Christmas Carols: On Repeat

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

There’s a line in When Harry Met Sally: “Every year I just try to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Year’s”. If you added: ‘without having to self-isolate’ – it would probably capture the mood of the entire nation for the last two years.

And I’m sure every vicar in the country has been thinking: “please God, can I just get to Boxing Day, without having to cancel everything or arrange another Zoom coffee morning.” Covid steals joy. It is the mosquito in your ear creating the anxiety that prevents sleep. I very much look forward to Boxing Day and sleeping in heavenly peace – Hopefully not in the way of all flesh.

Christmas is about repetition – we delight in the familiar. And sorry Tolstoy, but actually even happy families are happy in different ways – with different traditions; Our Silent Night didn’t actually sleep ‘in heavenly peace’ tonight but ‘in Mary’s arms’ – different translation and arrangement of what is most familiar. So we have our films we watch, our moments by the tree, with presents; A 45 year old unpronounceable highland scotch; However, you spend it, there’s a joy in connecting with Christmas past, A reawakening of a childhood memory; Or the memory of someone very precious no longer with us. It can be just a sensation, rumbling through our guts, hearing an overly enthusiastic soprano throw herself at a descant; The memories may blur together, But somehow all this is a part of us.

Last year the Covid grinch stole Christmas. I can almost feel him rubbing his hands as we speak.But as Ecclesiastes reminds us ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. Plague, war, famine, all those merry horsemen have turned up in time for the Nativity play before. But they’ve not had the last word yet.

Christmas itself is summed up in a very simple image: A ‘light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ It’s easy to picture – you hold it in your hands: it’s a picture of hope. The verse stands out in the prologue of John because it’s the only verse written in the present tense. It’s all has and was and then suddenly, out of nowhere, like an aside to the reader – speaking into our time – the light shines in the darkness. It’s not the historian saying what happened. It’s a promise. A promise that Christ is Emmanuel – God with us – Today, tomorrow, as before in that little town of Bethlehem.

So Christmas is about hope, even, especially, in dark times. There is little cause for carolings, but as that most miserable of novelists Thomas Hardy put it, even in the voice of an aged thrush, in the ‘growing gloom’ there may still be ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware.’

So good luck to us all getting through ‘to the day after New Year’s’. I hope you don’t spend it this year in the covid tank. And in faith we can say that we will see another one. So ‘Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.’ Or as the most famous Christmas Carol finishes: ‘God bless us, every one!’