Sermon Christmas Day 2023

Now, I need some room, some leeway. this morning. Perhaps, and please, you might be patient? I do know it is Christmas Day; I am a priest. I have been singing Hark the Herald Angels for a month. I really know it is Christmas. I know it is Christmas and that you have come here for a baby in a manger and a star in the sky. I promise that we will get there, a baby, a manger, shepherds and kings. But not yet. You see there is more to the story than we glimpse on a Christmas card. So now we must start somewhere else entirely. Christmas is coming, but, please, bear with me.

Picture high summer, a hot day in an English village, thatched cottages, pretty as a picture. I am walking with an old friend and talking about poetry. It is a bit precious I know, but it is what a dean does on a day off. I tell my friend I have just read a very odd poem called The Emperor of Ice Cream. And he does not miss a beat, he starts to recite it—he knows a lot of poetry and, in truth, he enjoys a bit of theatre. So, quite loudly he begins,

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

I did tell you it is an odd poem. It is seriously peculiar. These words rush ahead of you, you cannot keep up. We will hurry on. The poem ends,

Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I did not explain, and I should have done, that on this extremely hot day, in an English village, the two of us had just had a very good lunch. We were enthusiastic. I only realised just how enthusiastic we were when the young woman pushing a baby, in a buggy, towards us suddenly decided she would be happier on the other side of the street. I remember her scuttling aside, I rather hope she has forgotten me and forgotten The Emperor of Ice Cream.

Feeling slightly shifty I have gone back to that poem and that day to make appoint about the reading we have just heard. The great Christmas gospel ‘In the beginning was the Word’ that too is strange poetry rushing ahead of us. The anxious might well get out of the way. We have come to the place where words can barely take the strain, where images are startling and hardly hold the truth we want to speak.

John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s long ago, wrote about ‘In the beginning was the Word’ and called it thunder, ‘universal thunder’.

… the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. (John 1: 1–3)

This is not the way we talk over the kitchen table; it is more like the Emperor of Ice Cream. Yet, this really is John telling us about a baby and a manger and a star. It is exactly the same story. It is about a birth—a beginning—‘In the beginning was the Word’, ‘He was in the beginning’. But this birth is unlike anything and the words need to be rare and fine.

Matthew tells the story and he has a list:

Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob… (Matthew 1: 1–2)

A long list, a whole heap of begetting. It is nothing like poetry. It is genealogy and history—all the way back to Abraham. Luke has another list and that is not poetry either, but Luke goes right back to Adam. Which is a lot of history.

John, well John takes a flying leap right over Adam, back before the birth of planets and stars. In the beginning, in the very beginning, in the beginning there was just God and the Word that was God. It is what poetry can do. We are not just talking about a baby in Bethlehem and a dark night long ago. We are talking about everything, everywhere, and forever, from the very beginning, out from that deep darkness before there was any light at all.

When John writes about the birth in the Bethlehem, the baby and the manger. He sees far and long. Luke looked and thought that a different kind of peace became possible that day. That is politics. Matthew looked and thought that God had proved that he kept his promises. That is faith. John sees light and dark; he sees all hope and all despair. He says that all that nothing can defeat the life of Christ. The dark cannot overcome, nor comprehend the light of Christ.

Then Luke and Matthew summon witnesses, to see this thing that takes place in Bethlehem. Luke has shepherds, Matthew has kings or magi. John summons up John the Baptist who will witness to the light, but rushes on to say this light is for us all, we are all invited to see and speak. This great drum roll of theological verse visits the child born in Bethlehem and comes away with words that say what we did not expect, more than they have a right to say. More than history, more than our prayers, more than we can know.

I still think that poem about The Emperor of Ice Cream is odd. I am quote sure it does not set out to explain anything, but I do go back to it and remember that hot afternoon when the world was just briefly a bit richer and brighter. That is where John takes us. As we go to our homes and to noisy families, or to quiet places, where we will be surrounded by whatever routines we have this day, as the day darkens and the curtains get drawn, we should hear. The glory of God has come close today—and it abides, the light burns and the dark cannot overcome or comprehend. The story is told and the witnesses see and speak. In Israel and in Gaza, in Ukraine, in hospital wards and care homes, wherever there is hunger or hopelessness that distant thunder announces that God has begun amongst us. The card on the mantlepiece, the figures at the crib seem like an invitation to peer in. But in truth this gospel explodes up and down the years. In the words of another poet:

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After…

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.