NIGHT OF WONDER Luke 2: 1=15 A Christmas Eve Meditation - December 24th 2005

The stories of Narnia told by C.S. Lewis are this Christmas very much in the hearts and minds of many people with the recent release of the film, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Lewis paints a bleak picture of Narnia as it is under the power of the witch. It is the place where there is “Winter but no Christmas.” It is a place in need of hope.

Hope lies at the centre of the Christmas story. A people have travelled with God. Their journey has at times been difficult. Disunity, despair, destruction and exile - they know all these things. Yet they have glimpsed the dawn of a great hope, a hope that the Gospel writers saw as being fulfilled in the coming of Jesus.

In this Holy Night we look to the fulfilment of the hopes of the years. An ordinary night, in a small town far from Rome, amongst ordinary people and ordinary happenings, God breaks into our world, unnoticed by nearly all. And yet that night, we recall, is the greatest, most significant moment in the history of our world. As U.A Fanthorpe, the first woman to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University puts it;

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the Kingdom of heaven.

I don’t know about you but that poem blows me away. On a night such as this, those farm workers and members of an obscure Persian sect walking haphazard by starlight straight into the Kingdom of heaven. What a night it must have been!

And it’s that night which changed the world, that draws us here at this late hour. Why do we come here? In a real sense we come to stand in the space between history and the future. That night is a night that changes everything. It is a night which affirms that brutishness and violence need not have the final say for this is the night in which God’s love is unleashed in the person of Jesus. In our world that is armed to its very teeth, God unleashes a liberator in the form of what Jurgen Moltmann describes as “a pleading child.” This doesn’t mean that darkness is yet at an end. Our experience of life tells us that this is not so. In a real sense the work that began in a stable in Bethlehem is not complete but through Jesus Christ, light is a reality in the world as much as darkness and it is a light that darkness can not put out. And just as Christmas is a fulfilment of the hopes of the years, so to we can as Advent has reminded us, look to a future in which God’s will that is the will of mercy and peace, is done on earth as well as in heaven.

And so on this night, we welcome Jesus as God’s perfect gift. You know, our Christmases today owe so much to Charles Dickens and his “Christmas Carol.” It’s a book which I love and yet it merits a cautionary note. Dickens tells us of the transformation of Ebeneezer Scrooge from a tight fisted mean spirited man to being a model of generosity. The message is that we like Scrooge can become generous people. We can be givers. We can feel good about ourselves. But that is not the story we find in Luke’s Gospel. For Luke’s message is that we are needy people who need God to do for us what we are incapable of doing for ourselves. And that God does in giving us a gift beyond anything we could imagine or expect, the gift of himself in Christ Jesus.

But whilst recognising that our relationship with God is based on God’s loving initiative, it does of course call for us to identify with what God is doing. Rowan Williams in his Christmas message to the Anglican Communion puts it well when he suggests that if Christians wish to be a part of the solution to the problems of our world, then as we look to the vulnerability of the baby of Bethlehem, we “must be wholly and unconditionally pledged to that love with all its costs.”

Tonight, we look to the heavens and like others across the globe and like others from whom we are divided by time, we are filled with the wonder of God’s grace revealed in that Holiest of Nights. In wonder we approach the mystery of grace which is the only yet supremely valuable thing we have to share with our world. For this is the night when our world is invaded by hope, joy, love and mercy. This is the night above all night, the night in which our world so often ruled by force is confronted with the wonder of the grace of God. This is the night in which winter is invaded by Christmas.

Welcome! All Wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span.
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in human.
Great little one! Whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth!


This sermon was preached at Christmas Eve Midnight Communion on December 24th 2005.