Christmas Sermon at St Bride's
by Guy Elsmore
The words which we just heard read are close enough to the version which I remember from my school days to do the same for me: as soon as I hear those familiar words then I’m right back in my parish church in Sutton Coldfield, sitting in the choir stalls at the school carol service. Christmas is such a time for evocative memories and of familiarity and that is part of the wonder of the season, but as with all repeated rituals the familiarity also carries some danger too.
If we are not careful, Christmassy nostalgia and soft focus can start to infect our view of the story itself. A kind of seasonal haze descends over the reality of Jesus’ birth and we fall in love with warm pictures of the Christ child sleeping peacefully in a manger brimming with golden hay, a beautiful and beaming Mary, an adoring Joseph standing manfully beside her, pastoral images of shepherds, gentle and well groomed animals peering in.
Christian art, and many a parish crib set would provide a prime example, has done much to encourage this rosy image of the nativity… and our beloved Victorian carols play their part too:
“but little lord Jesus no crying he makes” says “Away in a Manger”, really? As John Bell once observed “there must be something wrong with the child!”
The birth of Jesus was nothing like the idealised Christmas card picture.
At the toddlers service on Christmas eve afternoon in Widnes my RC colleague Fr Kevin Kelly used to talk to the children about the sounds and the smells of the stable – trying to get them to appreciate the earthiness of the situation, rather than its other worldliness and I think that is absolutely right – we are so familiar with this story, so caught up with a sense that this is how things SHOULD have happened that we lose touch with the reality, the scandal, the chaos and the messiness of the whole scene.
The traditional carols and the traditional images of Christmas leave out the sheer reality of the situation and in doing so they detach it from reality. Nowhere in the soft focus nativity scene will you find the pain, the cries, the exhaustion and all the other realities which are part of childbirth with no midwife present, no anaesthetics and no comforts.
Even in Jesus’ day, to be born in the animal shed would have been something of a scandal.
What about Joseph? his mind no doubt was full of anxieties about registering his new family, the baby born outside marriage, his failure to find a safe place for the child to be born; the shame of ending up with the animals amongst all the dirt. Did he feel like a proud father? Did he feel like a father at all?
And then there are the shepherds. The romantic image of the rustic shepherds running down the hillside to pay homage is far off the mark. In Jesus day, shepherds were the lowest of the low. They earned a pittance. They would have smelled of sheep and of days and nights of work on the hillsides. Their language would probably have been choice. They probably did not have ordinary home or family lives, living as they did with their flocks and moving round constantly to find good pastures. The religious law saw them as being in a constant state of sin because to be a shepherd was to be a thief, by definition, because they could not stop their sheep from grazing other people’s land. And these misfits come blundering in out of the night, scared to death by their encounter with the angel. And here’s the point. All that is not by way of interesting colour on a familiar story. It is by way of being the whole point of the story. The soft focus and halo version of the story is so dangerous as to be almost blasphemy.
Screaming Mary. Dirty stable. Crying baby. No nappies he wore. Shame faced Joseph. Disreputable shepherds. Occupied country. Corrupt government.
This birth does not happen when everything is cleaned up and when the house is in order and the world is ready and swept clean to meet its maker. No. Jesus is born into a life, a family, a community, a country, a world every bit as messed up, as complicated, as confused, as fearful and as anxious as our own.
THAT IS the point.
Peace on earth was not sung by angels into a peaceful country but to a group of outcasts in an occupied one.
Jesus was born into reality and he still wants to be.
Jesus is not born into our adequacy, our self sufficiency, our preparedness or our good consciences. He is born into the mess and the reality of our lives and for that we give glory to God who is born not into unreal perfection but into life as it really is.