Address : Its alright I’m not going to talk for long we are here to sing songs of peace and joy. I love the traditions of Christmas more and more the older I get, struggling with the carols service, going hopelessly overdrawn without having bought food or presents in the week before, tiptoeing drunk out of my children’s room and accidentally waking them up, you know the sort of thing…

Every Christmas-Eve I listen to the service of 9 carols and lessons at 3pm as the sun sets and as I hear another choirboy’s strangulated rendition of Once in royal Davids city I remember that Christmas begins as the sun goes down in so many European countries and feel that Christmas can really begin in earnest.

But a few years ago I accidentally listened to the 9 lessons as well as the strangulated Choirboys, and I realised that this orthodox Christian retelling of the story by way of such carefully selected readings no longer satisfied me: the narrative presented is exclusivist and reduces Hebrew scripture and therefore the whole of Judaism to merely a precursor to Christianity. And so I started devising my own versions of this same format and I could have repeated one of them today but I didn’t because I want to be honest to my feeling and to you my congregation: the story of Christmas must also be the story of Mary’s birthing day and not just Jesus Birthday;
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis, called the Magnificat “the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary hymn ever sung.” so why don’t we hear that? why don’t we hear the hymn of the woman at the centre of the story?

in her earthy and angry poem Kaitlin Shelter writes
the reality of the Birth of God
lies in the cracked nipples of a
14 year old
and not in the sermons of ministers
who say women
are too delicate
to lead.

Which is difficult to synchronise with being minister, and a man obviously; but that is partly what led me to try to speak about this right now: because the challenge for any honest religious person right now is to find harmony within paradox and unity within division.

Our culture has become divided and divisive because our emotional responses are being held to ransom by profit centred corporations who take shelter from responsibility for the chaos they’re wreaking in peoples emotional lives, and therefore the lived lives of whole cultures behind logarithms and social media platforms. And as a result in the middle of the greatest post-war crisis this country has faced we’ve fallen into name-calling and mudslinging. What is this? and what might help?

Theologian John Dominic Crossan writes well about the story of Jesus. Whether or not you’re a believer you should read him. One of the things he points out is the restlessly relentless way that Jesus challenges the orthodoxies of his day. He breaks religious categories which were the cultural limitations of his time and especially urges his listeners to understand that such categories are human constructs. He touches the unclean, mixes with the sick and deranged the damaged and the unrepentant. He crosses political divides too; acting to heal and help collaborators and colonial soldiers to the horror of literalists, academics and fundamentalists. He drinks with outsiders and eats with losers – in fact its a pity that his symbol is the crucifix because it could far more convincingly be the table, (and for Leonardo da Vinci that’s what it was). A table, complete with enemies and friends, betrayers, losers.

One of my favourite images of Judeo-Christian mythology is that image again from Isaiah of Emmanuel – God amongst us. Its a radical retelling of the ancient concept of God because it presupposes that God is among us not above us.

The re-tellings of the nativity story that Isaiah initiated by Matthew and Luke include a detail that is important. Mary gives birth amongst animals. Specifically an Ox and an Ass

This boundary breaker ‘comes by it honestly’ as my Irish friends put it, being born in a byre, in the somewhat bewildering company of an ox and an ass, creatures who would never be stabled together – in Judaism an Ox is considered a clean animal and an Ass unclean and in Jewish culture the two wouldn’t have been kept in the same space.

The ass and the ox are carefully positioned symbols then, taken again from the prophesy of Isaiah and symbolic of the joining of extremes, the union of the spiritual and corporal, the clean and unclean.

I don’t know about you but I’m tired. I didn’t anticipate spending a second Christmas in a pandemic. But what I’m most weary of is my emotions being manipulated by outside impulses inviting me to consider those I disagree with as bigots or fascists. I’m weary of being locked into an intensifying social spiral which considers the honestly held opinions of others as threats or even actual harms.

More than the confirmation of knowing that I’m right or that my truth is validated by tribal celebration, more than the intellectual approval of my own ego and the rationalist goal of individual, I yearn for community, for the weight of gravity, the animal carnality of being alive and conscious in a context that is participatory and unique. This moment of our lives is precious because it is passing – it is exhilarating to be human, surrounded in this living network of animal experience. But it is the eternal that anchors our experience into that which is greater than our individual selves.

The Christmas story is the story of the eternal entering into the momentary, and the implications of that paradoxical irruption. We feel it reverberate if we chose to in so many of the feelings and traditions of Christmas, the moment when breaking off from the party you open your front door at midnight and looking up see a single star, or when two children sit in semi darkness enraptured by the fairy lights on the Christmas tree. My prayer is that you choose to be aware of the eternal in the moments of your Christmas as they pass by in all their dizzying tumult, and remember Mary. When she calls out the her soul magnifies the Lord, a huge possibility is calling to us all, that it is for us – for all of us to magnify not to reduce the possible, but to magnify – to expand and enlarge what God can mean, to open up to possibility to be aware of potential and to allow in our own souls the eternal to enter in to the moment.