaring a thirty-nine figure number. It took him more than two months but he got the correct figure which ran to 78 digits. To encourage him in his feats of mathematical memory, friends and dignitaries would buy him pints of beer, a list of which he kept mentally, so that by 1753 he could say that the Duke of Kingston alone had treated him to 2130 pints. Another treat was being taken to see a performance of Richard III. When asked whether he enjoyed the play he replied that he hadn’t understood any of it but he could tell you how many words the lead actor had said!
Christmas is a large-scale act of remembering. The whole “Christmas magic” thing is about recapturing the giddiness you felt as a child, decorating the tree, waiting for Father Christmas, asking your parents difficult questions about the lyrics to ‘Fairytale of New York’. And then there’s Christmas movies. You don’t even need the radio times any more to plan your viewing, and avoid missing your favourite ritual. But why do we watch them again and again? At 135 minutes anyone who happens to have watched Love Actually every year since its release in 2003 (and why wouldn’t you?), will have spent forty hours of their life watching what is by most standards a pretty mediocre movie. And if you’ve watched ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ every year since its release 75 years ago then you’ve lost nearly a week of your life.
So why do it? Why come to carol services each year? It’s not like you’re going to be surprised by the story; Or the rarely sung fourth verse of Hark the Herald where Mary and Joseph stay in on Boxing Day and order a curry.
But actually what makes life meaningful is repetition. Repetition gives order, shape. It allows experience to build; it makes connections; it gives resonance to our little rituals. I hate birthdays. Most of the bad things that have happened to me have happened on my birthday – heart-breaking break-ups, hospitalization, walking in on naked friends who really shouldn’t have been naked; but we get a bigger sense of our lives when we remember back through birthdays. Like Christmas and New Year we find layers, another year, laid on our lives, like a coastal shelf. And hopefully it helps us understand ourselves, and where we’re going.
Or think about anniversaries. The one year since the first date that you forgot and he didn’t. Going out to dinner; reliving those memories of unpromising conversation. Looking at the photos. And this year’s platinum jubilee – a repetition that marks history and tells the story of a life of service through a large collection of commemorative crockery.
Repetition is a way of remembering and bringing order to your life, from your morning cup of tea with the Today programme, to your annual birthday walk, to sleeping through the queen’s speech. It marks time and glues the fragments of our lives together in some sort of shape.
And it does so much more than simply looking back. Normal remembering works backwards. And even if the memories were wonderful they are receding in the rear-view mirror. Repetition is memory working forward, re-lived. To look back to your wedding day is to think of what was. To repeat your anniversary is to inhabit that day and all that it meant, and to add to it, to create new memories, to deepen and enrich it. What happens but once, says the German proverb, might as well not have happened at all. To look back at past love affairs is always bittersweet, nostalgic; the repeated act of telling someone you love them, taking them out to dinner, builds a life together.
Repetition can also be hellish though. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, according to Marx. The essence of trauma is being unable to escape horrific repetition. In that other great Christmas movie, In Bruges, the main character contemplates giving himself up, saying, - I have edited slightly here - “at least in prison and at least in death, you know, I wouldn't be in [] Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me. And I realized, [] man, maybe that's what hell is: the entire rest of eternity spent in [] Bruges. And I really really hoped I wouldn't die.”
But whether it’s positive or negative what’s repeated is meaningful. When we repeat what is good we see shades of heaven. When we repeat what is dreadful we find fifty shades of hell. What happens only once may as well not have happened. Even if this is our annual pilgrimage to church, to sing the familiar carols, to experience for one night again a lifetime’s repetition of words and music, year on year, it’s putting us in sight of heaven for a moment. Like an old remembered fairytale, coming to life.
Today’s Gospel was the reason I read theology at 18 and so inadvertently why I became a priest, not first for the theology, but for the poetry. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was the first book in the Bible. It deliberately starts the same, “In the beginning”, the repetition layering the story of Jesus onto the story of creation. In Genesis God speaks the first act of creation: in the beginning God said “Let there be light”. And in today’s Gospel we have ‘in the beginning’ was theWord, in which there was light, the light which is the life of all people made flesh for the world. Creation and redemption layered together as the repeating act of God’s love.
But ‘Let there be light’ is now ‘the light shines in the darkness’. The first act of creation, incarnate in the Word made flesh, that’s Jesus, is still shining in darkness. So in this eucharist, near to the shortest day of the year, in the middle of the night, we are celebrating, we are repeating in the soft candlelight, the light that shines in the darkness, that is not ever overcome.
Memory is not supposed to be perfect. One can count, one can even say words with no meaning at all. When we remember forwards by repeating, the memory changes with us, grows with us. The important thing is the connections; being connected to the past; building a connection with the future. If we can dwell in the magic of tonight for a moment, we meet our precious childhood Christmases; the people who we’ve loved and who’ve loved us over the years. And even if you’re just trying to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Years, that’s ok too. Because repetition can also ease our most painful memories.
So, dearly beloved, happy Christmas. It’s Christmas Eve and you’re not in the drunk tank. Given the last two years, we will all ‘see a better time where perhaps some of our dreams come true’. But the enduring hope of generations is in this birth of a child, the light of the world, That we remember forwards, repeating the old words, repeating this gift of God’s love for the world in our gifts to others; repeating this hope that in all the darkness of the world, there is meaning and purpose. And in this act of remembrance tonight we are brought close to the creative and redemptive love that still echoes through the world.
God said let there be light. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Amen.