All this evening’s hymns are you, will have noticed, traditional. It’s quite hard to find good and memorable modern carols for congregational singing. The people who might once have written them now tend to work in the musical theatre; what I wonder would a carol by Stephen Sondheim be like? This week’s Book of the Week on Radio 4 is called ‘Finishing the Hat’. It is written and read by Stephen Sondheim and it is mainly about how he wrote all his song lyrics from West Side Story to Sweeney Todd. In the first episode we heard about the three essential principles for writing a good lyric; ‘content dictates form, less is more, God is in the detail, all in the cause of clarity without which nothing else matters.’ That I suspect would be rather a good recipe for writing a Christmas carol.
Take to begin with, the third principle: ‘God is in the detail.’ Now it may be that most of us are more familiar with the popular modern variant of that phrase –‘the Devil is in the detail.’ It relates, I suppose, to contracts and policies and plans which we sign up to without paying proper attention; and then we discover too late that we have overlooked something crucial in the details and nothing is going to work out in our favour – quite the reverse. Modern life often seems swamped with detail – information overload – we long for the big solution, the leader whom we can trust, the leader who will put things right. And most of the time we complain about our actual leaders because they never seem to be big enough to live up to our expectations.
Another name for ‘the leader who is big enough to live up to our expectations’ is ‘the Messiah.’ That is the sort of leader the prophet Isaiah refers to as ‘the one who bares his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations’ like a latter day Mr Universe. That is the kind of leader the Jews of Jesus day were looking for because they too were oppressed by detail – the details of the Roman rule which required them all to scurry hither and thither to be registered for the imperial census, the details of their own laws which amounted altogether to 613 different rules, the intricate details of worship in their temple. They longed for a Messiah – a big enough Messiah who would set things straight. And with a positively divine irony what they got was a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger. For God truly is in the details if you know how to look, God is in the seemingly little things which easily get overlooked when you’re looking for a big enough Messiah.
Which leads on to the second of Sondheim’s principles, ‘Less is more’. The kind of Messiah we really need is the one who encourages us to see the few crucial details; if we care for those everything else will take care of itself. Jesus was the kind of Messiah who was so concentrated on what was going on around him that he could sense the need in a hand reaching out to touch him in a crowd. He went to the places a Messiah was not supposed to go, he met with the people a Messiah is not supposed to meet. He accumulated nothing for himself and he began at the bottom of the heap; he addressed the needs we would rather keep secret, the failures we would rather keep quiet, the people who usually get ignored. We might go so far as to say that the memory of Jesus survives because he spent most of his time paying most attention to what was least in the eyes of the world.
And so to the third of Sondheim’s principles – ‘Content dictates form,’ by which I suppose he means that what you want to say dictates the best way to say it. Which brings us to the opening lines of our gospel reading. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ Jesus Christ was the form of what God wanted to say. Content dictates form – the content of God’s word required the form Jesus took. So what was the content of God’s word? The standard answer to that question is of course ‘love’; but love can mean many things – so what kind of love does God’s word mean? Again the standard answer is ‘love of neighbour’. So look to your nearest neighbour in church tonight, by which I mean not the husband or wife or relative or friend who may be sitting next to you but the nearest stranger; what is your fundamental attitude to that stranger and could it be described as love?
If we want to know what love of neighbour really means we are usually told that we should be more like Jesus but such an easy answer lacks clarity. So picture instead a group of bewildered shepherds and three dignified and elderly statesmen who have just travelled rather a long way on camel back, and above all a very new mother and father all of them looking at a baby – picture that and then feel the kind of emotion that very new babies have the power to evoke in us all – the simple but profound, protective, gut wrenching, tearful hopefulness that a baby evokes in its parents. So by giving us this endlessly powerful story of Christmas, God begins to give shape to the meaning of love. Love takes other forms in the rest of Jesus’ life, but this is where it begins to reveal itself. And so we are invited to show towards each other that simple but profound, protective, hopeful, love which makes us attentive and available to our neighbours when they need it. For that is the kind of love the word speaks to us in Jesus. That as Sondheim put it, is ‘all in the cause of clarity without which nothing else matters’, the clarity of love.
Ideally I suppose I should be able to finish by quoting a modern carol which illustrates this clarity of love in the details of the birth in Bethlehem in which God is to be found; a carol to make you aware of being alive on this most holy night. But perhaps one of you could write it and we could all sing it, may be next year.