This is roughly the sermon I'll be preaching at Midnight Mass at Hodge Hill Church this year. I never usually finish preparing so early - but we're sending out our 'worship at home' packs on Wednesday (as we have done every week since March 2020), so I had to get my act together. I cried writing this, and I may cry delivering it. I don't often weave the stories of my nearest and dearest into my preaching, but this time it felt right to do so, in the spirit of the message itself. It was our first baby. Janey had
been pregnant about 18 weeks – some time after the first scan, not long until
the second. But something wasn’t quite right. Janey had been bleeding a lot, so
we phoned the hospital, and they called us in to check her over. I vividly
remember the short car journey together to Birmingham Women’s Hospital: mostly
in silence, but we both knew what we weren’t daring to say. I remember us going
into a small cubicle with the obstetric nurse, her friendly warning that the
gel would be cold on Janey’s tummy, the foetal heart monitor making contact,
and then the wait… the silence… the long, increasingly uncomfortable silence,
as we listened for any sound… I remember Janey and I looking at each other. I
remember realising I was holding my breath, for what felt like an eternity… and
then there it was: the quick, steady pulsing of a baby’s heart. The sound of a
tiny human life. Fragile life, and yet clearly more resilient than we had
feared.
13 years on, the day before the
end of a year marked by a global pandemic and recurring lockdowns. But it’s
snowing, so our family of 4 and some of our best friends are out hunting snowy
slopes for sledging fun. And then in an instant the screams of laughter turn
into shouts of fear, and in another instant I’m down the slope and bringing our
9-year-old daughter back to consciousness and holding her, desperately trying
to keep her awake. The waiting, this time, is for the paramedics, who take
close to an hour to find us. It feels much, much longer than that, and it is
terrifying. In the hours, days and weeks that follow, there is more waiting, as
immensely skilled medical professionals do their work of looking and watching
and treating and checking, and surrounding us with their care. And around the
four of us, and around the professionals, there is a wider circle, of family
and friends, neighbours and church community and a jumble of wider networks of
connection, with us, holding us, in love, and prayer, and practical care and
support. With us, holding us in our fragility, of body, mind and spirit; with
us, holding us and upholding us, and not letting us go.
* * *
All of us know something of that
fragility of body, mind and spirit, whether it’s become inescapable for us
through some of life’s more traumatic events, or through illness, or ageing. In
our relationships beyond our own families – in our church community, in our
community-building work in some of our neighbourhoods here, and in other places
too – loved ones have died, people who’ve been hugely active have had to step
back from things, relationships have come under strain or have broken,
much-valued aspects of community life have been put on hold, or have slipped
away into more and more distant memory, hoped-for developments have been
stalled, pretty much everything is smaller, and more difficult, and more
precarious, than we’d like it to be.
We know what fragility feels like,
how in a moment we can suddenly be plunged into it, how we can try our best to
defend against it, to build in strength and resilience, but discover, often
very slowly, that fragility is just a part of reality that stubbornly refuses
to go away. And as human beings together, we are learning, some of us very
slowly, that the world in which we all live and in which we are entangled and
inescapably interdependent, is also a fragile ecosystem that won’t just
endlessly tolerate our extreme activities of extraction, consumption, pollution
and destruction.
Fragility marks reality, and there
is no erasing or escaping it. But to tell ourselves we ‘just have to deal with
it’ would be too cold and hard. And unjust – because fragility is more
unavoidable part of daily life for some people than for others. While holding
it at bay is like holding back the tide, some people have the privilege of
higher and stronger flood defences against it. So we need a wisdom in dealing
with fragility that is rooted in justice: grounded in a hearing and
seeing of all God’s children, all God’s creatures – so that no cry of pain, or
fear, or loneliness, or hunger, or suffering goes unheard. We need a wisdom in
dealing with fragility that is patient: that knows that when we rush, we
break things – and people, and ourselves – and that fragility in all its forms
needs of us a slow, attentive carefulness. And more than either of these, we
need a wisdom in dealing with fragility that has love woven through it:
a love that can be tender with the small and the wounded and the hurting; a
love that can plumb our shared depths with empathy and compassion; a love that
hopes, believes, rejoices, fiercely, in the beauty and abundant possibility
that is to be found in the midst of the fragile; a love that is with us
in the midst of fragility, that waits and watches with us through the darkest
nights, a love that holds us and upholds us and will not let us go.
