Second Sunday of Christmas

A sermon by Edward Probert for the Second Sunday of Christmas

(Jeremiah 31.7-14; John 1.1-18)

The vast majority of our services contain two readings from the Christian holy scriptures. We are, as Muslims tend to put it, ‘people of the Book’ – our worship, our individual and common lives, are built around our sacred scriptures. As the Collect puts it, we ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them’ – at least in theory.

The most cursory glance at our holy scriptures – a look at the table of contents at the beginning – shows us one thing: they aren’t entirely ours. Eighty percent of these writings are inherited from the Jewish tradition, borrowed from and shared with our Jewish fellow-worshippers; only twenty percent of our texts are explicitly Christian.

If we have read, marked, learned and inwardly digested these Jewish scriptures, we may have gained not only a familiarity with some of the choice phrases in the texts, but also a sense of the sweep of the historical narrative they contain. Among its big themes are the covenant made between God and Abraham, that this childless man would become the father of a great people; that in due course that people were drawn into slavery in Egypt; that they were liberated by God at the hand of Moses; that at the hand of Joshua they gained the land of Canaan, and purged that land of its native people; that they became powerful, but then met disaster, and were oppressed and exiled. It is this period in the narrative that gave us prophecies like today’s from Jeremiah – focussed on the promise of return, a joyful hope in the faithfulness of God.

The thing about faith rooted in history is that history isn’t just past; it’s still being made. The story continues, even though there are no new prophecies or narrators to include these things among the 1,400 pages of our sacred scriptures. The exile didn’t end with Jeremiah; it continued for thousands of years; within living memory the oppression of God’s people reached new depths of depravity and misery; a new nation state for the people was formed; a new exodus and occupation of the promised land created new miseries, new collateral damage. We may hear and read our scriptures’ accounts of Amalekites and Jebusites being obstacles and enemies; but in the rest of our lives we hear of Palestinians living for generations in refugee camps, living in exile; having their properties appropriated and their hopes dashed. For 15 months now we have heard fresh waves of horrors from the tiny enclave of Gaza. If you need me to describe these after so long, there is probably little point in my doing so.

We all know these things – in this extended sweep of narrative we find ourselves in all parts of the story. We are at the beginning with God in Genesis; we’ve seen Roman oppression at the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate; we know the atrocities done to Jewish people in Europe over the centuries; we know how compromised the record of the Christian Church is; we know that our governments, our economy, and our military, are closely entwined with modern-day Israel; we know the enduring modern history of antagonism and violence in the names of both Palestine and Israel. If we speak out into this disaster we may legitimately be accused of self-righteous hypocrisy, of preaching from the sidelines, of denying both the wounds of history and the promises of God. And so we are silent.

We here have next-to-no agency in all this; but it’s our story. Our whole tradition is rooted in a creator of all, who saw that it was good. Whose presence could still be seen and heard in hopes which endure through oppression, destruction, and exile. Whose love is for all that he made, whose true light enlightens everyone.

In our modern, intractable, compromised and shameful situation, that vision of hope must endure. The hope is not just for Christians; it’s not just for Jews; we are here today, this is our tradition, because ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone’ was coming into the world, and where the world chooses so often not to know him. God reaches out to the extent of sending his own son into the darkness, and that too must be our story. Nothing is impossible with God.