Fred Shade: Church - Sermons

SERMONS

CHRISTMAS EVE
Some reflections

Tonight is a magical night. We have been preparing for this night for some weeks (Advent). The moment has arrived.

However, tonight's service is not the occasion to analyse, explain or interpret the Christmas Story, the Nativity of our Lord - this will be done during the coming weeks of Christmas and Epiphany.

What I would like you to do is to focus on just two words -

MYSTERY & JOURNEY.

Mystery. Christianity is a Mystery Religion, it is a religion of mysteries. We use a special liturgy which involves all the senses to help us enter the mysteries of the moment, the mysteries of our faith.

We are in fact maintaining a Sacred Memory, the story of the founder of our Faith and the witness given by the Church and its people over 2,000 years.

We are also invoking Sacred Time and thus we can be present, in a certain sense, at those sacred moments in our Lord's life, in the case of tonight, His Birth at Bethlehem.

We have also entered this Sacred Space - the church, in which this sacred memory and this sacred time are made real to us.

The particular mystery we are entering and honouring tonight is the Birth of Jesus of Nazareth. This mystery, like all the mysteries of our Faith, is a tapestry which weaves together the elements of history and tradition, myth and fable, the actions of both human and divine.

All of these features are present in the story of Christmas. The words of our Liturgy elaborate on this mystery and the truths it contains.

The second word is Journey. The Magi, priest-kings of the East, travelled far, in a physical sense, to greet the Christ-child.

Our journey today is a different one in that we are taking an interior journey to the cave of the human heart, which becomes for us our own little Bethlehem.

Another of the mysteries is that the interior journey, which each of us takes in this life, is also portrayed in the service of the Holy Eucharist. In this service we continue the journey with the Holy One whom God has created.

And, as I have mentioned, we have also the mystery of Time, for the Past, the Present and the Future, as they relate to God, the Cosmos, to Christ and to ourselves, is also present at this one point, this sacred moment on our journey.

And so, tonight, we honour and participate in the mystery of Birth, and the journey we are required to take and which recalls a manger in a far-off land, is now a journey to a manger which is within us. And there, in the presence of the Christ-child, we make our own offering - ourselves.

A Merry Christmas to you all!