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Archbishop Stephen Cottrell

The Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell presents his 2023 Christmas Homily, with a message of hope: how to experience a peace beyond understanding, and happiness too.

There was no room at the inn. That's one of the first things small children learn about the Christmas story. Many learn very little else; reflecting what many of us, old and young, tend to do when God comes knocking. We turn God away. God – and God’s values of peace and justice, God’s uncomfortable habit of welcoming everyone and of treating everyone the same – are deeply disturbing in a world which loves to build barriers and pass judgment.

So we draw the curtains. Check the locks. Put the chain across the door. Set the burglar alarm. Make excuses. Say we’re busy. Pretend we’re out. Ask God politely to move along. Imagine we are in charge ourselves, and peek through the net curtains to check God’s gone somewhere else.

We don't want God on the telly. Well, not too much. We think a happy Christmas can be found in other ways, and any number of adverts sell us dreams of wealth and beauty and the products that will deliver them and the happiness that comes with them. So please don't disturb these aspirations with something that tells us we may have to wait, or make do with what we’ve got, and that, instead of accumulating loads and loads, more and more, happiness might actually be found in giving. Especially not at Christmas.

And we don't want God in politics. Well, not too much. And only if God supports my opinions. That’s what my happiness depends on.

Fleeing for their lives

And we don't seem to want God in our homes. Fairy lights, tinsel, Christmas trees, yuletide logs, reindeers whose red noses glow in the dark, and Father Christmas, yes they are very welcome, these are what makes Christmas happy, and if this disquieting story of a teenage mum and a backstreet birth, a poll tax summons and a tyrant king, a bloody genocide and a refugee family fleeing for their lives, must intrude on our celebrations, then let it be that cosy, neutral, Disneyland version that sits on the mantelpiece and, bathed in beatific light, won't harm anyone.

And, saddest of all, we don't seem to want God in our hearts. Why? Because our hearts are too full of the worship of other gods. The gods of celebrity, the gods of pride, the gods of plenty and excess whose festivals of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Panic Tuesday, re-mortgage the house Wednesday and Boxing Day sales we must faithfully observe.

Oh, poor sinners that we are this Christmas in a country disturbed by unhealthy divisions and divisive slogans in a world engulfed again by war and conflict: never more in need of this fantastic story of love, yet never more distant from its firm and particular embrace.

(Clockwise from top left) Lay Evangelist Kia; the team at St Philip's Food Bank Service, Hull; volunteer Wendy; the Archbishop speaks to the Chorister Bishop, Edward Sangwine.

God is knocking. And God can offer a peace beyond understanding and a happiness as well. That’s what Wendy discovered. Furloughed from her job, she approached her local church in Hull to find out how she could get involved serving her community. In that service, supporting a foodbank network she came to serve many, and discovered the one who is the servant of all, the Christ child we are invited to welcome today. She welcomed Jesus into her life, and joy and renewal followed. Because God can break down barriers, can close distances of separation in a moment. Yes, I know we have all put so much insulation round our lives that it is sometimes hard to hear God; I know that we may think life is easier or even better without God, but the message of Christmas is that God is among us, and in  the most unlikely and surprising ways, offering the world a different future. God is in the Christ child born of Mary, born as one of us.

Dear brothers and sisters, here in York Minster and listening in at home, God is knocking at our door. If we open the door, God will come in and eat with us. God will help us see ourselves differently. God will help us see the world differently, for it is God’s peace that the world so urgently needs, a peace we cannot manufacture for ourselves.