A Christmas Sermon

Several people asked me for the text of my sermon at Midnight Mass last night. I had not recorded it, so here is the written text. What I actually said may have been a little different. . .

Twenty years ago tonight I was doing much the same thing as I am doing here. But it was in a church in Jordan, and among the congregation were twenty deaf children from the finest deaf school in the Middle East. Most were Palestinian, several from Gaza. At the end of the service they sang in sign language ‘Away in a manger.’ It moved people that these little Muslim kids, cared for in a Christian school, should so joyfully sing our carol. No one mentioned my sermon that Christmas; they remembered the words becoming flesh.

The following morning I set off for Damascus to take the Christmas service there, and then on to Aleppo. Today those cities are racked by civil war. Churches, mosques, hospitals have been destroyed, and evil men are trying to divide Arab against Kurd, Muslim against Christian or Druze, Shia against Sunni. For those of us who have lived in Syria this is almost inexpressibly horrendous.

And it is because of this that we must celebrate this Christmas with a special joy. For God comes among us not as a male, not as a Judean, not as a speaker of Aramaic: St John insists that the Word was made flesh. This common substance which unites us all, deaf and hearing, black and white, men and women, gay and straight and even, it must be said, Welsh and English.

While the Church has got itself excited about women bishops I have thought about the people I loved in Syria when I spent 5 years among them, Christian, Muslim, Druze, men and women. For God isn’t too interested in church politics. He is concerned with the world, he is concerned with all people. With every one of us here, and with all those outside who never bring their faces into a church building.

And God shares in our common human experience. As St John puts it, ‘The Word became flesh.’ His Reason, usually translated as Word, becomes human and lives among us. Actually, that really means to pitch one’s tent. God comes and pitches his tent among us, just like the tent of the presence of God went around with the Israelites in their wanderings, so God in the person of Jesus pitches his tent and journeys with us.

He journeyed with me 20 years ago through Jordan and Syria; and he is still journeying with people their in their suffering.  

And he is journeying with you.

In the choir there is a wall-painting of Mary, Joseph and Jesus travelling. It is not clear where they are going. They might be refugees fleeing violence. Oddly, they don’t look like the hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing the civil war. I did wander if they are just on the way to the family for Christmas.

For all the difficult travelling that people have at Christmas, to be with the people who matter to them, there has been no greater journey than the invisible, unknowable God becoming flesh in order to travel with us.

God with us. Not a static god stuck in a Temple, but a God who travels along with you and me, knowing what it is like to be you and me, and hoping that we will discover what it is to be God,