The nativity story, beautiful as it is, can create problems. For example, finding enough parts in the story for all the class to play often causes headaches for primary school teachers. The story just isn’t big enough. Those who don’t have named parts usually have to play stars or angels. In one of Alan Bennett’s dramatic sketches, entitled ‘Christmas in NW1’ a rather inventive teacher casts one little girl as an icicle. Her parents are not happy because she has no lines – all she has to do is stand and drip. Her father telephones the teacher and discovers that the nativity story has been brought up to date; the Holy family has become a family at risk, and the visitors from the East are the three social workers of Camden.
For very different reasons the apostle John also found that the story – if indeed he knew it – just wasn’t big enough – it didn’t have the scope – the universal application that he felt was so necessary. Perhaps, as in so many nativity plays, he thought everything else tends to be a distraction – only the baby counts. And so he focuses on the mystery of the Word made flesh.
Perhaps the most distinctive thing about humanity is our highly developed ability to communicate. We are ‘language animals’. We didn’t sit down and invent language; we are human because from the beginning we strove to communicate. We are spoken into life because words enable us to relate and to respond. Words shape us, draw us out of ourselves; words relate us to the things and people around us and tell us who we are. Our lives are based on this one fundamental act of trust; that our words connect with the world. This is our most basic creed: we believe that we can speak truthfully about our world and relate to it on the basis of what we speak.
We are ‘the speaking part of things’, made in the image of God who speaks all things into being. Of course John’s language is, we might say, poetic, but if we accept that all things are created, all things are dependent on the will of an intelligent creator then this is the most truthfully poetic way of expressing this belief. The Word was in the beginning with God and all things were made through the Word. As John begins his gospel he thinks of the beginning of the book of Genesis, where God says, ‘Let there be light’. The world comes into existence because God says, ‘Let it be.’ The subsequent history of the world might then be seen as a failure to listen and to respond. The creative word of God is drowned out by human noise – evil noise – cacophony. And so according to John, there comes into the world a life whose purpose is to restore the conversation with the creator. Jesus Christ is called the ‘Word of God’ not because he issues orders from God; Jesus Christ is called the word of God because in all the noise and confusion and deceit and lying, he speaks to God truthfully from the depth of his being. And so Jesus, the Word, enables us to become people who are learning the art of truthful and creative conversation both with one another and with God. Jesus you might say restores us to ‘responsible response’.
The very word responsibility implies response, just as the word answerability implies an answer. Both words show us that speech is ultimately a moral act; I must take responsibility for the way I respond; we must answer for our answers to one another. And so we come to church on this night in order to be renewed in our response to one another. We come to celebrate the first cry of a baby, who like all babies needs our response if he is to live. We come to remind ourselves that each of us needs to be heard and responded to in a way which makes us feel we have been truly and truthfully attended to, heard and answered. As husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighbours or even strangers, we need to hear from each other responsible responses. Every time we receive a glib response – a bored, rude, off hand, or untruthful response – a little piece of us dies; we feel unheard, unattended to and so not worth being listened to. Whereas courtesy, attentiveness, truthful and sincere speech, are all life giving and life saving. And all this depends on this one simple truth that the Word, the origin of all speech, became flesh. And all flesh needs words that are loving and intelligent and humorous and kind and challenging and imaginative, words from the heart as well as the head.
But how, we might finally ask, can I talk with God? I may strive to respond more responsibly to the people around me but what an earth can it mean to have a two sided conversation with God? At one level of course people can experience being spoken to by God through the words of the Bible. A particular text becomes at a particular time significant for them as a word of consolation or challenge. At another level the language of worship can provide a similar experience of being spoken to in unexpected ways by a phrase that leaps out of a prayer or even a sermon. At yet another level questions or needs that we have expressed to God in prayer can be answered by the sudden intervention of a friend or a stranger through whom God seems to speak to us just at our point of need or uncertainty. But finally what of that hope that somehow I might experience what could be called a personal response from God in the context of prayer itself?
And that question at last brings us back to where we began – to the stable in Bethlehem and the figures gathered round the baby in the manger. God the Word comes into the world as a wordless baby. And yet, though the child cannot speak to them, his parents and the shepherds and the wise men and whoever else might join the circle feel a connection with the child – something is drawn out of us, the desire that the baby may be cared for and nurtured in hope and love. And that is what God asks of us tonight – to nurture his word in the world. That is God’s simple and single communication to us to be experienced in many different ways. God speaks to us in the desire that rises in our hearts to be more serious, to reach down to the roots of the mystery of our lives and to be servants of the Word of truth and hope and love. And perhaps more amazingly God speaks to us when we begin to believe that we can indeed play our part in God’s story, as a dedicated social worker from Camden or whatever part is given us by God in the birth of His Word in the world. Amen.
(Some of the ideas and phrases in this sermon are derived from George Steiner’s book ‘Real Presences’)