Midnight Mass 2025

Isaiah 9.2-7; Luke 2.1-20

In the name of God, Creating, Redeeming and Transforming. Amen.

Just over 10 days ago, on the other side of the world, Ahmed al-Ahmed found himself unexpectedly, and horrifically, at the centre of unfolding tragedy. Having been forced to flee his own war-torn city of Idlib in Syria in 2006, Ahmed had made his way as a refugee to Sydney, making a new home there and eventually becoming an Australian citizen. He was finally reunited with his parents in the last 6 months as they too managed to make the journey to Australia, and was making a living through the fruit shop he now owned. But on this particular Sunday evening, he was having a coffee with a friend near Bondi beach, when shots began to ring out. Many if you will have seen what happened next, in the midst of that horrific and deadly attack on the Jewish community celebrating Hannukah in Sydney. Ahmed responded to the sound of gunfire by running toward it, and spotting a gunmen, he crept behind parked cars to then jump out and disarm one of the two men bent on bringing death and destruction. He disarmed and so prevented some further injury and death at personal cost – he was shot in the shoulder. We are told he is now recovering.

I know little more than that about Ahmed. But his story, that courageous and selfless act, got me wondering about the accidents of history that meant that this Syrian born man, forced to flee the violence of his own homeland, happened to be in that particular place at that particular time. What had formed him, such that he ran toward the sound of gunfire rather than away? A choice I’m not sure, in that moment, I would have made. It is those particulars: a Muslim man, responding to an attack on the Jewish community in the city of his new home far from his first home; an act of bravery which defies rational explanation; a fruit seller, suddenly finding himself in the midst of world news. It is those particulars that are worth contemplating; the very particular life experiences that meant that he responded in that way at that time, on the other side of the world from so much that originally formed him. He no doubt hoped, in fleeing to Australia, to escape the violence that haunted him in Idlib. And yet here he finds himself compelled to run toward the sound of gunfire. A very particular choice, by that particular, remarkable, unremarkable, man.

More than 200 years ago, in the midst of the so-called European Enlightenment, the German philosopher, Gotthold Lessing, articulated the problem that he saw with Christian faith in an age when people were seeking a rational basis for what to believe. ‘The accidental truths of history,’ said Lessing, ‘can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.’ In other words, particular events, particular happenings, are just that – particular and partial. They cannot be the foundation for an understanding of universal truth, of that which is true everywhere at all times. And this is a problem for Christianity, said Lessing, because we proclaim that a particular man born at a particular time – now more than 2,000 years ago – brings salvation to all people everywhere; and reveals the nature of God. The God who by definition is universal, the Truth and the Good. There is an ‘ugly ditch’ said Lessing between the particulars of history, including the historical figure of Jesus, and the universal truths of love, truth, goodness that faith wishes to proclaim. How can a particular man, born in a particular time, far from our own lives and experience, save us? This is the scandal of particularity that Lessing wrestles with.

And it is certainly true that what we celebrate this night, is the birth of a particular baby, to particular parents, in a particular, obscure, location. Christ comes in humility, we may say, but what difference does that finally make? How can those events, how might the wandering Jewish teacher from Galilee, save us; bring us to faith and hope and love?

What is proclaimed this night, what we celebrate and are drawn into, is a life lived, as all lives are, in a particular time and space. Christ’s incarnation commits God to that particularity. Christ is embodied, lives out in flesh and blood, a life shaped by love. That life that begins here in the poverty of the stable; in the jubilant praise of angels and the response of shepherds; in the pondering and faltering parenting of Mary and Joseph. But what we celebrate this night is how the shape of that life, in all its grace and truth, shapes and moulds our lives lived in our own particular times, and in the midst of our challenges. As that particular life is proclaimed to us and by us, as that life is given into our hands in broken bread and poured out wine, so we ourselves, like generations of Christians before us, are caught up into the ongoing embodied life of Christ.

Christ is no super-hero, freed from the constraints of time and space, of the limits of what being human means. Neither is Christ an ideal, a set of ideas, that we endlessly fail at living out. Christ comes as this particular man, to live and die a very particular life. It is the scandal of that particularity that we celebrate this night.

For we too are formed, if we open our hearts and minds to the shape and purposes and calling of this life; we too are formed into habits and practices of love and courage and selflessness. Not many of us will find ourselves, God willing, in a situation where we have to make the choice Ahmed did and run toward gun-fire. But we will, and do, face our own particular challenges. We face, and make choices, day by day. And the question that Christ poses, and seeks to help us answer, is how much grace and truth can we find as we respond to what life asks of us.

So my prayer is that the particular life whose birth we celebrate this night, the life given and shared once more in that bread and wine that is his body and blood, might shape my life and yours in concrete embodied ways. That Christ’s life might help us focus and respond to what is in front of us; the particular challenges that we are asked to shoulder and celebrate. That may be the family who gather around our Christmas table, in all their frustrating and loveable habits. It may be the challenge of creating a sense of home and community in our cosmopolitan city in our rootless age. It may be together responding to the challenge of climate change and how we make life sustainable and possible for the next generation and the one after that. These are the particular challenges of our own time, immediate and wide ranging, which require courage and love and selflessness, that cry out for embodied grace and truth. What is given to us this night, in the birth of this child, in the communion we share, is the life of Christ that can form us, and shape us. And in that formation, we pray to be made a little bit more loving, a little bit more wise; a little bit more gentle with one another and ourselves. It’s not Love, with a capital L we celebrate tonight; but our capacity, in Christ, to love the particular people given to us– family, friend or stranger. To join with Mary and Joseph in responding to this transforming presence come among us. To be, a little more faithfully, the gift we all receive this night. Amen.