December 24, 2024 • Christmas Eve
The Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity • Paris, France
Text: John 1:8: “…the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.”
Just a few days ago I heard from one of my oldest and closest friends, one of those people who was among the first friends of young adulthood.
We met at church, in a community I have shared about with some of our congregations in Europe. He had come to faith along a more evangelical path than mine, but there we both were in an Episcopal Church, him challenging my easy complacency about matters of faith and quoting in detail from all of C. S. Lewis’s writings, and me explaining the peculiar customs of the church that I knew in my bones because I’d grown up in it.
But really, there was not much I had to offer. He had the same deep passion to learn that an outsider brings to a new home. He had a deeper knowledge of the liturgy than I had, having studied it both as a matter of practice and because he’s a composer. He wrote a setting for the mass, and a few anthems that our little choir sang, and was the reliable soloist when we needed one.
Well, that was a long time ago. He went off from that place about thirty years ago now, to pursue his dream of conducting and composing. The road was hard for him, and filled with detours and disappointments. He always managed to find joy in music, but it was in ensembles as small and unheralded as the little church we met in.
He ended up sort of falling out of the church, feeling as though it was no longer answering the questions he was asking—questions that I suppose had become harder, and more searching, and more the sort of things we all sit with in the second half of life.
He came back to Massachusetts and that little church where we had first met a couple of times, twenty years later, when I was serving there as the parish priest. We spoke about his frustrations with life, and with doubt, which of course I saw as the shadow of the light cast by faith. But I caught no sense of longing to return to those days, or that season of shared sensibility that had brought us together and bound us in friendship.
And then, as I say, I heard from him a few days ago. He wrote to ask where I would be preaching on Sunday, and whether it would be live-streamed. It happens that on that Sunday I was in a place that doesn’t live-stream its services, but I let him know, and he replied by saying that he had decided to head to a nearby Episcopal cathedral on Sunday morning, about a forty-minute drive away.
“Trying to get back into the pool,” he texted me.
Those words haven’t left me since I read them. There is nothing at all remarkable about living through a season of questioning and doubt in our journey of faith; it comes to all of us, and sometimes for a season measured in years.
But there is something brave, something even noble, about defying our doubts and getting back into the pool—back into the swim of the sights and the sounds that first drew us into the embrace of God, back into the messy reality of God’s people who make up the church. There is something admirable about the willingness to do that, to jump back in at the deep end, which of course is where the darkest waters are.
These are difficult days to be people of faith. We are surrounded on every side by reasons to doubt that love really can win in the end. The values we preach and teach are actively mocked by the wealthiest and most powerful. We stand by and watch as good causes seem to fail, innocent people are murdered by war, and children are run down in a Christmas market.
And religion itself, the idea of a private sphere of belief with public consequences for our lives as citizens, is regarded as suspicious or subversive by more and more governments afraid of the conscience of their own people.
Within all of that, the church, for all her struggles and failings, is still the risen Body of Christ, alive and at work in the world. The gospel we preach here, that all people have equal dignity in God, no exceptions—and that all people are equally in need of salvation, no exceptions—that gospel is still true.
The conviction that grounds us here, that the health of your eternal soul is actually of far more urgent importance than your bank balance or your brokerage account, that conviction is still true.
And the mission of the church that we share here—“to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ”—that is still the mission of the church in every place, in every congregation of ours across Europe.
And if none of that is seen by the people we walk among in the gathering darkness of this world, well, “he was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him.”
The world did not know him then; and today, when Christ is still in the world here, through the work and witness of this church, most of the world still does not see us. “He is in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world does not know him.” That is our circumstance on this holy night.
So if we catch a glimpse of hope at all on this night, we will have to see it in the shadows. We will have to have eyes of faith tuned to the darkness in which we walk, able to pick out the glimpses of light that bear witness to God’s still-burning love for us even if the world around us cannot or will not see.
We are like the shepherds. We have no choice but to go out into the darkness of the world, out where our tasks, and our cares, and our work, and our doubts lie.
But it is exactly into our darkness that the light of God breaks this night, a light that will be seen, a herald that will be heard, not by the arrogance of power or the certainty of knowledge, but by hearts open to faith that keeps searching despite the doubts, and by minds open to wonder that only humility can glimpse.
May Christ in his mercy lead us all on by that light, through the fears and the sorrows of this time, out to where he waits for us to find him. Amen.