Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on Christmas Day 2025

The birth of a child is an assault on the senses. It isn’t tidy, it can only barely be controlled. New-borns are slippery, normally screaming. Not much chance of a Silent Night.

The birth is a world away from those months of waiting, while mothers feel the gathering weight of expectancy. Those early, grainy, ghostly ultrasound pictures, and weird whooshing of foetal heartbeats have an uncanny feel; almost alien. You can see where Ridley Scott got the idea!

The birth is a whole new reality; intensely physical, stomach-churning; releasing a whole new world of wonder and terror and joy and exhaustion and, if friends are to be believed, endless brutal reminders of your parental inadequacy. The hopes and fears of all the years.

No wonder we tend to focus (in Christmas cards and the like) on what comes later; the infant polished and snuggled, held like porcelain (perhaps); the tiny fingers curled around the hand, (one of many we trust), on which the child will completely depend, whether they like it or not, for years and years.

Just as it has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, on battlefields, I suspect there aren’t many to be found around a birth. We know this is holy territory without anyone telling us so. Nothing less than God can account for the shock of emotion, the existential fear and the profound wonder – the feeling that we are at the centre of whatever it means for any of us to be human – that terrifying, breath-taking, vulnerability.

It is not unlike some of the feelings around a death-bed. We come into the world screaming, and if we take Dylan Thomas’ advice, we might go out raging too. These two poles of existence, these holy extremities, define us, and they scare us, and we spend most of our lives preferring not to dwell too much on either of them.

So perhaps we fail to hear the shock at the heart of our gospel reading; this majestic prologue to John’s Gospel that we solemnly intone each Christmas Day. Not so much all the high theology of the Word that was in beginning, that is with God and is God, through whom all things were made, but that this Word was made FLESH. Holiness not just in the realm of the abstract and eternal, to be reached for philosophically, intellectually, but holy biology; our un-squeamish God in all the weird and unspeakable biological processes; conception, gestation, parturition, lactation. Is it any wonder so many, of all faiths and none, throw up their hands in horror.

The Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alicia Stallings, spares us nothing in her poem First Miracle. She writes, of Mary

Her body like a pomegranate torn
Wide open, somehow bears what must be born,

The irony where a stranger small enough
To bed down in the ox-tongue-polished trough

Erupts into the world and breaks the spell
Of the ancient, numbered hours with his yell.

Now her breasts ache and weep and soak her shirt
Whenever she hears his hunger or his hurt;

She can’t change water into wine; instead
She fashions sweet milk out of her own blood.

Apologies if this is putting you off your Christmas dinner.

We are talking about Holy biology – not just the flesh of the Word, but Mary’s too, and ours, if we can bear it. Our holy biology, self-evident in birth and in death, yet somehow forgotten in between, in clean laboratories, in the controlled world of experiment and theory, in the constant bid for mastery over creation and over ourselves.

We curl our tiny fingers and we never stop hanging on; never stop trying to control the hand of fate, the never-quite-trusted hand of God. We make holiness impossibly remote, a kind of extreme-sport just for enthusiasts, just for those who really like that kind of thing, and we miss the holiness in the very hands that are hanging on; in all the hands on which we all depend for love, for care, for good governance.

The Word is made flesh, God becomes human, to show us humans how holy we are, how holy we can be – not just in our coming-in and our going-out, but in all the barely-controllable business of our bodies, and our fragile minds. He comes to show us the beauty in our flesh; to invite our response, like Mary’s milk, to all the hunger and the hurt that yells out to us.

Christmas is an assault on the senses; and not just the glare of tinsel and fairy-light, or the gut-busting cuisine, or the incessant, jingling-jangling seasonal tunes. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, recalling us to holy wonder at our humanity, in all its biological need, and frightening vulnerability, and unimaginable glory.

Christ is born. Alleluia! Happy Christmas.