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About 15 years ago now, it was Christmas  and I was seated in the historic Durham Cathedral. My family is from the UK. I was spending Christmas that year in northeast England where my relatives have lived and worked for generations. I sat that night with my grandmother on one side and my uncle on the other. I remember looking around, seeing these huge columns, a hallmark of gothic architecture. I remember listening to the choir; they sounded like angels. I remember feeling the warmth of the entire church bathed in candlelight. 

I remember being totally caught up in the grandeur of it all when suddenly there was someone tugging on the sleeve of my sweater. It was my grandmother. 

“Helen,” she said.

“Helen!” she said, again.

“What time should we put on the yorkshire pudding?”

Maybe you, too, have had the experience of being torn from the utterly sublime to the totally mundane? Maybe it’s having a much needed lie-in on Christmas only to be woken by little ones’ plodding down the hallway? Maybe it’s those times when you’ve just been out to the symphony, or a really great concert, or had a really good meal, and you get into your car and face bumper to bumper traffic all the way home? 

The bible story for Christmas Eve this year comes from the gospel of John. It starts, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It’s not the typical nativity story. It’s not the one we usually hear with the angels and the shepherds, and Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus in the manger. It’s the sublime version. It’s the one that talks about light and darkness not in mundane, everyday terms, but in these really big, abstract terms like we would talk about the light and darkness of black holes or stars. 

One of my pet peeves is when preachers say that the nativity story is written only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, that John doesn’t really talk about Jesus’ birth. This evening’s reading from the gospel of John is very much about Jesus’ birth. It’s the telling of the nativity story that brings the grand Creation story from the book of Genesis, the birth story of the universe, into the story we know so well of a seemingly insignificant baby born in Bethlehem. 

Some fun facts about the Gospel of John and the Book of Genesis—you can impress your families with these when you go home tonight:

Both the gospel of John and the book of Genesis start out with, “In the beginning” (In the beginning was the Word . . . In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth . . .)

Both talk about light and darkness (In the gospel of John: The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it . . . In Genesis: Darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’ . . .)

Both have this expansive, inclusive vision of who gets to have a relationship with God, who gets to experience this other-worldly light which shines in the darkness (John says, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” . . . Genesis 2 begins, “these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. . . .”

These two stories have a lot in common, which tells us that God becoming human is no small thing. It’s a matter of universal importance, of global, timeless significance. This is a God, a Creator who literally has skin in the game. The Creator of the heavens and the earth, of light and darkness, this same Creator, comes into the world in a tiny, ordinary baby called Jesus. God the abstract made manifest.

We know, don’t we, that sometimes we can’t really understand something until we’ve experienced it ourselves? We might imagine what it would be like to be a parent or a grandparent, or to live in another country or to be finally finishing those final exams. We might imagine what it would be like to be homeless or unemployed or living in a war-torn country. We can imagine what any of these things might be like, but it’s not until they actually become a reality, something we’re living every day that we truly come to understand them. 

And, I think that’s what God’s like, actually. The God behind the Christmas story is the God who wanted to know what it was like, really, to be human, to participate fully in the creation they had made, to know what it’s like to be born of a human mother, to be raised in a politically unstable and fragile world, to know what it’s like to face hardship and loss, what it’s like to experience joy, forgiveness, kindness, what it’s like to journey towards death while hoping for resurrection, for something on the other side of it all.

There’s a wonderful quote from one of the great ancestors of the Christian faith, a saint named Athanasius. He wrote, “God became human, that we might become God.” He was riffing off a passage in the Bible where it talks about becoming participants in the divine nature. What he means is not that we would try to be God—we know what happens when people consider themselves or others as though they were God—what he means is that, even as we go about our daily lives, the sublime, the divine is right there with us. This human existence isn’t only or ultimately something mundane; it is shot through with something much bigger.

One of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his poems he writes “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil, like the ooze of oil, crushed.” I love that Hopkins would use ordinary household images like tinfoil and olive oil to describe the grandeur of God.

My prayer for you this Christmas is that you would find somewhere in your life where your heart can be lifted, even if only for a little while, from the heaviness and maybe sometimes the despair of the very real, very difficult parts of life and the fragile world we find ourselves in. I pray that in that place you would come to encounter the God who cares deeply for you and for others in ways that sometimes lie beyond what we can imagine ourselves. 

I pray also that, in those moments when you are torn from ecstasy to humanity, from the sublime to the mundane, to the reality of what’s in front of you, that you would know that you are not alone, that you’re in the very good company of a child named Jesus, who came from heaven to earth, to dwell among people, who was full of grace and truth.

Amen.