And that is what the good news of
Christmas is. The birth of Emmanuel: God-with-us. The Word and Wisdom of God
who spoke creation into being, who brought all things to life… becoming fragile
flesh and blood, becoming a fragile human baby, and in the process not becoming
any less God, but if anything becoming even more God. ‘The glory
as of a parent’s only child’: as if the glory of God is glimpsed most fully in
the fragility of creaturely flesh – that is exactly what the good news of
Christmas is. If God-in-Jesus is Saviour – which we claim he is – he doesn’t
save us from our fleshly fragility, but in it. He saves us by
being with us in our fragile flesh, with us in our tears and
brokenness and suffering and fear, and with us too as light: light that helps
us more clearly see God’s presence in our midst; light that helps us more
clearly see each other, as human and creature-kin; light that helps us more
clearly see, in our fleshly fragility, the beauty and hope and abundant, divine
possibility that are some of the meanings of the word glory.
* * *
And we have seen that
glory…
…in a youth worker patiently
journeying with a young woman over many years: being with her through the anxieties
of pregnancy and the steep learning curve of motherhood, as she discovers what
it means to be a ‘good-enough parent’; being with her as she begins to discover
that parenthood need not be the only thing that defines her, but that she can
find her own voice, find her confidence to travel, find her horizons widening –
even as far as the other side of the world… a youth worker who can journey with
her, and then cheer her on from a distance as she begins to journey with and
mentor others, as she has been journeyed with and mentored herself…
And we have seen that
glory…
…in a pantry volunteer who takes time
and care, every week, to greet the nervous, jumpy woman with a big smile and a
cheerful ‘hello!’, and who always stays alert to that day when the woman is
ready to sit down and talk, and share something of what’s going on in her life
right now; not to ‘fix’ her, but so that she feels heard, maybe for the
first time in a very long time – so that she knows that there is someone, maybe
many someones, who are with her in the struggles; that she’s not alone…
And we have seen that
glory…
…in those who will show up to the last-minute,
chaotic memorial service of someone they barely knew, but because they want to
support the friend who is grieving the most; and they know that being there, just
being there, will mean the world to him…
And we have seen that
glory…
…in those who will muck in
together to sweep up the glass from the break-in, for the first, and the
second, and the third time, and turn it from a wearing attack into an opportunity
for laughter, and camaraderie, and supporting those who are feeling down, and
remembering what faith and hope and love look like…
And we have seen that
glory…
…in grabbing a spade and getting
stuck in to some hard ground, side by side with neighbours from half a dozen
different countries, from toddlers to pensioners, to turn a neglected communal
garden into a space of beauty, a space for play and rest and friendship…
And we have seen that
glory…
…in coming together to sing carols
outside the house of someone who’s finding it increasingly difficult to get out
beyond her own front door, but who knows that she’s still part of a community
of love and care and prayer, and that even when we’re separated, and even when
that separation hurts on both sides, we are longing and loving and praying together,
with her prayers as valued as any others…
And we have seen that
glory…
…in the midst of a protest against
the global catastrophe that is climate change, calling for radical, courageous
change from governments as well as individuals… walking with a few banners through
central Birmingham, but joining in solidarity with walkers and banners and
voices from across the global South, who are already measuring the effects of
climate change in terms of land and lives lost forever…
And we have seen that
glory…
…in a hospital chaplain sitting
quietly with an anxious dad, while their daughter is in surgery; a dad suddenly,
unexpectedly thrown by the moment the general anaesthetic made his child’s eyes
close as if they might never again wake up; a chaplain with the gift of just
being there in the right place at the right time, and knowing what to say, and
when he needs to not say anything at all…
And we have seen that
glory…
The glory of God-with-us,
where the word ‘God’ is important (obviously), and the word ‘us’ is important
too – but so is the small, apparently insignificant word ‘with’. ‘With’ is the
good news of Christmas. ‘With’ is what we’ve been waiting for through Advent,
what we’ve glimpsed by candle-light in Advent’s stories, what we’ve whispered
and prayed and sung every time the words “O come…” have passed our lips.
“Rejoice, favoured one! The Most
High God is with you,” said the angel Gabriel to Mary.
It is with her cousin,
Elizabeth, that the frightened Mary finds sanctuary for the early months of her
pregnancy, as together they began to make sense of the new life that was
stirring inside them.
For Joseph, it is staying with
Mary, even though her child is not his, that is his God-given calling.
And now, God-with-us, full
of grace and truth and radiant with glory, comes to be with us in an animal
feeding trough in an irrelevant little town in an occupied country on the edge
of the Roman Empire…
…and God-with-us, full of grace
and truth and radiant with glory, comes to be with us in the small and fragile,
the messy and chaotic, the overlooked and ground-down, the weary and tearful,
in our time, in our places, in our communities, in our
homes, in our hearts.
And if our eyes are open enough,
if the waiting of our Advent – however long this Advent might have been – has helped
develop our night vision, helped us see even when it’s really dark, then we
might just catch a glimpse of the glory of God-with-us – in each other, in our
midst, in the world, in ourselves – tonight, and in the days and nights to
come.
“O come to us, abide with
us, our Lord Emmanuel.”
