A Christmas Message, 2024 
 

Midnight Mass: Christmas 2006, Basra Iraq

The poet WH Auden names his Christmas Oratorio, “For the Time Being.” It is a title that suggests contrast. There is before and after, there is darkness and there is light, there is what is and what could be, and we are in the temporal space in between.

As I write, I am reminded of a Christmas in 2006 when I was deployed as a chaplain in Iraq. As we celebrated Midnight Mass in the Headquarters, we were conscious that many of our soldiers were heading out into the darkness on a dangerous operation to take on the Al Jameat Police Station where we had reports of torture and executions. That contrast between the light of Christmas reflected in the candlelight in the service and the thought of our young soldiers moving out into the darkness to confront that particular evil was stark indeed. It was a risk. The possibility of losing people was always horrible, but to do so on Christmas Day was a particularly unpleasant prospect. The light really was shining in the darkness for us in a profound way. As it turned out, all the soldiers came back, 127 prisoners who were being tortured and faced imminent execution were released, seven gunmen were killed and the building utterly destroyed. A strange Christmas act perhaps, but a present to the abused and forsaken for all that. 

If not always as stark and personal, it seems to me that Christmas is always a contrast like this. At the first Christmas the Christ child is not even born before his life is in danger. In our own day, we gather around the manger, around our bright and cheerful firesides, around our lighted Christmas trees, and we too are aware of the brokenness and danger of the world that surrounds us in the darkness outside. Wars threaten, ideologies clash, lies assail the truth everywhere, and we come to the light in search of something that seems scarcely possible. As Auden puts it;

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

And that, my dear friends, is exactly what we do find. We who live in the “for the time being” see in this fragile, ordinary and unremarkable birth a hope that is brighter than all the world’s darkness. We look into his eyes, and we see the infinite that is coming, and we see just how weak and fragile the darkness and the evil shapes it hides actually are. If our lives tell us anything it is how quickly entrenched evil can break and melt away when put to the test. The Jamiat in 2006 was just one tiny example. 

Most importantly of all, in Christ we discover the real choice that is ours to make. We see, as Auden puts it,” our choice of How to love and Why.” Every year it is a shock. Every year we come not expecting to find it, and yet somehow, we do. 

As we look forward into the coming year we do so as men and women of hope. Christ Church is part of that hope for each one of us and, as we kneel before the manger once more, come what may, we will have that choice of how to love and know the reason why. 

May I wish you all a blessed, joyful, hopeful and merry Christmas.

Your friend and Rector,
Tim