Midnight Mass 2012
I started to feel quite Christmassy quite early this year. It might have been that it's a new parish, it might have been that I've been looking forward to Christmas for months. You see, Christmas is more than just
another day for me, it is an attitude, it is a feeling that we can keep throughout the
year, if we can understand what it happening this evening.
We are not just here singing and
celebrating, we are actually writing another page in the story of Christmas. We
are adding to the story that is 2,000 years
old…and it hasn’t finished.
We are making Christmas!
And down the generations, people
have done the same. There is no
greater example of this than the carols we are singing this evening.
(14th Century)
On the way in this evening we sang Adeste
Fidelis the carol we know as O Come all ye Faithful.
The original words are attributed to
John
of Reading, who wrote a book called “Prose for Christmas Day”
around 1320.
Much later, the tune (and some of
the words) were changed by John Francis Wade, a Catholic Layman who fled to
France during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
It’s suggested there’s a secret
meaning to some of the words. The
return of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the secret followers of The Old Pretender Stuart are all supposedly
mentioned. The faithful are the ‘Jacobites’ who are being
encouraged to return, and Bethlehem, was a code for them to
mean England. So this was a carol of rallying the
people to return.
(18th Century)
No midnight mass is complete without
us leaving to Hark the Herald Angels sing. This carol was written in 1739 by Charles Wesley. Although he was a bit of a sober,
sombre man, it’s still possible to sing this carol after a Christmas drink, as
a few of you will know. The
words are triumphant! In the last
verse we sing “sing choirs of Angels” I looked through every Bible I have, and according to them
the Angels “spoke” not “sang”, but that’s fine. It’s a good picture!
(19th Century)
Then, before the Gospel reading we
sang that calm and beautiful classic Christmas carol Silent Night. The original lyrics were
written in Austria in by a priest, Joseph Mohr. The music was written by Xaver Gruber in 1816 and it was
sung the first time on Christmas Eve 1818 in the Church of St. Nicholas,
Oberndorf, Austria.
Nearly one hundred years later, in the 1914 Christmas truce of World War One, where troops stopped
fighting and left the trenches to exchange gifts with the enemy, this carol was
simultaneously sung in three languages (English, French and German) it was so
widely known and sung. This is the
quiet colossus in the Carolling world!
(20th Century)
Even though Christina Rossetti wrote
her famous poem “In the Bleak Midwinter” before 1872, it didn’t appear as a
carol until 1906, in the English
Hymnal with a setting by the famous English composer Gustav Holst. It’s got
everything in – the birth of Jesus, the second coming, the simple surroundings
of the birth and Mary’s love and care for her son. It’s all there!
So we are hearing what Christmas
meant to the people of the last seven hundred years, and we join with them in
adding to that Christmas story!
Christmas has given us a wealth of
art and music, poetry and philosophy, the story of God working with others…
And tonight, WE are adding to Christmas just by being here. WE
are part of the Christmas story, the story of God and his people, the greatest
story ever told.
We are making Christmas!
That’s why I’m a Christmas person! In Church we speak of the Incarnation – the birth of Jesus - and at Easter, we speak of the Atonement; the crucifixion, death and
resurrection of Jesus. I
understand you can’t have one without the other, but I have to say that Christmas is for me, as C.S Lewis
calls it ‘That Great Miracle’.
However, the miracle doesn’t end
here. It can be Christmas Every Day. If we are making the Birth of Jesus Mean Something for
others not just at the end of December, but throughout the year.
You might think that I’m overdoing it a bit, but I’m not!
We hear lots of talk about the
church dying, and I’m pleased to tell you that it isn’t happening. In parishes such as this one, we have
outreach into the community every day of the year. Dozens of people are doing
hundreds of jobs to make life a little brighter and more manageable for others.
We start every morning with prayer
in this church and many work late into the evening to keep Christmas
going! To make the incarnation of
Christ mean something concrete, tangible and real.
We are making Christmas! In December, January and even June!
A newspaper reported a couple of
days ago that Anglicans
give up 22.3 million hours every month to work that benefits their local
community. The Sunday Telegraph asked church representatives of every Diocese
to say what their church did that they were most proud of, and the response was
overwhelming: night shelters, food banks, credit unions, housing trusts, legal
advice, street patrols and support groups were all mentioned.
We get
everywhere!
According to
the recent Census, 59 per cent of people in England and Wales call themselves
Christian. However, separate research shows that 85 per cent of us visit a
church in any given year, whether to give thanks, pay respects, mark a
significant moment or seek solace. The church provides a rallying point.
So, this
Christmas, I’m not worried about the future of the Church! Down the generations it has proclaimed
the birth of Jesus, the Incarnation of God, and made that mean something to the
people! This evening, we are making more Christmas!
God has put us into the Christmas
story in our time, creating something good and new, we are blessed indeed to be
here this evening.
May God give you a time of peace and
relaxation, and the joy of understanding your part in the greatest story ever
told, in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
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