[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians Carol Service on Sunday 18th of December 2022]
(Readings: Luke 1:26-38, Luke 2:1-11, and extracts from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens)
I am sure that many of us will have Christmas traditions at home or with our families. A key one for me has been watching a particular film at Christmas, every Christmas, something I have done for as long as I can remember. I have never seen it earlier or later in the year. It has always had to be watched at Christmas. This year, I broke this tradition – by seeing it early!
I am, of course, talking about the best Christmas film in existence – and now I’ve uttered those words, I know that this is bound to go down as a controversial sermon. Any guesses as to what the best Christmas film ever is?
It is, of course, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Zosh and I went to see it in the cinema on Wednesday and, like every time I watched it, I cried.
Christmas is a time of stories, both making new ones and retelling old ones (with or without the help of Muppets). Not only does Dinkins’s classic work get an outing, but adults are treated to the late-night ghost story on the telly.
However, stories have not always been popular. In Russia, an author called Korney Chukovsky (think the Russian equivalent of Dr Seuss) got into hot water in 1928 when his children’s book Krokodil was condemned as “bourgeois nonsense” by none other than Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaia. The heart of her criticism was that Chukovsky’s fictional character, Krokodil Krokodilovich, was illustrated as an anthropomorphic crocodile who wore a hat, smoked cigars, and spoke Turkish. Krupskaia thought such stories were completely incompatible with reason and that the Russian school system should instead teach children why it is impossible for a crocodile to smoke cigars, wear hats, or speak any human language – never mind Turkish!
Such a reaction against stories is not unknown outside that period of Russian history. Back in 2014, Richard Dawkins found himself in hot water after appearing to condemn fairy tales as “pernicious”. “Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasies of childhood, magical as they are? Or should we be fostering a spirit of scepticism?” – he was quoted as saying. He went on: “Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it’s statistically too improbable.”
If stories are criticised as irrational and statistically improbable, then it is easy to see why some people might be tempted to double down on the stories that are important to them. The Christmas story is no exception. Indeed, I recently heard someone say that we should no longer refer to the narrative of Jesus’s birth as a “story” but as a “history”, for it is recorded in the Gospels, and its details must therefore be historical fact.
In our second reading today, we heard The Gospel Luke mention a decree from Caesar Augustus “that all the world should be registered”. In Luke’s Gospel, this event kickstarts the whole journey to Bethlehem. The problem is that most scholars are now fairly sure that such a decree never happened. There was a later census conducted in the region in 6 CE by a local governor, but this had nothing to do with Augustus. Even if this discrepancy in dates could be figured out, archaeologists have found enough evidence of Roman tax censuses to know that the only requirement was to be at home. There was no mass travelling to where one’s descendants happened to have lived. On top of all this, only the Gospels of Luke and Matthew contain the nativity story we are so familiar with – Mark and John are silent on the issue – and only Luke’s Gospel contains any mention of a census as part of the story.
To save something from being criticised as a story by attempting to declare it as history is a mistake. Histories far too easily succumb to the scrutiny of judgment and can be found unreliable and counterfactual. We best safeguard the truth of the nativity story by telling it as a story.
For it is a true story in that it has truth in it. If it were not so, none of us would be here today. We are each here because we recognise the truth in the story and wish to honour it.
We have all known people who have got pregnant at times that society would deem inappropriate.
We have all known men who have stuck by those they love in difficult times, or at least we wished we had known them!
We have all known people who have encountered difficulties in starting a family amid poverty.
We have all known government bureaucracy to be an inconvenient nuisance.
And even though few of us know what it is like to be a refugee as the infant Jesus was, to have to flee one’s home for fear of violence, I know for a fact that there are people in our Borough who know that experience all too well – for whom such experiences are their lived reality today and not just some quirk of ancient history or biblical story.
Maybe that is why I and so many others come back to the Muppet Christmas Carol every year. We may not have ever been Tiny Tim, but we all know children in need of care who are denied it due to costs all while the rich continue to get richer. We may never have been Scrooge, but we have all – at least once – passed by someone we know we could have helped or prioritised our own interests when we had no need to.
Great stories become part of our own stories. This is a place of stories. This year, I have celebrated those whose stories are just beginning, a couple whose stories are merging together, and sadly, mourned those whose stories have reached their conclusion.
A dog might not just be for Christmas, but the Christmas story is not just for Christmas either. I encourage you all to continue to write the Christmas story on the pages of your heart today, tomorrow, and for all the days to come. Let Christmas be the heart of your story.
Amen.
