Isn’t this wonder enough?
Sermon on Christmas Day 2020 at the Church of the Holy Trinity, in the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s order of service is adapted for the pandemic, and includes a poem in addition to the Old Testament Reading and the Holy Gospel. The order of service can be found here.
Words from the end of Tanya Runyan’s poem this morning: “Isn’t this wonder enough / that yesterday he was inside me, / and now he nuzzles next to my heart? / That he wraps his hand around / my finger and holds on.”
“Isn’t this wonder enough?”
In 1948, a radio station in the United States ended a series of interviews with various foreign ambassadors to Washington by asking them what they wanted for Christmas. To his listeners, the French ambassador said (and I’m not going to trouble you with my French accent), he said that, for Christmas, he wanted “peace throughout the word.” The Soviet ambassador said that he wanted “freedom for all people enslaved by the imperialism of the Western world.” Sir Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador, rather misunderstood where they were going with this line of questioning, and when asked by his interviewer what he’d like for Christmas, replied, “Well, that’s very kind of you to ask. Do you know, a box of crystallized fruit would be delightful.”
Isn’t this wonder enough?
On the way over here from Bangor at the moment, along the A55, I pass digital signboards displaying in orange lights the message, “Covid Alert Level 4. Stay at home. Essential journeys only.” And, apart from thinking that it’s a bit late, now that I’m already on the A55, I thought to myself this morning, “Good, this is an essential journey; I’m off to celebrate a birth.”
Isn’t this wonder enough?
From the book Genesis:
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, darkness covered the face of the deep. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”
“Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”
Isn’t this wonder enough?
When the author of the Gospel of John wants to explain the wonder of the birth of Jesus, he echoes Genesis. “In the beginning” is where John begins, too. And, remembering that the two key creative moments in the story of Creation are God saying “Let there be light,” and God breathing into our nostrils the breath of life, John talks of Jesus Christ, the Word that is God, as the bringer of light and life anew. “What has come into being in him,” says John, “was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Isn’t this wonder enough?
Many people have made their essential journeys to see this life, this light of all people. And many have been disappointed. We laugh a little at the Wise Men with their absurd gifts, or at Herod the king, who expected this Messiah “to raise a gold sceptre / and turn swine into angels.”
But I come too, sometimes, expecting purity and perfection, or wanting the pain miraculously to be taken away, and that is not what this life and light gives unto us.
Isn’t this wonder enough?
God is life and light, and existed before the creation of any thing. God is life and light, and will be after all that is has passed away.
And God, who is life and light, is with this morning us in a baby. All that energy and noise. All that promise and potential. All that gentleness and vulnerability; those fingernails, “small / and smooth, like almond petals.”
God, who is life and light, is with us this morning in a baby — one who, like all of us, will know and have need of grief and charity, and hope and faith, and pity and love.
Isn’t this wonder enough?
This year, perhaps more than ever, we can be forgiven for making our essential Christmas journey expecting purity and perfection, wanting the pain miraculously to be taken away, the loneliness and emptiness filled. And what we find, in the hay of our hearts, is a God who breathes, who nuzzles next to me, who wraps his hand around my finger and holds on.
And isn’t this wonder enough.
