The Eucharist of Christmas Night, 24 December 2008, 11.30 pm

'Of mans first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse'.

Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to read all twelve books of Paradise Lost .We’d be here until Epiphany, and in any case Radio 3 is making a much better job of it than I ever would.

On the four hundredth anniversary of John Milton’s birth many commentators have pondered why the work of England’s greatest epic poet has slipped so far from the public gaze. Theories abound. Its great length means that it’s not easily digestible. It could never feature as a Poem on the Underground. Its complex language means that it’s inaccessible to many. ‘Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky’ is forbidding to a generation that has just learned to text.

But more profound that either of these hurdles to popularity is its sheer ambition. For Milton sets out to tell in verse the story of humanity’s creation, fall and restoration. Grand narratives come no grander than this. His setting stretches beyond the farthest limits of the universe; his timescale is eternity; his players are the omnipotent God and his heavenly courtiers. The scope is breathtaking, and it is that very scope that makes Milton so difficult for modern readers.

For we no longer trust grand narratives. Poets, philosophers and prophets could once upon a time articulate over-arching stories for the world with utter confidence. That confidence was dealt a body blow on the battlefields of Western Europe more than ninety years ago. Civilization, progress, liberal values: those great totems that the educated citizens of the European empires treasured and celebrated as their common story when they entered the first decade of the last century - those were left bleeding in the trenches, their humane pretensions revealed as paper-thin veneers. And in their place other ideologies appeared and in their turn these too have gone to their fate, very often deservedly: fascism perished in the rubble of Berlin; statist Marxism in the wastes of the Gulag. Unregulated consumer capitalism may have done the same in the credit crunch of 2008.

The effect of the last hundred years’ history is that we disbelieve grand attempts to interpret history. We are suspicious of authority and we are cynical about the claims made by those who wield authority. We prefer our politicians to be technocrats rather than ideologues; we worry more about solutions than visions. What matters is what will work– not what might be. Our soap opera culture, and celebrity addiction respond to this preference. They give us manageable stories about people like us, or people almost like us, and don’t pose the awkward, eternal questions that drove Milton to write. What were the national obsessions of this year? Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Heather Mills McCartney and Strictly Come Dancing.

‘Milton! Thou should’st be living at the hour: England hath need of thee.’ Wordsworth’s lines have never seemed more prescient.

Yet if she is true to her vocation then at Christmas the Church does the thing that some of her most vocal critics long for her to do. She takes a stand; she refuses to collude with the national trend; she rows against the tide instead of meekly swimming with it. For at Christmas the Church defiantly offers an interpretation of human history and proclaims a grand narrative. But this is not a narrative which seeks to diminish or enslave people as did the discredited ideologies of the last century. It is not a narrative which absolves its hearers of their responsibilities for one another or for the world. It is not a narrative which aims to overthrow all other narratives by force of arms. For this is the narrative of God’s love for his world, a love which compels him to become a part of his world, a love which, ultimately, drives him to suffer at the hands of his world. This is the narrative of God becoming one of us so that we might become like him. This is the narrative we celebrate tonight, the narrative of Bethlehem, the narrative that tells us that human time and earthly space matter to Almighty God, this time and this place matter to Almighty God, that this time and this place are the time and the place in which God acts, that in this time, this place and these people God is present among us.

So let us proclaim that narrative with confidence, with joy. Tonight earth and heaven are one; tonight love eternal lies in a manger; tonight we learn our place in the grand narrative of God.

Let John Milton, poet, prophet, seeker after truth, have the last word:

‘…at his birth a star
Unseen before in heav’n proclaims him come,
And guides the eastern sages, who inquire
His place, to offer incense, myrrh, and gold;
His place of birth a solemn angel tells
To simple shepherds, keeping watch by night;
They gladly thither haste, and by a choir
Of squadroned angels hear his carol sung.
A virgin is his mother, but his sire
The power of the Most High; he shall ascend
The throne hereditary, and bound his reign
With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heav’ns’.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.