Midnight Mass
By Mark Oakley, Tuesday 25th December, 2007
A sermon preached by the Venerable Mark Oakley
St Alban´s, Copenhagen
If you have travelled to get here from the UK over the last 24 hours, congratulations on getting here. Many of us here at St Alban´s find ourselves flying a lot with work and keeping in touch with families – in fact, we have a little blessing we use: May God and your luggage go with you. And I wonder when you do fly, whether you are one of those persons who, when going on board, loves to try and see into the cockpit and see all those buttons and levers, or are you the sort who prefers not to think about all the technical stuff and just hopes the pilot knows what he´s doing and gets stomach ache every time the plane hits turbulence? Tommy Cooper always used to say that if you shout aaaah in a library everybody just stares at you, but if you do it in an aeroplane everyone joins in!
But it used to be said that if you were travelling by ocean liner, the worst thing you could do was to visit the engine room; and we might go on – perhaps its not best to go into the kitchen of your favourite restaurant, or backstage after a fabulous performance at the opera, or maybe even into the vestry two minutes before the service – especially before the children´s carol service this afternoon when a grumpy shepherd was having a row with Joseph and an angel had broken a wing! And I was trying on my halo…
Getting too close to the centre of things (or what people think is the centre of things) can be alarming or disillusioning or both: you really don’t want to know that, people will say; you don’t need to know how things work (or fail to work). Just get on with it. I always say that those who sit on Church Councils need twice the amount of faith as everyone else because of what they´re going to have to deal with from time to time. As you know, God so loved the world that he didn´t send a committee.
It´s an odd thing we are doing now: sitting in a stone building, in a cold climate in the middle of the night – very odd indeed. But for me one of the reasons we gather here tonight is to, as it were, go into the engine room of reality.
Belief in God is going under one of its periods of attack at the moment: from Richard Dawkins to Christopher Hitchens to Philip Pullman and everything in between. Many of their objections are, I think, valid and totally understandable. My problem with their books is exactly what Prince Mishkin says in Dostoyevsky´s The Idiot: “Atheists always seem to be talking about something else�. The God they rightly dismiss is not the God I have come to glimpse and tentatively try to understand in the Christian traditions. The God they reject is an unpleasant, all powerful, vengeful, fickle God who demands his dues or rejects you forever in the fires of hell. Now this God is around in some pulpits, lets be frank, but it is a terrible distortion, a human construction of fear and hate placed in the clouds and out to get you like a bad tempered traffic warden.
Instead, tonight, we go into the engine room to see the curtain pulled back a little on who God is, and how God works. We find him in poverty and weakness, vulnerable – with no trumpets and splendour. The universe lives, by this picture of truth, by a love that refuses to bully or force us but, which like a small child, can draw us closer simply by who he is. We discover a God tonight who allows a freedom in which to journey to him. And if we do use the word power for this God it is not in the sense of Zeus or Thor or Stalin, even. It is not the power of a dictator but the life of a lover that is the metaphor that opens up Christian truth: lovers are not in control like a monomaniac, they can only love and be loved in freedom, they love often by letting go, and the price of love is often grief. The gift of myrrh, used in burials, had foresight.
This engine room, like so many, is unnerving because it threatens so much of what we spend our time and energy building our lives on: to be on top, to accumulate, to place ourselves at the centre of the merry go round existence we find ourselves in. Spending money we don´t have on things we don´t want in order to impress people we don´t like.
But as we step over the droppings and spilt food in the stable we see life from a different angle from the one we generally see it from, the one that gets us tired, stressed, competitive, jealous, distracted, ending up with lots to live with but little sense of what to live for.
Perhaps coming here might distil things a bit, there is a sense in which we seek a forgotten home tonight, looking at a new life and wondering whether we might share in it somehow, a new life, something born in us, revitalising, resuscitating, something beautifully human and humane, a freeing of the soul, a life born in trust, not jaundiced or cynical, so real and beautiful that it might transform our relationships and all that we carry about with us – if we can bear to see all our fakeness exposed? Might we be remade in this engine room? In 15th century in London masks were forbidden…
The Christmas story we just heard started with a demand – that all the world should be taxed. It ends with a gift, of a birth and of new life. This is the Christmas truth, that God is always Emmanuel, among us, newborn, fresh and just beginning. And that a life that struggles to draw closer to this divine reality can begin to reflect the freshness of eternity. There are those telling us loudly at the moment that life is just survival of the fittest, but fit for what? A human self learns tonight that to be most truly itself it is not to be selfish. We are gifts to each other, we should be kinder to each other.
Winston Churchill said many things that should be quoted from a pulpit – and many things that never could be! But tonight one of his reflections seems absolutely right, made in the engine room as it were, and the truth, so clearly seen in the crib tonight, to carry with us into the new year:
We make a living by what we earn. We make a life by what we give.
