Midnight Mass 2010

The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change. In all of my years, one thing does not change, however you disguise it, this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil wrote T.S.Eliot.

We shall never cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

These words are appropriate as the calendar turns once more to Christmas.

For over 1000 years on this hill the church calendar has turned. 50 generations have revisited the coming of God to the earth year by year throughout their life time and gained wisdom from this.

Tonight we arrive where we started and know the place as if for the first time.

The Word became flesh so that those who receive him, who believe in his name, may gain power to become children of God (John 1.14, 12). In the Christmas event we welcome life and light afresh. By the Holy Spirit the words of scripture enter our hearts afresh so we know that life and light as if for the first time.

Though 50 generations have prayed here before us we do not inherit that life and light. God has children, not grand children. To be a child of God is to receive him, to believe in his name, the name of Jesus, and so to gain power.

Tonight we recapture the sense of our being God’s children through the love that came down at Christmas. The annual celebration takes us back to basics with its reminder of the dignity afforded the human race by the incarnation.

The world turns and the world changes but this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

In that struggle there’s a winning side we’re called to enlist in as God draws us to his side and his victory in Jesus over sin, death and the devil.

The truth I am sharing is a hidden truth. It started off hidden away in a stable and continued in the obscurity of Palestine over 33 years. Then it was revealed by the resurrection.

We live in a more and more transparent society as the WikiLeaks saga has been reminding us, which is both good and evil. The aggression behind the hacktivity as they call it is such that when the Australian Prime Minister announced plans for censoring the internet the hackers took down his website and that of the Australian parliament.

This thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil...and internet technology is to be found on both sides.

The knowledge that is most powerful remains hidden to pride. It is concealed tonight in a stable away from the mainstream. God, as much as WikiLeaks, sees all. And he loves all. That is the Christian good news in an internet age or any age!

God sees all and he loves all - and all can respond to this truth.

The Word became flesh so that those who receive him, who believe in his name, may gain power to become children of God.

Love needs a body to show itself. Tonight divine love takes flesh.

This year is the centenary of the birth of one of the 20th century’s great explorers, Wilfred Thesiger. I have been reading his life in pictures which has a particularly Christmassy scene on the back.

He twice crossed the so-called Empty Quarter of Arabia, lived in the 1950s with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq and finally among the Samburu of Kenya.

Just as the internet is changing our lives today for good and ill, so Thesiger lamented the changes to Arab society that came about through the demand for oil. His writings are an invaluable record of a desert culture that has been largely lost.

Wilfred Thesiger explored by going native. He took no radio, let alone iPhone, to keep up with what was going on at home. He lived as the natives. Through this he became the first European to see amazing sights, many captured in his brilliant photography.

He writes of the fearful splendour of the desert being offset by human companionship. In the pitiless light of day we were as insignificant as the beetles I watched labouring across the sands. Only in the kindly darkness could we borrow a few square feet of desert and find homeliness within the radius of the firelight.

In human solidarity the fearfulness of nature is countered. Just as Thesiger’s work gained from hiding himself away for years among the natives so it is with God’s work of hiding himself in Bethlehem and Horsted Keynes. God is in the homeliness that counters the impersonal forces at loose in the world.

The Christian faith holds God has taken a body and kept it for ever in the body of Christ. God made a home in Bethlehem, literally the House of Bread, so he can continue in that bread, through Christ’s Mass, and in the hearts of all who will receive him.

Love needs a body. Divine love provides the body of Christ which now embraces the world in the words of scripture, in signs of water, oil, bread and wine and in the human warmth of Christian fellowship.

Love needs a body for this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

The light and life of Jesus show us a body with love stronger than death.

Though our lives move on from Christ’s Mass the end of all our living and exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Bethlehem. God made flesh. Love incarnate – this is the place we need to know!