Sermon: On Christmas Day

We had come our separate ways /Gathering like players on a stage

With voices that were muffled, low, /As though a blanket had been thrown

Our bodies, slow, / For bone and muscle needed testing out

Repositioning / Across this strange new flow.

A birth was quietly transforming roles /Adjusting lives.                 

We caught it in a gesture, chance remark, / Each others' eyes:

I'm glad now that I went / And took my place among them all.

Though as I knelt / Such clarity shone through the infant face

Such marked intent  / That glancing round, it seemed we had been sent. 

That poem was written by a friend for this year's family Christmas card.  It captures beautifully how it might have been at the crib when news of the birth had spread and the shepherds came to see what had come to pass.  Or is it the magi?  Or even the angels, converging at the place where heaven touched earth?  ‘Gathering like players on a stage', as if not quite sure what kind of drama this would be and what was required of them - for what performers and what audience can ever know in advance how it will play out in the end?  But the low, muffled voices - tentative and unsure, I think, rather than respectful - undergo what turns out to be truly life-changing.  ‘A birth was quietly transforming roles, adjusting lives'.  Kneeling seems the only possible response to what is in the child's face, ‘such clarity... such marked intent'.  And that act gives meaning to this scene that is both ordinary yet extraordinary: ‘it seemed we had been sent'. 

But could we transfer the scene from Bethlehem two thousand years ago into our own age?  Could those who have come their ‘separate ways' be our contemporaries, or ourselves, gathering in front of a 21^st century crib in a market square or a living room or a church?  Can today's cribs still have the power to create a ‘strange new flow' in the hearts and lives of human beings?  And can that figure of the Bambino, whether in wood or alabaster or papier maché or even plastic still touch and move us with its ‘intent' and ‘clarity' so that even if we came across it by chance, we would have to stay awhile, linger in its presence, find that we are not after all kneeling here by accident, for in catching the eyes of others might we realise that we are being caught by the eyes of Jesus? 

The Christmas crib goes back to the 13^th century when Saint Francis set up the first praesepio or nativity scene at a hillside cave at Grecio in northern Italy. His biographer St Bonaventure says:  ‘To excite the villagers to commemorate the nativity of the Infant Jesus with devotion, Francis prepared a manger, and brought hay, and an ox and an ass to the place appointed. The brethren were summoned, the people ran together, the forest resounded with their voices, and that holy night was made glorious by many bright lights and psalms of praise. The man of God stood before the manger full of devotion, bathed in tears and radiant with joy and chanted the holy gospel. Then he preached to the people of the nativity of the poor King; and because he could not utter his name for the tenderness of his love, he called him the Babe of Bethlehem.  A soldier said that he saw an Infant marvellously beautiful, sleeping in the manger, whom Francis embraced with both his arms as if he would awake him from sleep.' 

For St Francis the crib is iconic, an image in a physical space that embraces the eternal; it draws you into its own life and leads you into a realm beyond, a kind of sacrament of the incarnation where, as we meditate on it, we glimpse the ineffable mystery of God made man. We glimpse it, for its infinite depths are beyond our grasp. Francis intended that the crib should lead people into a new and deeper awareness of how wonderful it is that the divine should enter this world and share our life as Immanuel, God with us.  In Germany during Advent, every city and town has its Christmas fair where you can drink mulled wine and enjoy sweetmeats and buy exquisite gifts and decorations that so often make our English Christmas in public places look shallow and kitschy as if we cannot give it the effort it needs to be truly beautiful.  At the heart of the buying and selling you come to a life-sized crib, lovingly adorned for the festival.  They call it Christkindlmarkt, the Christ-child market.  It's as if the Holy Child himself has come to bless this festive time, be present at our merrymaking, call us back to the true source of our happiness and joy.  And who is to say that these iconic images of birth are not each day ‘quietly transforming roles' with the healing ‘clarity' of the Infant's face and his ‘marked intent' of love?  

Here in Durham we have our own much-loved nativity. It was made for the Cathedral by Michael Doyle, a pitman all his life who came from Houghton le Spring.  He is shown on the Lambton Lodge miners' banner as an alderman, next to Hugh Gaitskell. Late in life he discovered a flair for woodcarving and created the crib figures in the 1970s.  The beauty of his nativity is not only the craftsmanship and the tenderness he has expressed in the faces of his figures, but also the way in which he has he sensitively incorporates references to Durham's mining traditions into the carvings. By the ox stands a pit pony complete with harness. The Holy Child lies not in a manger but in a ‘choppie box' such as the pit ponies fed from underground. The innkeeper, who has dropped down on to one knee as he gazes reverently at the Infant is dressed as a miner with lamp, and water-bottle in his pocket, and his faithful whippet at his feet.  It is quintessentially Durham.

Like St Francis's, our crib is iconic, telling not only about what took place then but what takes place now as we meet the infant Jesus and his grace and truth gets to work on us like a woodcarver, ‘adjusting our lives', sculpting their raw material in ways so unexpected that our human roles are truly ‘transformed'.  It speaks into our ordinary days, our work, our relationships, our joy, our pain.  If these are not touched by Christmas, then it has not yet become real for us.  For this pitman's nativity tells how the truth of this day is deeper than we can imagine. Its images mined from the earth's depths seem to say that there is nowhere that is beyond the reach of incarnation.  ‘If I climb up to heaven thou art there; if I go down to hell thou are there also.'  And to think of miners buried each day beneath the earth and emerging at the end of their shift is an evocative image of the death and resurrection of this Infant who the gospels say must suffer, and die and be raised the third day.   This year's Christmas cards yielded a poem from another friend who had visited Durham and been touched by our miner's crib.  The simplicity of her poem moved me: it seems to gather up so much of this season's poignant mix of tenderness and longing and the promise of redemption:

The rose window gleams / far off like hope. / In the pony's choppie box / a bairn sleeps, carved / By a man who knew / each day is a burial
and perhaps a resurrection.   

(Matthew 1.18-end)