Isaiah 62.6-12
Psalm 97
Titus 3.4-8a
Luke 2.8-20
Christmas Day 2025
©Suzanne Grimmett
Joy to the world! The Lord is come
Joy to the earth! The Saviour reigns
He rules the world… with truth and grace
We have claims in our carols that ring familiarly in our ears but we would be less than honest if we did not look around at the world as it is and wonder sometimes, even at Christmas, “Where Lord? Where have you come and where do you reign and where are the signs that your rule of the world has been established with truth and grace?”
It is understandable that these questions do not trouble us mid-carol because there is in music, and so deeply in Christmas carols, a recognition of the arrival of our best hopes. Music can do this- carry the weight of unseen wondrous realities that can never be expressed otherwise. The poet, Mark Doty captures this in his poem called, Messiah, a word picture he paints of a humble Methodist choral society’s production of Christmas Handel. He says;
This music
demonstrates what it claims:
glory shall be revealed. If art’s
acceptable evidence,
mustn’t what lies
behind the world be at least
as beautiful as the human voice?
We sing of the glory which shall be revealed. The Saviour has come.
Truth and grace rule. The song is the bearer of our best dreams.
While music may help our spirits soar, the very idea of incarnation, however, needs somewhere very earthy to land. We are reminded every year when we hear the story of shepherds who lived in the fields being the first visitors to greet the newborn Saviour of the world, of just how earthy this arrival was to be. No palace for this king but a bed of straw in an animal’s food trough and a welcoming committee of some smelly blokes fresh in from their night watch. But perhaps the greatest scandal of all is not the manger or the unwashed shepherds but the particularity of a God who just shows up someplace. This idea of a “someplace” God is offered by Cole Arthur Riley in her beautiful book, This Here Flesh where she describes Christians who want to talk to her about salvation and her future of faith but show little interest in her present condition. Rather than a rescue operation to a heavenly future, Riley says she would choose a God who is someplace every time. [1] The God of the Bible seems intimately caught up with particular locations and lives, from Abraham in Canaan… to Moses liberating slaves through the Red Sea… to prophets in Babylonian captivity… to a young peasant girl from Nazareth who gives birth in a humble lodging in Bethlehem and lays her holy child in a feed trough. Christmas, more than any other story, tells of the astonishing inbreaking of a someplace God.
The greatest rupture in time and space in Christian understanding is that God may now be found not only in a cosmic existence beyond our realm of being but grounded in the material – the material stuff of our bodies and of this earth with its diverse life. Maybe though, to find God in the dirt is not as shocking as finding God in the mess and pain of our human lives. This divine move into the material would mean that God with us means not just a comforting presence but an actively shared experience of the suffering, trouble, sickness and pain that is part of every human life. God with us means God with their sleeves rolled up, working for liberation and peace and the righting of injustice. This is the Lord who comes, the Saviour who reigns, ruling with truth and grace.
But we can miss the point of the incarnation if we are looking for a God of dominant power to step in and right all the wrongs. God did not arrive in a lightning bolt from heaven but grew quietly as do all flesh, in the body of his mother, and born, a helpless babe, that holy night in Bethlehem. He grew and lived a fully human life before suffering betrayal and death as an outcast. Christians believe Jesus rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven, returning to the source of all life and being. And here is where this Christmas event really takes on some new life. Angels, those other worldly messengers singing glory to shepherds, once again appear to insist at Jesus’ ascension that God is not to be found by staring into the sky, but here amongst the enfleshed life he shared. The ascension account in the book of Acts includes angels demanding of the disciples, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” It is fitting that the angels who first announced the someplace God insist that God is still someplace- not at a heavenly distance but an earthly Emmanuel, God with us. We can share the angels’ song of glory at the miracle of the incarnation and then attend closely to the angel’s line of vision. Angels may seem otherworldly, but their message is down to earth. They prompt us to not forget the someplace God in favour of a sky god disconnected from our material reality. If we ignore the suffering and sorrows of real people we know or the practical needs of those who live next door, then we will fail to encounter the Christ who is right here amongst us.
But where is our someplace and indeed our sometime? Our Christmas carols often hide within their text this shining truth that God is born in our someplace –here– and in our sometime –now. Joy to the world – God is born in us today! And joy is something that does not need everything to be perfect to burst out. Joy can sing alongside grief and sorrow, illness and ageing, failure and loss. One of my favourite theologians, Willie James Jennings has said, “I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces.” Cole Arthur Riley reflects on these words saying, ‘Our liberation depends on our willingness to resist despair. We do this by allowing joy, in whatever form, to be our song.’[2]
There is much that might cause us to despair right now and it would be easy to allow it to dull our senses, stifle our hope and rob us of light and love. To this Christmas Day sounds a clarion call to awaken and listen to our better angels. If we are to follow the angels and look not up, hoping for something better in the next life, but down, to the many incarnations of this sometime and someplace God, we might hear the song of joy. We might, for instance look very literally down to our community care hub in the Undercroft, where those going through a hard time can receive food hampers or clothing or be welcomed in for a cuppa. Any community aspiring to follow Christ must surely be built on concern and practical care for the vulnerable. Or maybe we might catch the thrum of joy later today in the hall amongst the Christmas feasting with friends we haven’t met yet.
But here’s the thing- joy flows from our deepest desires. Christmas is a festival of joy because it celebrates the God who so desired our company and communion that Mary… Bethlehem… earth became the someplace of God and the dream of earth to be as heaven. We have been dreaming of this ever since- desiring a world where love and justice reign and peace is known on earth. A place where hatred no longer feeds violence and self-serving desires for power and greed for wealth do not oppress and dehumanise. It is this kind of good dream that can find its way to joy in the midst of horror or tragedy because joy is a posture of resistance. Christmas finds its way even in terrible sorrow because now that God is someplace, the light that has come into the world is everyplace and the darkness of acts of terror or war or violence or hate can never overcome it.
And so we persist in singing songs of joy, because joy pushes back despair. Mark Doty finishes his poem, Messiah, with a question and a truth of the light we bear;
Aren’t we enlarged by the scale of what we’re able
to desire? Everything, the choir insists,
Might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
quickened now, by song.
This Christmas may we take courage and sing of our best dreams for humanity. May we be enlarged by the desires of the God who is always someplace, taking up residence within and amongst us, helping us sing a song of joy. +Amen.
[1] Riley, Cole Arthur. This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories That Make Us: (pp. 168-169) Kindle Edition.
[2] Riley, Cole Arthur. This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories That Make Us (pp. 168-169). (Function). Kindle Edition.