Address for the Christmas Carol Service 2023

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As we sing beautiful Carols in this beautiful hall, we know how far the world is from the vision of peace that we hear in our readings this evening. There are 30 wars and conflicts around the world at present, with terrible death tolls and injustices, and the trauma ricochets among us here in Edinburgh.

The war in Gaza and Israel is most powerfully in our collective blood stream; the trauma is in our corporate nervous system. And so we go into fight, flight or freeze.  We accuse one another, or we flee (feeling unsafe to go to libraries or demos), or we freeze, and feel at a total loss, finding that all words and actions are wrong and that silence is also wrong.

Tonight, we are singing not so as to hide from these realities, but to find our responses to them. The darker things become, the more we need light; the more troubled we become, the more we need wisdom; the more fractured the world is, the more we need the hope of peace.

This Carol Service follows a tradition of Christmas readings and Carols that has been shaped by war. Eric Milner-White, a First World War Chaplain emerging from traumas of the Western Front and the Italian Campaign, introduced a service like this one to King’s College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve 1918. He said we need more imaginative worship to answer our horrors. The deeper we go into the mud and rubble, the higher we need to soar in our imagination for what else is possible.

Two decades later, the College’s organist, David Willcocks was fighting in World War 2. At his postings, he would play whatever piano or organ was around, to keep people’s spirits up. He later wrote beautiful descants for choirs to sing to the last verses of many carols, some of which you will hear tonight.

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The way to deal with a body that is in fight, flight or freeze, is to provide a context strong enough to contain the rage that must be expressed, given the huge injustices suffered and the legacy of centuries of tension.  I’m so grateful to our musicians – organist, Salvation Army band, Choir directors and Choirs - for making it possible for us to sing together and be musically transported this evening.

The war in Gaza and Israel; it didn’t start with us, with our generation. It didn’t start with the murders and hostage taking on 7 Oct. It didn’t start with the rise of Hamas, or the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, or the Naqba (the catastrophe, of Palestinians being killed and driven from their homes in 1948), or the Holocaust, or the Balfour Declaration, or the European Pogroms, or the Ottomans, or the Byzantines, or the Romans – who were occupying the land when Jesus was born. It didn’t start with Judaism, or Christianity, or Islam, or with the Hittites, Canaanites and other ancient warring tribes predating all of these. It is in all of us and it is as old as humanity. This is not to excuse us. There is always fault. There have also been long periods of peace. Whatever we can recognise in someone else, be it anger, compassion, or probably both, whatever we recognise in others is also in us.

The infant Jesus was born into a nervous system and bloodline that wanted to drive out the Romans. His mother’s name, Mary, or Miriam, was popular with the resistance; her namesake, Miriam sister of Moses, helped lead her people out of slavery. The people of Jesus’ day were looking for someone to save them, as perhaps we are now, hoping for a Nelson Mandela, or a Gandhi or Dali Lama for the Levant.

Most people did not recognise Jesus for who he was, because the weapons he used against the occupiers were not the machinery of war. He was a prophet, and prophets do not take sides, other than to speak for truth and justice (which, along with children, the sick and elderly, are early casualties of conflict). Prophets disrupt everyone’s thinking, and raise it to a higher level. This can cost them their lives. Even Jesus’ closest followers did not understand him until after his death. The crowds turned against him, and the Romans executed him. But we cannot simply eliminate people and expect that to be the end of it. Those we eliminate always come back; they haunt our minds, their people fight in their name; we carry them around in our communal nervous system.

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Jesus was God born to us to bring compassion and hope to our warring humanity. He taught us how to love. He took on our fear and fury in his own body, and did not pass it on. When the Romans killed him, he prayed ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing’. And when he came back, he came back not in withering vengeance, but in peace, and he taught his disciples to be his body of love on earth. If we are still looking for someone to save us, let’s look to ourselves to provide the hands that tenderly care, the mouth that speaks with truth and grace, and the eyes that look with compassion on the world.

As a collective body, we can be strong enough to hold those who must express rage and fury, without causing harm. We can be a body compassionate enough that instead of causing our individual members to flee or hide, we create a home for us all. And we can be a body inspired enough to get ourselves unfrozen and find our best action.

So let us fill our singing with all the feelings, of dismay, outrage, compassion and longing, as we raise the roof with our carolling. May even the gorgeous murals rejoice, as God receives our lament and hopeful expectation. Let us see one another for the hurting, loving beings that we are, and let us fire up our imaginations for a world in which we are bringers of peace.