A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 24, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Christmas Eve
If you travel to northern Norway, and wait till it goes dark, which at this time of year isn’t a long wait, you’ve got an even chance you’ll see just about the most remarkable phenomenon the sky can offer. The Northern Lights is a brilliant, colourful light display that looks like a curtain, or spiral, or flicker. The Latin term aurora borealis was coined by Galileo in 1619, from the Roman Aurora, goddess of the dawn, and the Greek Boreas, god of the cold north wind.
When we see a breathtaking sight like this, we’re bound to ask ourselves a basic question. Is this a purely natural occurrence, occasioned by a million chance events that have created the mixture of astrophysics and human perception by which things happen and we behold them? Or is there some deeper meaning underneath or beyond this concatenation of randomness? It’s the biggest question of all: what lies at the heart of all things – chance or love? Is there truly a logic behind everything, and is that logic about relationship, cherishing and purpose? This is the question the Norwegian-American composer Ola Gjeilo asked himself when he visited northern Norway at Christmas in 2007. He beheld the astonishing skies filled with the aurora borealis, and he composed the sublime anthem we’re going to hear in a few minutes’ time.
The question he’s addressing arises in the Christmas story. The Christmas story has quite a lot of reference to the sky, and the wonders of what we behold above and beyond us. In Luke’s version, as soon as Jesus is born, a host of angels fills the night sky, and, in a sight that must have been even more awesome than the Northern Lights, the angels sing the praise of God’s glory in heaven and on earth. Meanwhile in Matthew’s account, the wise men spot in the night sky a star like no other: a star they associate with the coming of an unparalleled king.
So the question we ask ourselves when we behold an extraordinary aerial sound and light show is the same as the question at the heart of the Christmas story. That question is, Does the universe fundamentally represent soulless, material, boundless randomness, or does it revolve around meaning, purpose, and love? Now you may think, those seem two extreme opinions. Surely there must be some middle ground, where there’s shall we say a bit of logic behind some aspects of astrophysics and some reason, if only self-interest, for us all to behave decently towards each other and pursue causes beyond ourselves?
But here, without becoming a razor-sharp forensic lawyer, I want to suggest that such a middle ground is a sentimental fantasy – a kind of wishful thinking that fudges the biggest question of all and assumes a directionless, literally hopeless universe without facing up to the harsh horror of what that truly implies. In the midst of his experience of the aurora borealis, Ola Gjeilo makes his choice on this greatest question of all. The words he chooses to set to his composition the Northern Lights don’t come from an astrophysics textbook. They come from a very surprising source indeed. They come from one of the most curious parts of the Old Testament, the sixth chapter of the Song of Songs. The Song of Songs is a love song between two passionate companions who search for each other and kiss one another and caress and adore one another in gardens and gateways and streets of a city. But it’s not a sentimental book. In this passage it recognises how terrible love can be, how frightening it is to sink your heart and soul into the being of another person, and how vulnerable and terrifying it is to say, ‘I belong to you.’ What makes Ola Gjeilo’s composition so awesome is that he beholds the fearsome beauty of the Northern Lights and in it he sees the startling beauty at the heart of the universe. He’s telling us the heart of the universe is a love song, a passionate love song: a passionate love song that God is singing to us.
Which is the mystery at the heart of Christmas. Christmas does have drama – it has drama in the heavens with the star and the host of angels, it has drama on earth with Mary and Joseph’s long journey and Herod’s hostility and the visit of the shepherds and wise men and the slaughter of the innocents and the flight into Egypt. But at the centre of all this drama is something astonishing; not because it’s an awesome spectacle visible from millions of miles away, but because it’s a vulnerable creature we can only see from very close up: a tiny baby. The biggest question of all is whether at the heart of all things is hopeless chaos or purposeful love: and the answer Christmas gives to that question is a tiny, helpless, vulnerable baby.
When human beings are passionately in love with one another they often find themselves lost for words. That’s partly because they’re experiencing an emotion for which words seem inadequate. But it’s also because the only words at their disposal seem hackneyed and clichéd. To feel something profound, stirring and new is to reach for metaphors and images that do some kind of justice to what you’re discovering. In 1954 the Midwestern musician Bart Howard wrote a song for his gay partner that tried to encompass what he didn’t have words to say and what the culture of his time struggled to comprehend or endorse. ‘Fly me to the moon…’ began the song, ‘and let me play among the stars.’ He was drawing on the emerging aspiration to send a person into space, and finding in that metaphor the kind of out-of-the-body emotion he was feeling about his partner, both the validation of what it meant to love another man and the truth that he’d met a man with whom he genuinely and mutually felt such wondrous things. Then he starts to become dizzy and playful, and continues, ‘Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.’
The song had a subsequent history that connects it with Ola Gjeilo’s Northern Lights. It was recorded a hundred times in ten years; but one version became better known than all the others. Frank Sinatra’s 1964 cover was played by the astronauts of Apollo 11 shortly before they made their momentous first landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969. That was perhaps the definitive outer-space moment in all human history. But what the song has in common with Ola Gjeilo’s choral rendering of the aurora borealis is that it too is balancing the wonder of amazing astronomical phenomena with the question of what lies at the heart of it all.
This is the bold, sweeping, transformative, yet humble claim of Christianity. That one night, the amazing movement of the skies beyond converged with the profound truth of the human heart; the deepest meaning at the centre of the universe synchronised and resonated with the utter reality of temporal existence. And what we saw – like the result of the greatest chemical reaction of all time, or like the most astonishing word spoken at the height of the greatest romantic passion ever known – what we saw, was quite simply, quite breathtakingly, quite unforgettably and totally charmingly, a baby. And that baby answered the greatest question of them all, not with a shout, not with an explosion, not with an equation, not with an argument – but with a tiny, unmistakeable gurgle. And a hiccup. The greatest question of them all is whether the universe is founded on random chance or purposeful, relational love: and this baby gives us the definitive answer. The answer is what we call the incarnation. And the incarnation is God saying to us, ‘Your life is in my hands. And I am going to put my life in your hands.’
Frank Sinatra’s song is universally known as, ‘Fly me to the moon.’ But that wasn’t its original title. Its original title didn’t come from the first words of the song, but from the last. Those words are, ‘In other words, please be true. In other words, I love you.’ Those words are the words God says to us on Christmas Day. They’re said through the presence of a tiny, defenceless baby. A pure gift. Those words encapsulate the meaning of Christmas. Christmas is God saying to us, ‘In other words, please be true. In other words, I love you.’
