The End of the World: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2023 (Midnight Mass)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9. 2-4, 6-7; John 1. 1-14

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”         

How would you react if a vicar, at Midnight Mass, in a medieval church, in a rather traditional village in the depths of Deep England, started preaching about the End of the World? Would you wonder if he had been teleported in from the American Bible Belt? Or perhaps, on hearing a certain accent, wonder if he was a friend of another Ulster preacher, whom some of you may remember, the man who liked to say “no” a lot?

In fact, in the churches I go to I never hear anyone preaching on the end of the world. They’re far too moderate and sensible for that sort of thing. But lately, I’ve heard people talking about the end of the world on Radio 4 and in the pages of The Times.

That nice Matthew Syed, who won an Olympic medal in ping-pong, and makes those interesting radio programmes about quirky bits of modern history, had a column in The Times the other week saying our advancing technology meant that we might cause our own extinction. Then last Tuesday, when I was driving, Radio 4’s PM programme – not normally known for fire and brimstone sermons – had an interview with Geoffrey Hinton, the man often called “the godfather of artificial intelligence”, warning of the risks that AI might pose to human existence within the next 5-20 years. And all that’s before we talk about climate change, or nuclear war.

The world might be entering a very dark era.

So far, so cheerful!

Tonight’s Gospel reading wasn’t about the end of the world, but the beginning. Some being called “the Word” – isn’t that an odd term – some being named “the Word” already existed before the beginning of the universe. In a phrase full of paradox, it says the Word was with God and also was God. Then the story gets even stranger when it says this mysterious godly Word, older than the universe, took flesh – became a human being – and lived among us.

This wonderful piece of writing probably started out as a hymn sung in the first years of Christianity by the community that had gathered around St John. These early Christians believed that our other Bible reading tonight – the one that John Chandler read – was written about that ancient being who became human. A child, a son, would be given to a people who dwelt in darkness; the boy be their light and establish justice and righteousness. They believed that this vision, already ancient in their times, had become real in the boy named Jesus Christ, God made human, born in a stable because there was no room at the inn. That boy grew up not to be a war leader or a political power player, but a man who said His Kingdom was not of this world. Jesus’ victory was to die on the Cross, and in doing do to open the way to eternal life for us – for Jesus, being God, could not die and so by being put to death, He destroyed death.

Now, the man who had the vision of the boy who would bring light to a people in darkness – the man who wrote the passage that John Chandler read – was called Isaiah. Isaiah lived at a time when things seemed to be in decline, when Isaiah’s people looked back fondly on a golden age that was recent but receding into the past, when the quality of leadership was mostly poor, and one crisis seemed to follow another. For all the time that separates us from Isaiah and his people, some things about their situation seem very familiar, to us, in this country, right now.

Isaiah’s countrymen had a firm faith that they were God’s chosen people, which was correct, and also believed that because of this, they could do no wrong, which was definitely incorrect. Isaiah was one of the first to start warning his people that they had become arrogant, assuming they could do no wrong in God’s sight. As a result they were taking bigger and bigger foreign policy risks, despite bordering on larger and richer countries, even as their own cities were ever less well-maintained, their army less well-supplied, and the gap between rich and poor got out of control. Familiar, eh? Isaiah warned his countrymen that they were completely out of their depth, and he was right. In the end, disaster struck.

In our time, we have the opposite problem. While Isaiah’s countrymen were convinced that God would support them no matter what they did, we stopped believing in God at all. We thought God was a silly myth that people only believed in because they weren’t clever and scientific enough. God had no place in the modern world, we told ourselves, and science and technology would mean that as generation followed generation we would bring ourselves steadily closer and closer to building heaven on Earth.

Now technology can be a wonderful thing. Many of you will enjoy chatting with family at the other end of the world via Zoom or FaceTime at Christmas; some of you are only here because advancing medical technology saved your life. But one thing that technology can’t do is make us any kinder or more honest or more decent than we were in the past. Technology amplifies our power to do good, but also amplifies our power to do evil.

It’s not God-bothering sky pilots like me making this point, but very secular commentators in The Times and Radio 4. The images we’ve seen on our screens from Gaza and Ukraine show how much more dangerous even conventional wars have become in the era of drones and laser-guided bombs.

Just like Isaiah, we are starting to realise we are out of our depth. We thought we could uninstall God because we were so clever. We forgot the enormous difference between cleverness and wisdom, and we forgot that clever people can be wicked as well as good.

And this is where we have hope, as long as we are willing to take the risk of trusting that Jesus Christ was that mysterious Word who was with God and was God before all things began.

Christians have always believed that Jesus Christ came into the world on a rescue mission; that at some point in our evolution from being naked apes who lived by instinct to homo sapiens with the capacity to know good from evil, something went badly wrong. That’s what the Adam and Eve myth is all about – humans getting seduced by our own cleverness, straying from the limits God had placed on us for our own good, and getting ourselves exiled into a land where death and pain are ever-present.

In this time of crisis, amplified by our technological progress, Christianity is more relevant than ever before. It’s precisely because the human story always risked ending in a moment like this Jesus Christ’s rescue mission was needed – God and the Word will have seen all this before time began. The moment when we accept that our generation is genuinely at risk of seeing the end of human life is the moment when we can start a journey away from that existential risk to something better. The moment we trust God, as individuals, as a country, as a human race, is the moment that God can begin to save us from the worst of ourselves.

And now to our wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, to Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and to the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, be glory in the highest, until the end of all ages. Amen.