A group of people are standing around a Christmas crib. One of them is a small boy called Henry, who is pulling at his mother’s coat, because he wants to go home. His mother asks him what’s the matter. ‘It’s not true,’ he says, ‘ it didn’t happen.’ And his mother tells him to shush, embarrassed by what the other people must be thinking about critical doubt in one so young. ‘It can’t be true,’ he says, ‘ they’ve got it all wrong, Mary had her baby in a stable last year and he was baby Jesus, she can’t have two baby Jesuses, and anyway, Joseph would have remembered to book a room this time.’
Like Henry our more sophisticated modern world can find the Christmas story not a little incredible. This story of angels, and guiding stars and a virgin birth may be a good story for children, and their endlessly endearing nativity plays, but for grown ups? Scholars debate whether any of it actually happened and some of their arguments even make it into the press. Preachers are always looking for new ways to tell the story in order to get the attention of their congregations for whom this is probably the most familiar story in the Bible. And, all in all, each year we struggle to overcome a credibility gap. And yet I do not think that is the greatest problem with Christmas. More and more I find myself thinking about us here at this Midnight mass; in what sense are we credible?
Almost everywhere tonight this story will be told as a story of poverty and exclusion, a child whose parents have to make do with a stable, a child for whom there is no room; this is a child whose existence will soon cause the massacre of other innocent children by a cruel and threatened king. This is the birth of a light shining in darkness, a voice misunderstood and rejected, a voice on the side of those who are excluded from comfort. We listen to such a story from a position of comfort. Our hymns often use this story to remind us of our duty to help the poor and pray for peace; but we sing and pray from a position of comfort. And it is not that I say these things to make us feel guilty; it is rather to suggest that we might find it especially hard at this time of year to feel connected, connected with this story and connected with a world in which there is so much suffering and poverty and violence. We are comfortable people listening to an uncomfortable story. And the fact that we may begin to feel we lack credibility in the face of such a story in such a world is important. For this credibility gap introduces us to an even greater gap – a chasm that Christmas reveals to us – a chasm which is nevertheless crossed from the other side.
Tonight we entirely miss the point of this story, the point of what we are actually celebrating if we fail to appreciate the size of the gap which is crossed in this story. If there is a God, then the only credible God cannot be like anything we know. If there is a God who brought into being this universe and all possible universes, and if there is a God who created the circumstances for us to evolve on this small unlikely planet, then such a God must be timelessly, unknowably, infinitely, beyond all that we can know, good beyond our understanding of goodness, true beyond our understanding of truthfulness. And if there is such a God then tonight we celebrate his crossing a gap equally beyond our comprehension to represent himself in a child who lived at a specific moment in history in an obscure though troublesome province of the Roman Empire. And that child’s life gave rise to a story which is still told week by week in churches all over the world. This is so incredible a claim that it is breath taking yet joyful in its audacity. No wonder many grown ups and even small children like Henry find it hard to believe.
And the reason why as grown ups we find it hard to believe is partly because of our lack of integrity. Integrity means something more than a state of moral probity – it also means a state of wholeness; and our problem is that we never quite know what will make us feel whole, what would make us integrated human beings. We are not at one with ourselves. From time to time we become aware of this lack of connectedness. We look up at the stars and we are momentarily astonished that there is this point of self-consciousness in me standing on this tiny planet in such a vast universe. We struggle to work on a crowded Tube, or more topically we struggle to complete our Christmas shopping and we experience moments of meaninglessness, what is it really all for? And on this night of all nights we feel all the more the credibility gap between our comfortable lives and the story we reflect on as we look at the Christmas crib.
And yet tonight a child is given to us in whom human integrity is restored. The spiritual and moral and material parts of our natures, which in us fly off in all directions are in him at one. Jesus Christ establishes once and for all the human connection with God and the possibility of human integration. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is a morally, spiritually and materially whole human being. And if we leave this church tonight with the intention to seek a greater wholeness and integrity in our lives then Christmas is beginning to work in us. The options are many but they are all real options – to pay someone a living wage, to join a charity, to offer our skills to a voluntary organisation, to buy a meal for a homeless person, to join a campaign for something that we would wish to change, to worship God more often. The options are many, the connections are waiting to be made because tonight our creator crossed the greatest gap of all to make it possible that human lives could be lived with integrity. If we can begin to live such a life then next year we may be able to tell the Henrys of this world why we tell this story year after year, always in the same way that we might be made different.