Speaking at St Paul’s Cathedral on Christmas Day, Bishop Sarah shared a sermon, “Jesus, the reflection of God’s glory, the very imprint of his being”, drawing from Hebrews 1:1-4 and John 1: 1-14.

‘He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being’.

I love Christmas, I love the excitement of Santa Claus, presents, trees, reindeer, snow, mistletoe, and decorations. I love the music, and the stories of magi, shepherds, barn animals, and innkeepers.

However, in all the glitter, lights and carols, we can easily miss the key message at the heart of the Christmas Story, that God enters human life as it is – not as we would rather it was.

For many people, Christmas in particular triggers emotions around broken relationships, absent family members, difficult childhoods – or the deep, unfulfilled longing for a child. And likewise, the scriptures are full of human stories where joy sits alongside disappointment, and celebration amidst brokenness.

So, in Matthew and Luke, the birth narratives themselves include Elizabeth and Zechariah, who have longed all through their lives for a child, and Mary and Joseph who risk social exclusion because of the circumstances in which their child is conceived.

The stories do not present some idyllic setting of a baby who never cries. The shepherds on the hillside were not mentioned as a pastoral scene for greetings cards. The Christ-child does not have an easy entrance into the world – and within the earliest months of his life he will become a refugee.

Both of our readings this morning point to the heart of the Christmas story, which is the story of incarnation – God taking on flesh, coming alongside and among us, entering creation in a way which is different to any other way that we might otherwise imagine. He experiences life exactly as we do, not from a privileged position.

In the passage we heard from the Gospel of John, he tells us that life itself comes from God. Everything that exists has been brought into being by God – nothing is beyond the horizon of God’s creativity and love. In some extraordinary way for which we don’t quite have words, God does not just create from a distance then set the world going like a machine at arm’s length. Instead creation is infused with God’s very being, which is most clearly and miraculously expressed in the most startling way in the form of Jesus.

He is the exact imprint, says the writer of Hebrews, of God’s very being.

Yet he is quite literally a baby – a tiny, vulnerable new life, born in a space shared by human beings and animals. What does it mean that this is how God looks? What does it say to us, that God comes among us as a tiny child?

When we look at a small baby, there is something about trust, utter abandonment to those whose privilege it is to care for that new life: to feed him or her, to bathe them, to clothe them against the cold and to hold them secure when every experience they are having is of something new, something awesome, something potentially frightening. So there is something here about God’s utter abandonment of self in that act of letting go. Letting go of any control or personal power, any self-protection.

In Christ, God is trusting himself to a world which is precarious, where anything may happen. God is trusting himself to us. This is no ‘pretend’ way of entering the life of the world. This is for real.

The passage from Hebrews also tells us that this is the Son ‘through whom God also created the world’. So God’s imprint, found most clearly in Jesus, is not confined to Jesus alone. There are signs embedded in the whole of creation. Signs of God’s presence. Of God’s life, spilling through all life, shaping the created world – everything from stars, cliffs, rolling hillsides and deserts to the tiniest dormouse, or the pondlife which can be seen only under a microscope. God’s imprint is here, there, everywhere. That life which can’t be suppressed.

We can at times struggle to see that imprint when we witness, across the globe, the conflict, intolerance and political unrest which drives people from the lands of their birth, the environmental damage and the impact of climate crisis on the most vulnerable societies. Even here in this country and this city – where lives are marred by food poverty, fuel poverty, debt and violent crime – it can be easy to despair.

How do we reflect Christ’s light in this beautiful, complicated and broken world?

There is a word which is not used in either of these readings, but it is something which breathes through them both. And that is ‘hope’. Hope is the conviction of what God, in Jesus Christ, did in the past, which points to a future, and which leaps into our present in such a way that we feel secure in the here and now: sure that he will save us, that the best is yet to come, and that his kingdom of justice and peace will triumph. Hope is not just wishful thinking. It is alive and active and it takes practice.

Nicholas Kristoff, who is an American journalist who writes about global affairs, human rights and health, says that ‘Hope is a muscle that we must build and develop’. As we celebrate the coming of the Christ-child once again, we can commit ourselves to flexing the muscles of hope. Flexing them as we join in with God’s healing work in the world.

From our perspective two thousand years after the birth of Jesus, we know that what followed was an extraordinary life in which the poverty-stricken, the minoritised, the sick and those whom society dis-abled found themselves to be the principal focus of the divine gaze of love and healing. 

Cole Arthur Riley, in her book Black Liturgies, writes: ‘‘As we enter this season, help us to remember that hope is rarely ever sudden, but that it’s okay if it grows on us slowly – as carefully as the hairs on our saviour’s head.’ (Cole Arthur Riley: Black Liturgies, p258-259 Kindle version)

It is as we live in hope that the imprint of God’s being, which is in each of us from the very beginning, grows stronger. As we turn to the places and people most in need of God’s healing, and as we open ourselves in trust to that healing in our own lives, we pray that the imprint of God, the reflection of God’s light, will grow slowly but surely over the days and years. Slowly and surely in the most painful and broken places of our world. Slowly and surely in our relationships with one another. Slowly and surely in ourselves. May that imprint grow, as slowly and surely as the hairs on our saviour’s head.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, we become the character — the imprint — of Christ, for a broken and hurting world.