A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 24, 2023 by Revd Sally Hitchiner
I don’t know if you knew this but some of the clergy at St Martins live overlooking the church. It’s a strange place to live and you see all sorts of things from those windows but possibly the most memorable moment for me was during the cup final of the Euros in July 2020.
Remember the summer of 2020? To see any crowd was remarkable. To see swarms of football hooligans so numerous that you couldn’t see street from pavement was shocking.
The council had set aside a socially distanced, luxurious viewing experience inside Trafalgar Square for key workers and their families. They built high walls and concentrated the small amount of policing they had available on ensuring that this was secure.
The young fans swirled around the edges of the enclosure, drinking more and more alcohol and taking drugs. As England lost to Italy the frustration exploded in a wave of destruction. Shrubbery outside of restaurants was uprooted. Social Distancing signs were mounted and torn down. From our window we watched helpless as the crowds climbed over the metal church gates, eventually breaking the padlocks and damaging the ironwork that we are still restoring now. They smashed the lanterns hanging over the doorways and tried to break down the doors. In the middle of it all, a young man climbed on the stone statue of baby Jesus on the portico.
It’s a beautiful sculpture by Mike Chapman: a 4-and-a-half-ton block of Portland stone hone neatly into a cube at the sides but roughly at it’s top with the life size figure of a baby boy emerging from the stone. Tourists are often shocked to see a naked baby right in front of a church. I’ve seen a handkerchief or even a nappy placed strategically to cover his dignity.
The football fan who had climbed the statue, raised his hands in the air in triumph: the king of the castle. Then he looked around to see what he could smash to put his mark on. He looked down and raised his foot to stamp on the leg and gentiles of the tiny stone baby.
But then he stopped, his foot hovering in the air. A look of intensity on his face as he stared down. And he slowly lowered his foot to the side, climbed down and moved on.
Maybe a tank spewing teargas could have dispersed the crowd but what could have got inside this young man’s soul, cutting through all the madness of the mob and drug riddled forces on his mind and motivating him to remember his humanity? Seeing this baby, naked, vulnerable cut through it all and gave him a chance to discover something he was not expecting.
Christmas is not about power or even our empowerment. Jesus became human not so we could become divine, but so that we might become human. Christ shows us who we are to create a way for humanity to bring our authentic selves, undefended and vulnerable, to do the most important, most powerful thing we could ever do… Christmas shows us how to be human, to be ourselves, with God.
So, Christmas is not simply new information, telling us something different about who God is, Christmas is a transformation of our understanding of who WE are. It is impossible to hear this story without hearing our own story, our own nakedness, our own suffering, our own need, told in a new way. For In this child, humanity Is both remade and given new possibilities. In his birth is our birth: our wasted ways are restored, our shame is held with care, our endless capacity to undo our own lives is itself undone.
By joining us in our humanity, God creates space for us to be human without losing God. God creates a path for us to be with God as we are. Christmas is the invitation to discover what humanity is truly about. As Christians, but also as human beings, Christmas is where we come from. And we discover with surprise, that Almighty God, that source of all humanity, had something in common with the boy in the riot. The tidings of comfort and joy that God is fundamentally gentle.
