Vicar’s sermon Carol service: Barnard Castle 2024

I was looking for a key on Tuesday. Not any old key. Not the sort you need to empty all your pockets for, look down the back of the sofa or scour the car floor for. No. A church key. More precisely, a church safe key. I know that you and the people we serve in this town are the real treasure of the church: the martyrs of old taught is that. When they were asked to hand over the church’s treasures they pointed to the people they served. But, with one of the two safe keys not working in the lock that gives us access to the church silver a replacement was needed: a replacement that could be cut by a Master Locksmith on a digitally programmed machine, set up to produce the exact key to fit the intricately machined German lock in our safe. They key was cut and brought triumphantly home – for your information the new key doesn’t work – but the journey wasn’t wasted. No, no, no. For, chatting to the Master Locksmith’s assistant I learned that she used to attend a church in Durham, that her teenage years had seen her stop going but that she loves going into churches now. Indeed, the last time she was in Durham Cathedral she found herself welling up with tears.
Now that’s interesting isn’t it? The lady in question couldn’t explain her reaction but, when I phoned to report that the brightest key in the bunch still didn’t turn the lock I posited a suggestion: might it be that your tears are because you feel you want to come home to your faith? – that the big doors, the high ceiling and the ‘room-for-everyone’ welcome of the Cathedral had spoken those words that we all deep down want to hear: ‘Welcome Home’. Before I put down the phone I encouraged her to attend a carol service this season for Carol services are ideal for those dipping their toes into the waters of faith. We all love a good sing but not much is asked of us other than hearty singing at a carol service: ideal.
But we don’t just sing at Carol services. We listen to readings. More readings than we usually have in church services: 5, 6, 7, sometimes 8 or even nine. Readings that connect the dots of a story which is all about us…is our story. The carols don’t always do this. They focus in on the manger, the couple in the stable, the softly lit warmth of a mother’s love, or they narrate just a part of the story (‘We three Kings’, ‘While shepherds watched’). The carols take us so far, but we need more. Our songs only make sense within the great narrative arc that reaches back to what Christians call The Fall and forwards towards a vision of the whole creation gathered in worship of the creator: ‘God and sinners reconciled’ as Charles Wesley put it in Hark the Herald.
Before the Good News can be heard we need to acknowledge the bad. The birth of the Christ-child is part of God’s purpose to bring His creation back into relationship with Him. Why is that needed? It is needed because of the great divorce, the fracture that runs through all of us and divides us from who we are meant to be and from whose we are meant to be: God’s people. Each one of us here is capable of generosity, care, great deeds of altruism. But humanity in general (and dare we admit we) are also capable of unkindness, cruelty, indifference. For years we have deceived ourselves into thinking that humanity is ‘getting better’, becoming wiser, kinder, gentler. Not so. You read the newspapers as I do. You watch the news…and, there but by the grace of God…we see ordinary people defacing their own humanity and that of others. Humankind is not as God wished or purposed it to be. We need to be fixed: we need to be redeemed. I need to be fixed: I need to be redeemed. I need a Redeemer.
The Good News of Christmas is that God makes this rescue, this redemption, possible. Not through a prophet or a teacher (though Jesus was these things). Not particularly through a new moral code: though there are some ways of acting that are Christian and others that are not. No. He makes it possible for us to be reconciled to Him by being born as one of us. ‘God of God, Light of Light, Lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb, very God, begotten, not created’. We call Jesus, the child in the manger Emmanuel (God with us). With his birth ‘the hopes and fears of all the years’ are met: our hopes are fulfilled, our fears are addressed. Because of His birth there is hope. There is a love that mends, and heals, forgives, challenges and soothes, and says to people who walk in darkness, I am here. I am for you. Come home for Christmas.
Our keys, the ones we try to get through the door to a better, kinder, more just, peaceful world don’t work, they are worn and broken and won’t turn the lock. But you might know from the carol ‘O come, O come Emmanuel’ that one of Jesus‘ names is the ‘Key of David’. He has opened wide the doors to our heavenly home. Step through that door of faith into the Kingdom of God and then you’ll never stop singing His praises for Christmas will finally make sense for you will be home, where you are meant to be.