Sunday, December 24 - All Children

This sermon was preached for Christmas Eve, Sunday, December 24, 2023. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 52:7-10, Luke 2:1-20, and Psalm 96.

I’m not sure what it says about me that one of my all-time favorite movies, Children of Men, is rather grim and stark. But what redeems all that for me is that the movie also contains what I consider to be the most poignant depiction of Christmas hope ever put on film - and it’s a depiction I couldn’t stop thinking about this year, in all the grim starkness 2023 has brought our world. 

“Children of Men” is set in London but in an alternate future, one defined by a global fertility crisis. The story imagines the hopelessness of a society in which no child has been born for 18 years: constant civil wars, migrant crises, famine, and corruption. In one scene at the heart of the film, a gritty urban battle rages. Refugees huddle in a bombed-out building, hiding from armed soldiers and rebels alike. Suddenly, in the cacophony of shelling and machine gunfire, there arises the holiest, most miraculous sound: a newborn’s cry. 

As the young, unwed mother and the older man who is not the father stumble down the hallway, bent over the swaddled babe, ragged people fall to their knees around them. They reach out their hands to the infant’s tiny feet, cross themselves and murmur words of blessing in different tongues. Soldiers barreling into the building halt and lower their weapons at the sound of the wail, astonished. A commander, wide-eyed, turns and screams to his men: “Cease fire! Cease fire!” His order echoes all down the stairwells, the hallways, and out to the ruined streets, where ranks of amazed fighters silently part to let the three figures through. The world falls still, holding its breath, straining to hear the sound they’ve longed to hear and never thought they would again. 

That vision is the hope of Christmas, to me this year: that at the sound of a newborn’s cry all gunfire and warfare and destruction cease. All arms are laid down, all people locked in bitter conflict unite in the simple act of adoring a child.

Christmas declares this to be the core promise of our faith: For too long, humankind looked to mighty kings to save us. But God came as a new sort of king, one who calls up in us the very best of human nature. Our salvation comes as a newborn babe and all that the sight of a baby opens up within us. 

Hear again what the prophet Isaiah proclaims: Humanity’s salvation lies not in developing the most powerful weapons, nor in building the highest walls, conquering the best territory, and amassing the most wealth. Our salvation rests in God and in our faithful response to God-among-us and within us. That faithful response is to forget the art of war. It is to remember how to nurture, how to care, how to lean in and lift up the weakest, most vulnerable among and within us. 

At our interfaith vigil for peace a couple of months ago, the Rev. Jason Seymour shared this quote from Carl Sandburg, “There is only one child in the world and the Child’s name is All Children.” This is what Christmas urges us to believe and act like we believe: the Christ Child is every child. Every child is Christ. 

Peace, true peace, comes when we look into the eyes of another human being and remember they were once a child, too, deserving of compassion and mercy. True peace comes when we look inside ourselves and recognize the child we once were. When we have the courage to extend to each of those children the love and care we once needed and longed for. 

Has anyone ever told you that you, too, deserved the stilling of all war at the moment of your birth? You, too, deserved the end of raised voices and stony, hard silences and the calming of everything that raged inside your caregivers, your childhood home, your community. You, too, were worthy of kind words and gentle hands, and peace. You still are. 

The Christmas vision from the film Children of Men is so poignant to me both because of how similar and how different the scene feels from our own world. The scenes of destruction are so real to me: they could be the streets of any war torn city any of us have seen on the news throughout our lives, or have maybe even lived: Ramallah, Kyiv, Damascus, Sarajevo, Derry, Baghdad, Hanoi… also the internal worlds the most courageous among you have allowed me to glimpse in my pastoral work this year. And so the part of the scene that is so painfully fictional is the moment when the fighting stops. The truth is that in our world today, we do not consider the presence of a newborn babe, or any child, to be enough to justify a ceasefire. We have become numb or alienated to the parts of our humanity that long to lean in, protect, and adore every child. All Children.

Christmas Eve asks us: could we ever be true to that part of ourselves again?  

On the first Christmas Day of World War I, December 25, 1914, British, French, and German soldiers spontaneously laid down their weapons and emerged from their trenches to sing Christmas carols and share cigarettes and chocolate and even play soccer together. The 1914 Christmas truce is an historical moment that’s been well-researched and well-documented precisely because it feels too good to be true. Could that really have happened? Could men have really gone from mercilessly murdering each other to celebrating, embracing, singing in just one day? We know it happened because soldiers never forgot it, wrote home about it, told its story over and over. 

Could it really have happened the way we say it did, each year on this night? God come to earth. The whole world pausing to hear a newborn’s cry.

A part-time preacher from my husband’s hometown, Wayland, Massachusetts, penned these words in 1849, in response to the bloody Mexican-American war. I know they will be familiar to you: 

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold;
"Peace on the earth, good will to men
From heaven's all-gracious King" –
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.

And I trust the longing of the following verses will be utterly familiar to you, too, although we don’t sing them as often:

But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!

For lo! the days are hastening on
By prophet bards foretold,
When with the ever circling years
Comes round the age of gold;
When Peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Just a few years before, a Frenchman wrote these words that were translated in another beloved carol, words that became all the more moving in next decades of abolitionist struggle and the American Civil war:

Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.

It matters to me that this poetry was written in the midst of the same sort of endless conflict and pain that our world faces today. That these words and others like it welled up inside of other Christians as they contemplated the promise of Christmas. It matters that many more have put those words to music and sung them in many different languages, for almost two hundred years. The story of these carols reassure me that the hope of Christmas is not a denial of the world as it is. The hope of Christmas is born into our exquisite longing. It binds it up. Makes it holy. 

On this holiest of nights, we hold our breath until we hear it, the newborn’s cry.

And in that precious sound, there it is: the sound of the beautiful world that could be. A future filled with peace. A moment of angelsong that could be and will be again. The good news for me this year is that something in each of us that yearns to protect and nurture that sound, that hope, to keep it close, keep it safe and alive. The Good News is that hope is reborn in every child. All Children.

“A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices. For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.” That hope is why we can sing the songs we do on this night. Why in the darkest, coldest part of the year, we can sing, “Joy to the world.” This weary world. 

To believe in Christmas is to give ourselves over to the most tender, most nurturing center of our souls. It is to let the swords and shields and all our desperate barriers to love slip from our hands. To believe in Christmas is to fall on our knees in awe of what could be, what will be, when love is all in all. 

To the newborn’s cry, we give back our heart’s dearest song: Alleluia, alleluia! Merry Christmas! Amen.