Sermon preached at the First Eucharist of Christmas 2023

It’s a very particular sound-world. At Christmas, in the villages surrounding Rome, you can sometimes still hear the distinctive pipes of the pifferari; traditional musical instruments played, often beneath an image of the Virgin and Child, which remind us of the shepherds who were the first pilgrims to the infant Christ. Travellers in Italy during the 18^th and 19^th centuries frequently reported encounters with these rural musicians coming into Rome from the hills, bringing with them their aural reminder that the earliest witnesses of Jesus’s birth were those watching in the fields, quietly alert to what was going on at the heart of the night.

If those 18^th and 19^th century Grand Tourists had gone to Midnight Mass, they would have heard something else very particular to this holy night. The Christmas Proclamation was chanted across Catholic Christendom, a text which placed Christ’s birth in relation not only to the events of salvation history recorded in the Bible, but also to notable events in the Greek and Roman world. Here is a snapshot:

The 25^th of December…

In the year, from the creation of the world, when in the beginning God created Heaven and earth, five thousand one hundred and ninety-nine (years);
from the flood, two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven;
from the anointing of King David, one thousand and thirty-two;
in the sixty-fifth week, according to the prophecy of Daniel;
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad;
in the year seven hundred and fifty-two from the founding of the city of Rome;
in the forty-second year of the empire of (Caesar) Augustus,
when the whole world was at peace… Jesus Christ, eternal God, and Son of the eternal Father, desirous to sanctify the world by His most merciful coming, having been conceived of the Holy Ghost, and nine months having elapsed since His conception, is born in Bethlehem of Judea, having become Man of the Virgin Mary.

The basic meaning behind this text is straightforward. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is not a myth. It is an event of real history, witnessed by real people. It is a specific moment, which stands in relationship to other moments of the world’s life; in fact, in that Christmas Proclamation, it is the event which crowns all other events. But unlike the empire of Caesar Augustus, or the Olympiad – the Olympic Games to which the text refers – this moment occurred unnoticed by most. Hidden from view; in its humility, its poverty, it is yet the event upon which the world’s salvation hinges. The artist and poet Caryll Houselander reflected,

He chooses to give himself to the world so humbly that none,
except perhaps His mother, could have guessed that He was the giver at all.

No fanfare apart from that proclamation of angels to shepherds, crossing the divide between heaven and earth to announce a message which would gather both together in a perpetual embrace. Forever, now, the seeds of the extraordinary will be in the ordinary, the miracle of redemptive love known in the humdrum, the strength which created all things seen in the vulnerability of a child. This raising of earth to heaven was an event only recognised at first by a few because of its very ordinariness. But those shepherds with eyes to see noticed the quiet fulfilment of the promises to Israel, they saw the successor of King David born in David’s own city, they recognised the one who would fulfil the world’s hopes. And all of this, in a scene of particular history, in a particular place, at a particular time, in some ways so unremarkable that by its very lack of force or dominance, tells us the eternal truth about God’s ways with the world. Christ doesn’t impose himself, force his way in, but enters the world like everyone else, so that this can be a scene recognisable to any home and in any age.

800 years ago, St Francis of Assisi tried to convey the same message through a medium with which we are all now very familiar. At the small town of Greccio, Francis created what is acclaimed as the first Christmas Crib made out of living creatures; a real donkey, an ox, straw, a child, all housed in a local cave, in the middle of Italy. According to the medieval source the Fonti Francescane, “Greccio has become like a new Bethlehem,” said St Francis. Wherever our hearts connect with this most profound truth of God With Us, that is our holy ground, its message as strong and distinctive as the pipes of the pifferari, taking us to the Holy Family and to the shepherds who recognise them, huddled together in Bethlehem, encouraging us to fall to our knees in adoration.

Tonight in Bethlehem, things are rather different. This year, the crib in the Lutheran Church is not made of straw and wood, but of broken breeze blocks and concrete, on which rests a fragile image of the infant Jesus. At the end of 2023, Gaza’s tiny Christian community has been decimated. Christians in the West Bank, already a minority, fear a further loss of livelihood as tourism continues to collapse. The angels’ song of peace continues to echo around those skies, but too few have ears to hear that song: hostage-taking, indiscriminate attack, mass bombardment, seemingly endless cycles of revenge, not just in Israel and Palestine, but across the world in conflicts of which we know little, as well as in those which regularly pepper our news-feeds. On the night in which God became human, how we should recall the basic implications of what that common humanity means. Father Rami, the parish priest of St Catherine’s Church in Bethlehem said a few days ago, “We pray each day for Gaza and for the victims of the war on both sides,” he said. “Israelis, Palestinians; we are all human, we are all the children of God.” It is in the vulnerability of human flesh that this world has encountered God, and it is only through learning that all our narratives, all our hopes, are rooted in this terrifyingly vulnerable moment in human history, the birth of Jesus Christ, that we can learn to love again.

St Luke’s Gospel surely gives us a certain amount of bustle and fanfare for this birth, but that does not detract from the intimacy of the scene. In fact, in some ways, these features interpret one another. Somehow this birth is both deeply private and hugely public. This is the most extraordinarily mysterious and mystical work, at the very edges of language and explanation, as the Lord of all time gives himself fully into a human life. And all in this particular land of Bethlehem, the city of the great King David, which would become a broken battleground at the heart of some of the most challenging political questions of history. Christ’s incarnation was not for this country or that country. This culture or that. Not a trump card to be marshalled into any particular argument beyond the justice and peace which Christ came to bring, and the human dignity to which his birth points us so directly. This infant child, in his vulnerability and his divinity, is God With Us, promising nothing more and nothing less than a loving and just judgement on all our attempts to extinguish his light.  

Our vision has become so clouded. But here in this Eucharist, we approach our Bethlehem, in order to see again, to notice what God is doing in Christ. Bethlehem resonates for us here, now, as we allow the mystery of God With Us to form us. Laurie Lee’s poem Twelfth Night puts it beautifully:

For men with shepherd's eyes there are
Signs in the dark, the turning stars,
The lamb's returning time.

Out of this utter death he's born again,
His birth our saviour;
From terror's equinox he climbs and grows,
Drawing his finger's light across our blood—
The sun of heaven, and the son of God.

Let this Eucharist be our Bethlehem, our faith refreshed, beholding our incarnate Lord and one another, with shepherds’ eyes.