Midnight Christmas Eucharist at Portsmouth Cathedral 2007

Every year, this Cathedral is filled several times with crowds of people who want to hear yet again the Christmas message and enjoy the music that traditionally surrounds it. Bethlehem, it seems, has not lost its pull, its attraction, in a world full of violence among old and new enemies, and strong questioning of the place of faith in a society that – like ours – has Christianity in the bones of its history.

Obviously, we could do without the violence. It’s a tragedy, for example that Bethlehem today has a shrinking, frightened Christian minority, pulled hither and thither by the forces that are trying to control the Middle East. It’s hardly ‘peace on earth’ for them, with weak political leadership trying desperately to work out some kind of settlement that does justice to historic hatreds and rivalries.

But it’s probably the questioning of faith that affects us more. And questioning is something that Christianity has known from the very start – you only have to read in the Gospels those sharp interviews Jesus had with different groups, who would do justice to Jeremy Paxman and John Snow at their most aggressive. We’ve been here before, as they say. And each year our own, perhaps hidden, questions need to be brought to the surface as we journey in mind and heart to that obscure Judaean hill-town – hardly a throne of unquestioned glory. There is little point in making the journey without taking the questions along with us. Otherwise what we are doing here tonight is a sham, a beautiful, musical sham, but a sham nonetheless.

I can’t begin to guess what your questions are. Speaking for myself, having missed the last two Christmases here because of my illness, my questions are different from those I have lived with before. For me, it is the helpless, vulnerable human face of God that I can see tonight, which is worlds away from the cynical ‘selfish gene’ Richard Dawkins writes about so confidently as he writes off Christianity. But nor do I desire certainties and cheap, easy solutions: the quick-fix God who will solve our problems for ever. The Bethlehem trip helps me face down my fears and doubts, and deepens my trust in those who care for me. I can’t deal with life on my own – as if I ever could.

So I go to that manger, not like a dumb beast wanting to munch hay, in some kind of instinct for survival. I go for a different kind of nourishment, as a human being, with a mind and a heart, a mind to think and understand, a heart to sense and to feel. It is the whole of me – not some phoney ‘religious’ part of me - that makes the journey. And as I get nearer, I sense more and more that pull, that attraction, as if Bethlehem is coming to meet me. And what do I find?

What I find lacks the excitement of today’s celebrity culture. I don’t find glamour. I don’t find slick sales-talk either. Instead I find that babe, that helpless, vulnerable human face of God. In him, my questions are not answered in a flash. They are met, and lived with. And, in a strange way, that is enough for now. In our very different world, Jesus continues to meet us on our own terms, both accepting our frail attempts at humanity, and challenging our assumptions and expectations. It is in the accepting and the challenging that we can find the real and deep movement of why he is born among us tonight.

An early Christian preacher put it in this way: ‘He was in a manger, that you may be at the altar. He was on earth, that you may be in the stars. He had no other place in the inn, that you may have many mansions in the heavens.’ (Ambrose, Exposition of the Gospel of Luke, 2.41.)

+ Kenneth Portsmouth