Sermon preached at the Christmas Day service in Durham Cathedral

It’s got a cute nose and big round eyes;
It’s created excitement you can’t disguise;
It’s a wonderful baby from a perfect pair,
And that’s reason enough for a great fanfare.
Congratulations on your new baby boy!

Joseph reads the card which the innkeeper’s wife has slid under the stable door. He reads it again and hands it to Mary – who ponders these things in her heart.

Later that morning another card appears – this one from the girlfriends of one of the shepherds:

A baby boy's one thing
The whole world adores,
And the best part of all
This one is yours!

The Gospels are strangely silent about the cards that Mary and Joseph received. Perhaps there were quite a lot because everybody loves a baby. As Mary carries Jesus around the market total strangers stop and coo. Everybody loves a baby. Babies remind us of how very precious human life really is.

Baby’s can bring out the best in people. You have only to look at how gently and tenderly people treat a new born. Babies are very precious. That is why there is such a terrible outrage, as we know only too well, when a baby is hurt or even killed.

The sad thing of course is that as the baby grows up he or she seems to become less adorable, less infinitely precious.

The adorable baby becomes one of the group of young people who hangs around on street corners, gathering with friends in a public place for safety but unnerving others in the neighbourhood and we do not always find it easy to see that young person as the infinitely precious and infinitely adorable person that they once were.
The adorable baby ends up as a child imprisoned in a detention centre – separated from her mother in a dawn raid just because her mother is seeking sanctuary in our country. We seem to have forgotten how infinitely adorable and infinitely precious those children once were
The adorable baby even in this country ends up living in poverty. Close to home in Sunderland over 50% of children are living in poverty. Many in the Council and elsewhere are working hard to do something about it. But somehow it has happened and I am left wondering whether if we had continued to see those children as infinitely adorable and infinitely precious things might be different

The Christmas story is a story of a baby – a baby who is most certainly infinitely precious and infinitely adorable to Mary and Joseph and for Christians the world over rightly adorable and rightly precious because he is God come to share our human life. But the real point of the story is not that the baby is infinitely precious but that we are infinitely precious.

For if Jesus who is God becomes a member of the human family then we all have God as a member of our family and that means that the whole human family which is now God’s adopted family is infinitely precious.

I am precious because I am a member of God’s family – that family which as the story goes on to tell – is so infinitely precious to God that Jesus dies to show how much he loves it

I am infinitely precious and if I am infinitely precious then every other human being is equally infinitely precious and that is not just about the people around us in the cathedral this morning but it also true of the person who will cut us up in the car to get the only parking space left in the January sales. It is also true of the man in a distant country’s call centre who will contrive to make the Christmas credit card bill even more incomprehensible than it already is. It is true of those who shock us deeply by the terribe hurt that they cause to other people.

And that means that Christian people can not sit idly by while that utter preciousness is denied to the young person hanging around on the street corner, to the child in the detention centre to the child living in poverty in our own diocese and that list can go on and on. We can’t simply sit idly by with talk of cutting public expenditure and not raising taxes when the utter preciousness of some of the most vulnerable in our society is at stake. The baby lying in the manger calls us to look at the world in a new way; to refuse to go along with those who in politics, in the media, in conversation would deny the utter preciousness of particular individuals

Christmas is about present giving and the very best presents perhaps say something to the other about how deeply precious they are to us. Bede who lies buried in this cathedral tells a wonderful story of King Oswin giving St Aidan the gift of a most valuable horse. It is given with the very best of intentions to aid the saint in his missionary travels across Northumbria but the saint is made deeply embarrassed and deeply uncomfortable by this wonderful gift and when by the grace of God a beggar appears in his path the saint without a moment’s hesitation gives the horse away to the beggar. Eventually the embarrassing moment comes and Aidan returns to the palace of king Oswin without the horse. The king knows full well what has happened and remonstrates with the saint saying to him “If you want to go round giving away horses to beggars I have dozens of old nags in the stables you can have to give away. You don’t need to go round giving away to any old beggar a horse as good as the one I gave you.” And the saint lovingly looks the king in the eye and says to him “Is this child of a mare more valuable to you than this child of God?”

That is the vision that this baby brings to our world – a vision of the utter preciousness of every human being. That is the vision that has the ability with god’s help to change and transform our communities. That is the vision of Christmas.

A baby boy's one thing
The whole world adores,
And the best part of all
This one is ours!

+Mark Jarrow