A Christmas Message – A Swaddled Life?

Preached by The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury

Seven million are sold in the UK every year, and 85% of homes have one. They are green; they prickle; and they are twinkly. I’m talking, of course, about Christmas trees. Their continued popularity is no surprise. Christmas trees are much better than they used to be – in at least three different ways.

The trees are better. When I was growing up the tree would have shed half its needles by the time it was through the front door. By Twelfth Night there was a thick carpet of them underneath it and no amount of 1970s purple tinsel could disguise the reality that it had become an overdressed stick.

The lights are better. A fixture of every childhood Christmas was my father retrieving the box of decorations from the garage and testing the multicoloured fairy-lights by plugging them in. They never worked. At least an hour would follow as Dad laboriously checked each individual bulb in turn. My sister and I would jump up and down in exasperated anticipation while this ritual was gone through. And if Mum had forgotten to buy a packet of spares, well…

And the packaging is better. Perhaps you’ve seen the aluminium tunnels in which retailers of Christmas trees have invested, and into which your tree is thrust; through which it is pulled; and out of which it emerges, tightly wrapped in netting, tied at each end, and looking exactly like every other tree which receives the same treatment. Transformational. No wrestling a seven-foot fir tree along a High Street bustling with shoppers. No donning of reinforced gardening gloves for self-protection. No driving home with unruly branches sticking out of every window. Your tree is trussed up like a…like a Christmas turkey, like a pig in a blanket, or like an infant wrapped in bands of cloth dozing blissfully in a manger. Contained. Confined. Cocooned.

But then comes the big reveal, one of my favourite Christmas moments. You get the tree home. You carry it into the living room.  You lift it into its stand. You run your scissors up the netting – and the tree bursts forth. You see its majestic shape; you see its dense boskiness; you see its deep colour. You see it as it is and as only it is: your tree, set free like a…like a pudding slipping out of its porcelain basin, like your best Christmas present with the wrapping removed, or like what a writer known to us only as ‘John’ must have felt when he put into six syllables what he believed to be the eternal meaning of the birth we celebrate tonight. ‘And the Word became flesh’. No longer contained; no longer confined; no longer cocooned.

Wrapped up like all the others, or springing forth in glorious uniqueness: two Christmas tree moments. In which will you choose to live?

Enveloped in protective netting? Your insurance company will tell you it’s possible. So will your pension provider. So will a million influencers, and so will some of the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen who masquerade as our political and religious leaders. But while the warmth of the stable and the glow of the lamplight and the song of his mother hold the infant for a little while, within days he is on the run, forced into exile by the perpetually insecure King Herod. Jesus Christ is wrapped in nothing but the humanity he shares with us. He is protected from nothing – and neither are you and I.

This building, this music, this season, this Jesus, will not guarantee you a swaddled life. But they may – no, they will – cut through the layered netting of fear and pain with which we surround ourselves. They may – no, they will – open our eyes to our attempts to conceal ourselves, defend ourselves, and justify ourselves. They may, no they will – open our eyes to these as (at best) the strategies of a life half-lived or (at worst) as delusional vanity.

But Christmas sets us free, offering us the assurance that we can breathe, dream, create, and love. Christmas assures offers us of all this and more because here we kneel with the shepherds and sing with the angels, and here we discover that what John writes is true. The one whom we adore is the one of whom he writes, ‘…the Word became flesh’. We are protected from nothing, but we face nothing by ourselves. We are never alone. Never. Through all the fear and pain of our living and our dying God is with us and we are held by a love that is everlasting.

So: look at the Cathedral’s Christmas tree before you leave the building tonight. Look at it in all its lofty, proud, dazzling beauty. Uncontained, unconfined, uncocooned. Pointing heavenwards and shining with light. Just like you. Happy Christmas.