On Christmas morning the church gives us a rousing challenge. The whole world seems to be focused on Christmas trees and Christmas gifts and Christmas breakfast. If most people are looking back at all this morning they are thinking of their memories of Christmas past. There is nostalgia in the air. Time to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, or A Charlie Brown Christmas. In this time we may be looking back to old family recipes, old family photos, old ways of celebrating. Victorian decorations. Medieval carols. Some of us are old enough to feel nostalgia for the nostalgic way we used to feel.
We might even say that one function Christmas serves for us is to be a storehouse of memory. There’s something heightened about Christmas that makes us want to look back, and our Christmas season becomes an almost overwhelming succession of stuff from the past: Sinatra records and that jello salad we always had and Charles Dickens and that ancient hymn we love. It’s striking how we bring up and recycle bits of the past at this time of year, implicitly challenging the present moment to live up to our expectations.
So yes, we look back on Christmas, but not usually all the way back. We might focus on the first Christmas, to be sure. Back past Sinatra and Scrooge and going a-wassailing we may see the baby in the manger, the star in the sky, the mother wondering and the angels rejoicing.
But it’s a challenge, on a morning like Christmas, to go all the way back. All the way back to the beginning, where John’s Gospel starts us off: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” It’s not the same thing as nostalgia. It feels really different. There is no sentimental version of this story. There is a great light, but it has a different quality than the warm glow we expect at this time of year.
Yes, we look all the way back, this morning, all the way back to the creation where Jesus is present to and in the Father, and all things come into being through him. Without him not one thing came into being. We are guided by John’s Gospel to see Christmas as a feast of the beginning of all things. We aren’t being asked this morning to do something old-fashioned for the holidays; we are being asked to ground ourselves in Jesus, way back at the origin of all that is.
Back at the source, where the light comes into the world. The true light that enlightens everyone. The light that enlightens us. Even now, all the way back from the beginning.
What do we learn by going all the way back to the beginning? That the light shines in darkness, but darkness never overcomes it. And that we are witnesses to that light, in the great tradition of John the Baptist. We ourselves are not that light but we have been given power by God to be children of God, born of God. We ourselves have seen his glory. Jesus is the only-begotten Son, but we are nevertheless in some way God’s children, testifying to that great light.
Our Christmas celebration takes the long, long view. Family traditions and the great cultural storehouse of memory that we call “the Christmas season” glow for Christians in a different light than they do for the rest of the world we’re celebrating with. For us the cherished past is actually just about one thing. It’s about the way that Jesus, the light, has always been shining in darkness, and darkness has never overcome it.
Think about it: nostalgia usually has us wishing or imagining that we lived in a different time and place, in Merry Old England or in A Country Christmas. There is a quiet preference for something we are not. There is an element of fantasy in our Christmas celebrations. The good times were back then. But John’s Gospel is clear-eyed about the past. John wants us to see all the way back so that we know where we really come from, and where we are going, and what’s happening in the present moment.
We come from Jesus, without whom nothing was made. Not one thing came into being without him. It’s daunting to contemplate but let’s try it this way: not one thing was made without God’s determination to be with us, present in all of creation. Not one thing was made without God identifying with it, as family. Not one thing was made to exist in isolation from God or in the ache of God’s absence or in the abandonment of a godless world. That light of God with us has always been shining for us.
That’s the light in which we see all things when we testify. God’s determination to be with us, to become one of us in the person of his Son, to live and die with us and to be born of a human mother in a lowly stable and to know cold and loneliness and misery. This is the logic of creation itself, it seems. And we see it. The light shining in darkness from the beginning is God with us, Emmanuel, Jesus.
What has come into being in Jesus is life, life as one with God, and the life is the light of all humanity. So we come from God’s eternal desire to be with us. And we see that light shining, in the stable and in the present moment.
Yes, the present moment is troubling and dark. Yes, I’m planning on hot coco and my favorite sentimental music later this afternoon. Yes, the manger scene on our piano is sweet and lovely and the Christmas decorations are merry and bright. But I’m hoping that for a moment this Christmas I will look on all of it in that more ancient light. The light that shines from the beginning of all things, without which not one thing came into being. Not me, not you.
That light is like a vast embrace from the depths of the unknown. There is plenty of room in that light, in that embrace. We have all the room in the world for nostalgia and dreams, for loneliness and sorrow. There is plenty of room in God’s creation for Christmas to be just another day if that’s what we need it to be this year. Plenty of room for the truth about what needs to change. Room for rest and hope and kindness. For giving and receiving. Room for that sacred image of the child in the manger, God who found no room in the inn.
Whatever this Christmas has brought to you, wherever you wish you were, whatever you hope for, I pray that the more ancient light will be visible to you. And that you, a radiant child of God, will testify to that light without which not one thing came into being.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
25 December 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia