The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

 A few years ago now the nursery school that meets in our crypt room was learning the Christmas story. A little girl who had heard it all before was explaining the story to a little boy who had only just joined the class. She wanted to make sure he could identify all the people in the story, as  the children would be dressing up as all these characters in the nativity play at the end of term. ‘There’s Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus and the shepherds and the kings and the angels and the donkey and the nanny and the cleaning lady.’ Clearly she was a little girl with a vivid imagination. And yet what she was doing is what the church has always done – she was making the story more vivid and she was relating the story to her own situation – it had become a Hampstead Nativity. Now the original story didn’t have a nanny and a cleaning lady but it wasn’t very long before two mid wives were added to the scene – they are often shown in ancient icons of the nativity. Like poetry the story  creates a world in which we can stretch our imagination.
And yet at this midnight mass of Christmas we do not hear the story. We can see the crib, but what we hear is St John’s strange metaphysical speculation about God – a different kind of poetry – the poetry of transcendence.  ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ And so Christmas becomes not an imaginative story but a philosophy of life or rather it becomes both together – a story for the imagination to revel in and a philosophy to stretch the mind. And if we are to live a fully human life we need both.
We need our imagination in order to break free from the constraints of our own little worlds. We need imagination if we are to learn from the past, the past of the gospel and the past of the church. We need imagination if we are to try to understand other people’s suffering. We need imagination if we are to dream a dream of a  different world,   where swords are beaten into ploughshares, where guns and knives are melted down and communities are built up on peace and justice and mutual respect.
Imagination can take us out of ourselves in this way, but imagination can also lead to self delusion and unreality. Imagination needs a philosophy – a philosophy of going beyond. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ St John begins his gospel at a point none of us can possibly imagine. He asks us to acknowledge the possibility that there is more to anything or anyone,  than we can manage or understand. He asks us to believe that the world relates to some reality immeasurably different to anything I know or can know. The world belongs to that reality in a way it can never belong to me. All that is good in the world is therefore only and always gift – a gift from beyond.
And perhaps tonight we might think of the supreme gift as communication. ‘In the beginning was the word.’ From the moment we are born we are spoken into life, through touch and through gesture and expression as well as through words. Everything that I know has  been communicated to me and words are the basis of my relationship with everyone and everything. And yet in this world and this life we know all too painfully that words can be used for lies as well as for truth, for cruelty as well as for consolation, clichéd and cynical words as well as honest and loving words.
 ‘In the beginning was the word’; but if we ask what that word was or what it said we get no reply. It is the word that reduces us to silence. But the silence is not the silence of defeat or confusion or fear. It is the silence of wonder and humility and self surrender. This is the Word before which all our words fall into place as partial and provisional and inadequate to speak the real truth of who we are and why we are here and for what we were made. And yet because the Word which is God humbles us then our language can be purified, we can learn to speak more truthfully and honestly and creatively. That is one of the purposes of prayer; to sit in silence listening to the word of God beyond all meaning so that  we can return to human words purified by  silence, made more truthful by that silence. And where our speech is made more honest and attentive to the complexity of life, then our actions too become more sensitive, more responsive to the needs of those around us.
 Christian imagination  enters attentively into the situation of others; Christian philosophy  remains humble before the truth which can never be pinned down; and together these things  open us up to dialogue with our neighbour and our world. Society has nothing to fear from the Christian faith. If our society suspects that faith claims to know all the truth and wants to impose that truth on everyone else, then society is wrong. If Christianity believes that in the face of divine truth our knowledge of truth will always be inadequate then we would be wrong to impose that truth on anyone. In fact Christianity teaches that to impose a truth destroys it. Truth is for sharing not imposing. Those who want to debate the way our society should go have nothing to fear from Christianity, only those who would seek  to dictate the way our society should go.
We have come some way from the Christmas crib and yet we can never leave it far behind. For at Christmas the humane imagination and the unknowable word from beyond come together in the child born in the stable. Without that imagination our life becomes closed in on itself, without that unknowable word we are in danger of assuming that we  can know all we need to know. But the stable in Bethlehem can cure us of that. For those who come to the stable are made one in the humanity the child Jesus comes to transform; this night can empower our imagination and fill our minds with wonder at the Word of God before which all words, especially the words of a preacher, fall short of the glory which it would take an angel to proclaim. Amen