Sermon preached at St Paul’s Athens on Christmas Day 2021: Isaiah 9, 2-7; Luke 2, 1-14

Fr Leonard Doolan

 

‘He is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’. (Is 9, 2-6).  ‘To you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, who is the messiah, the Lord’. (Luke 2, 11)

Both the prophet Isiah and St. Luke the Evangelist present to us what we might expect. The language, the vision, the expectation fits with the sort of power and authority that religious people want to see in and from God.

Then unexpectedly, ‘You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ (Luke 2, 11). The contrast is stark and should take us by complete surprise were it not all so familiar in the annual Christmas story.

The paradox at the heart of our faith is that God becomes flesh and face in a baby – Jesus, born in Bethlehem. ‘Holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us’ we say in the prayer called the Trisagion.

It is one enormous risk that God takes – perhaps even greater than the risk of creating man and woman. God’s glory has the setting of straw and smell; God’s eternity has time and place and person; God’s mightiness cries in the night and needs the love and care of a mum and dad. God’s immortality is moving immediately, relentlessly towards the mystery of the cross.

Even when we read the Christmas story, the story of the Passion of Jesus is never far away as the main sub-text of the child born in a manger. It doesn’t seem possible on Christmas Day, yet this is how it is.

If this paradox is so with God, then it is also with us – humanity made in his image. Our faith demands the dexterity of receiving the truths around the crib, but also the truths around the cross. These are not two different and separate truths, but part of one and the same truth, born in Jesus the Christ, who is the Light of the World.

It is he of whom Isaiah speaks when he says, ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them light has shined.’ (Is 9, 2).

And it is he of whom St. John speaks when he says ‘What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ (John 1, 4).

On this Christmas Day, as we celebrate the birth of our Saviour, we reflect on the world’s current condition; climate change, massive migration, virus infections and viral anxiety, tensions between nations, inequalities exposed, mistrust in political systems and political leadership. Any one of these would be enough, but altogether they leave us feeling fragile, and perhaps even humble.

So we can better understand the fragility, risk-full-ness, that God shared with us in the genesis of his glory in a baby’s birth – he is a God who touches us and our condition. This is a sure sign of hope – hope for the nations, hope for the peoples, hope for us, for you and me. ‘We have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’. May God in Christ bless you in this holy season.