If you don’t want to watch ‘Aladdin’, ‘Gentlemen prefer Blondes’, the ‘Great Escape’ or, of course, ‘Midsomer Murders’ this Christmas Day you could watch that delightful film, ‘Shakespeare in Love’, set here on Bankside.

In the film one of the characters says something that’s constantly repeated. Philip Henslowe, theatre owner, impresario, builder of the Rose Theatre in the parish and one of the churchwardens here, when he was asked any question, his reply was invariably ‘I don't know. It's a mystery.’  To say that of something seems like a bit of a cop-out; resorting to the language of mystery instead of really coming up with an explanation can, on the face of it, just appear a bit weak.  But then, sometimes, even in a rationalist, scientific, digital age like ours, when we seem to be able to understand everything, we come up against mystery.

In my carol service sermon this year I was talking about some of the number one hits of the past, not least those that were number one at Christmas.  I love songs that stay in the head or that you suddenly remember for no apparent reason, and I suddenly remembered a song that Frankie Laine – remember him – had a hit with in 1953.  It was in the charts for 36 weeks. In it he sings:

I believe, above the storm the smallest prayer,

Will still be heard...

I believe, that someone in the great somewhere,

Hears every word...

Every time I hear a new-born baby cry,

Or touch a leaf, or see the sky,

Then I know why, I believe!

The power of Christmas is the power that a new-born baby has over us.  We’re drawn to the baby, drawn to any baby, to take a look, to hold the little hand, marvel at the tiny fingers with their perfect nails, enjoy seeing them asleep or waking, and, holding the baby for the first time – especially when you’re not used to holding a baby, feeling its precious weight in your hands, its vulnerability, its fragile tenderness – it’s just so powerful.  And being drawn to the child draws you into the mystery. 

What’s true for any baby, any child, is true even more when we look into the manger and see what God has done.  The mystery is that such a little baby could hold the immensity of God, that something so powerless should be so powerful, that a totally dependent creature should be the one on whom we could depend.  It’s the supreme mystery that St John describes in that most famous verse from the Prologue to the Gospel that we hear every year at this Eucharist

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The mystery is that that can be said and that that can be true.

People keep asking me what it feels like to be doing things for the last time.  My answer is that I’m trying not to think about it, otherwise everything becomes too momentous.  But as I approached today, I was thinking, will this be the last Christmas Day sermon I will ever preach, and if it is what is it that I need, I want to say? 

The only way I can understand what it is that we’re celebrating today, the only way I can engage with what is the greatest of mysteries, the magnum mysterium, is that the world, creation, humankind, you and me, we needed this moment, we needed this birth like no other, we needed this child, the word spoken into our world and time by the God who spoke all things into being.

We needed this child, with his vulnerability and dependency because otherwise our vulnerability, our dependency would have no place in the godhead.

We had needed this child for generations, as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews reminded us.  We needed this child as the herald’s voice proclaimed in Isaiah’s prophecy.

We needed this child because we needed to hear the song of the angels, we needed to witness the awe of the shepherds, we needed to see the prophetic gifts of the magi, we needed to know that God is with us, that God is one of us, that God is alongside us.  We needed this birth because not only a child was born, not only a son given to us but that so many other things could then happen, so that we could be saved.

And everything around Christmas, all that’s so lovely and sparkly and fun, and even the annoying and expensive and irritating things, and the getting together of family and friends, and the moments of deep joy and the moments of deep sadness, and the memories of Christmas past and the demands of Christmas present and the hopes for Christmas yet to come, are all because a young woman laid her baby in a manger and the mystery of divinity became flesh and the mystery revealed the extraordinary ordinariness of the divine amongst us, the incarnation.

We leave this year knowing that there’s a great deal of unfinished business that will inevitably carry over into next year.  The war in Ukraine is still going on; prices are rising and will rise; strikes and pay demands are unresolved; refugees continue to arrive because there’s no safe and legal way for them to get here; people will continue to starve as crops fail and water holes dry up because we cannot really commit to what is required to combat climate change; the rich will still get richer and the poor will still get poorer. 

But as I constantly say, and I really believe it, is that into all of this God enters and reality and mystery meet. 

I believe, above the storm the smallest prayer,

Will still be heard...

I believe, that someone in the great somewhere,

Hears every word...

Every time I hear a new-born baby cry,

Or touch a leaf, or see the sky,

Then I know why, I believe!

I believe that you are the most loved part of the whole of creation, you, each of you, that diversity is the greatest gift God gives, that inclusion is about the enfolding love of God, that each of us is who God wants us to be, however much that may challenge those who cannot accept that humanity is as interesting or as wonderful as it is. 

Every time I hear a new-born baby cry,

I know why, I believe!

I look into the manger and I look at the bread on the altar.  It’s one and the same mystery.  As Betjeman so famously wrote in his Christmas poem in answer to his own question ‘And is it true?’

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

We don’t have to wait for Christmas to encounter God, to see Jesus, to hold him.  Every time we come to the altar we’re Bethlehem Bound, and our own hands cradle the one who cradles us in his love.

Hold on to that mystery, hold on to that love, it will help us through whatever the future holds, and when you hear a baby cry, believe.