Midnight Mass 2021
Here we are: it’s the midnight hour: in the Goyt Valley the barn owl is out hunting, our neighbours in Whaley Bridge are putting the last touches to the children’s Christmas stockings before running in for a night’s sleep, and here are we praying and praising God. The beauty of this service is the way it flies in the face of our routine, it upends our usual habits of sleeping and waking.
By coming to church at midnight on Christmas Eve we let the birth of Christ change our routine. For one night in the year we let go of our familiar habits, and allow the wonder of this holy birth to intervene. And how appropriate that is. On Christmas Eve we recognise that Jesus’s coming among us is a kind of interruption.
We may well feel that our lives have been interrupted enough over this pandemic. Plans made, postponed, cancelled, adjusted, remade. The thing we all care about – being with people we love – suddenly becoming fraught and complicated again. The interruption of global pandemic has jolted us out of our familiar routines, and we have all longed simply to celebrate Christmas in the way we used to.
Yet when we come back to the gospel story of Jesus birth and see it through a fresh lens, we can recognise it is a story of interruptions – improvised birth arrangements, a sudden unplanned journey to a foreign land to evade the clutches of a murderous ruler.
Yet at another level, the coming among us of Christ interrupts our ideas of what God is like. If we had pictured God has remote, a theoretical construct, irrelevant to the actual business of living – then our celebration this evening wants to throw that picture of God out of the window.
We heard John ‘s magisterial prologue to his gospel: no shepherds or wise men there. John chooses to wind back not to the birth nor even the conception of Jesus, but rather to the conception of universe: not to the first cries of the baby, but to the first stirrings of the cosmos, to the dawn of time. Beginnings don’t go any further back than this.
In the beginning, writes John, quoting the book of Genesis. Yes of course: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But no, not quite: “In the beginning……..was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” John is giving us a creation account but with a new twist: Jesus is there, right in the heart of God, the divine creativity that gives birth to everything that is. Jesus is God’s Word, God communicating himself to his creation. Communicating God’s presence, communicating God’s saving, healing love.
And how does he do that, then? “The Word was made flesh and dwelt with us…. Full of grace and truth.” That’s how. God speaks his word into a human life, into the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The beyond of God is earthed, is grounded in a human life like ours. A baby, a child, a man, a smile, a touch, a voice. This is what God among us is like. Jesus is the power of Divine love come as close to us as our own heartbeat.
So God is fully present in Jesus. The letter to the Hebrews put it eloquently: “he is the reflection of God’s glory, the exact imprint of God’s very being.” Jesus us shows us what God is like:
Jesus is full of grace and truth, showing us the truth about God and the truth about ourselves.
When we are taken out of our familiar rhythms of life, as we have been during the pandemic, it can shake our sense of identity. Home working instead of workplace contacts. Shielding in place of meeting with neighbours and friends. Those familiar patterns of being and doing and belonging weren’t just routines. Actually they helped give a sense of meaning and purpose. And when that rug is whipped away from under our feet….. Hold on a moment. Who am I, again? What am I doing here?
O God, you have made us for yourself, writes Saint Augustine, and our hearts are restless until we rest in you. Our hearts are restless. That quest for inner peace, that peace that comes from securely knowing who we are and where we belong is the spiritual search, and it is as old as the human race itself. We are all in our own way seekers after truth, trying to figure who we are, where we come from, where we are heading.
And into our restless searching comes Jesus; coming to us at Christmas to tell us the truth about God and the truth about ourselves. Jesus is God’s saving love, embodied in a real human life. In Jesus God shares the aches and laughter, the frustration and wonder of being alive in God’s world. He is Emmanuel, God with us, with us on our searching, with us in our questions and with us in the unfinished business of life. He is with in his Spirit, with us as we pray, with us in the bread and wine. He is with us when two or three of us gather in his name. Jesus is the truth of God with us.
“To all who received him…. He gave power to become children of God”. Jesus comes to tell us the truth about ourselves: we are not defined primarily by who are parents are, not by race or genetic inheritance: rather we are in our essence children of God. Jesus the Word was in the beginning, and he is our beginning. The saving love of God in Jesus Christ gives us a new identity, a new belonging which is open and available to each one of us.
Our culture is very good at setting up some impossible ideal of who we should be – successful, desirable, talented, thin, whatever. Receiving our identity as a child of God liberates us from chasing this illusion. We are freed to be ourselves as we are and to become the person God would have us become. What a relief!
“To those who received him – he gave power to become children of God.” Christmas is a time when parents and children and wider families gather – and that can be difficult for those of us who have few family relationships. Or none. Knowing ourselves to be God’s beloved sons and daughters gives us a different kind of family tree, a fresh way to understand who we are, a new connectedness to one another. In Jesus Christ God is saying: we are family. Welcome home. You belong.
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. In this second pandemic Christmas with all its complications and changed arrangements may we hear that word of grace and truth spoken to each one of us.