I ‘ve always loved Christmas and I succumbed to the traditions of the high-church at Christmas time; I loved Midnight-Mass (when I attended it for the first time in London in my 30’s) and I still love the Nine Carols and Readings service from Kings college chapel in Cambridge that is broadcast at 3.00 pm every Christmas Eve by the BBC in her favourite role as ‘Auntie’ to a nation that is definitely CofE, but recently something changed.

I got more religious but that’s a subject for another time…

This Christmas I just couldn’t do another service mis-appropriating the words of Isaiah, to make it seem as if the whole of the Hebrew Bible is just a forerunner of the Christian story, as the Nine Lessons and Carols service does, but at the same time I can’t deny the hold of the Christian story on my heart.

Recently historians have begun to push back against the notion, repeated every Christmas, that Christmas is really a pagan celebration in disguise, now all serious  historians point out that it isn’t the case that Christianity appropriated Pagan traditions, Christmas in Britain, beginning in the 4th century, pre-dates the pagan rituals that are often cited, and there is just no evidence to suggest that any of the weird Christmas rituals we keep are pagan at all, instead it is the case that Christianity has always been mysterious and strange, Christianity in Britain has always contained within itself the intense and physical narratives of transformation, and of the power and tragedy of human life in all its animal reality…

This week one of our amazing social action groups held their Christmas party not fundraising; just supporting, accompanying, befriending – as usual. Towards the end of the party one of the organisers asked me to speak – which is always a bit embarrassing as I never know what to say – what I did say was how good it was that we are still here after 8 years of meeting at Mill Hill – I reminisced that when we started we weren’t sure if there would be enough service users, we volunteers might have outnumbered the guests. Since then literally thousands of refugees and asylum seekers have visited over the years, up to a hundred each week, week in week out. This reminded me that every initiative goes through this ‘host stress’: a time of concern when you worry that it won’t work, it won’t be enough, that my bit, the bit I bring, won’t be sufficient.

And it reminded me that of course not all initiatives work out so well, some fall by the way, probably most of them, infact almost all of them…

And later when I was thinking about it I realised what I should have said, too late: as so often happens you think of the perfect response days later…

I should have told them about the time when another group got started:

A group wanted to do a free hot-meal for folks who live outside and we let them use the kitchen in the Priestley Hall. And they were young, very well intentioned, but very inexperienced and, being English, they were very hesitant and shy – you know as English people often are (it’s an odd thing that a people who invade countries far away and systematically remove all their material wealth and enslave the population are also chronically shy but there it is). One thing I’ve noticed from all my experience of these groups is that a very effective way of covering up your shyness, which is of course a kind of anxiety, is to adopt a role, to give yourself a kind of ‘mask’ I suppose. Anyway, they set up the tables and chairs and they set to cooking the food in the kitchen while I was busy upstairs, and when I came back they had set up a big table by the serving hatch in the Hall and they’d got the hot food on it and they were all standing behind the tables, and they all had serving aprons on and one had a big ladle and one had oven gloves on and one had the plates, and they stood behind the table, waiting for people to come in so they could serve them. and I realised that this wasn’t going to work.

I don’t usually intervene when it’s not my place to but this time I said: “Please let me make a suggestion and if it doesn’t work you can do it your way next time, but let me suggest a different way to do this, this time:” I said take off the aprons, and put down the tools, and let people serve themselves. And forget your role, forget being a do-gooder, forget volunteering, and when you open the doors get in the queue, instead and if the food is actually any good, eat some, but either way sit down at a table, and make people feel welcome to talk, and listen to them. And that’s what we did. And that approach came to characterise that group, I guess we did that every month for a few years, from 2016 – 2018 every first Thursday, so for about three years I suppose. And it was transformational for everyone involved in all sorts of ways, but mostly because people got heard. People came in and had a chance to eat together with people they’d never otherwise have met.

There are other religions that are wondrous and strange, and find ways to honour the fabulous and the extraordinary but it seems to me that the exact genius of Christianity is the idea that God could experience life on a human level, that God could experience a human perspective, and not be extraordinary or magical but be persecuted and tragic and ultimately broken.

The very idea of this is wonderful I think and its completely original, and its unique to Christianity.

I very often say that it is so exceptional to come into this grand Gothic chapel when it is empty.

Except for you youself of course, or how would you have the experience?

But a few nights ago, as I was leaving – I must have been overtired I think because I turned around and I felt overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with something like a kind of joy. What an amazing place! and I stopped and I said a kind of prayer right here in that moment – like an embarrassed fool stammering his British emotions, I just said “Thank-you”, probably more loudly than I meant to do – in full voice – and in full awareness of what I was saying and to whom, I said “Thank you”.

And it struck me, when I began thinking again, it struck me, that when I said ‘Thank you’ like that, in that way – as you might thank a person, what I felt, was the same kind of excitement and joy that you get from the feeling of being in love.

When Jesus was asked ‘which is the greatest commandment’ he said: Love God with all your heart. but it never struck me before that he meant that would feel like being in love.

Of course I now remember and see what is so wise about Meister Eckhardt’s saying:

“If you only ever say one prayer and that prayer is Thank You – it will have been enough.”

 I hope that is true.

There is an idea that is developed by Jean Luc Marion a great famous french intellectual that refers to the idea of the icon. He says that the difference between an Icon and an Idol is that an idol is something you look upon – the look you bestow on an idol stops at the object, and goes no further. That object could be something amazing, something dazzling, but it will be just that, some thing, and that thing whatever it is may be unreachable, unattainable – so it will make you want to attain it, that is an idol’s power, to make you feel something lacking, something that you will want but never really achieve – so it will always provoke an unsatisfiable urge. A desire. It could be a desire that can drive you a long way; after your first Rolls Royce you’ll want a newer one, a bigger one, 17 gold ones…

but an icon is different.

An icon allows you to see something beyond the image presented, it is not only that, like a mirror, the icon reflects you and your experience, but more – like a window it allows you to look and keep on seeing something beyond. Like a window of the spirit, a window through …

The most powerful example of such an Icon I know is this picture called ‘Jesus blessing the world’ by El Greco.

The actual painting is very small not much bigger than a postcard. It was probably painted to hang in a study or a monastic cell. Look at the rough brush strokes that represent the halo. Look at the eyes:

I believe our experience of Christmas is like an icon, that more than the image it represents it allows us to see something beyond our own experience.

This is a picture I took at the warehouse we set up in 2015 to collect equipment for refugees, there was all this stuff in black bags, clothing, equipment stored in the cold, and I suddenly saw this:

another kind of icon i think and I think now that Jesus is an icon of God, just as he is an icon of humanity.

The point Jesus most often makes in all of the gospel accounts is that the Kingdom of God is available to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

He doesn’t say it is revealed to those who believe the right thing, sign up to the right religion or behave in the right way. he says “let those who have eyes – see”.

The parables he teaches, and the parable of his own birth that his disciples told, are parables of our own capability to understand metaphorical ideas, to receive the message in our own understanding, to nurture meaning and allow it to mature…

The nativity doesn’t mean anything if we aren’t prepared to be changed by it. Just as Meister Eckhardt said.

For us in the 21st century it means to look through the tradition, and the traditional, not just disregarding it, making it invisible, as a generation before us has done, but seeing with it, using the tradition as an icon to transform, to create change, hope, and Joy…