Christmas Morning - The true centre of the world

‘The Word became flesh and lived among us…’

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

ܞ

Some 500 years before the birth of Christ, on the seventh day of each of the hot summer months,

the sun beating down, a woman veiled in purple would wash in a sacred spring before taking her seat in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Crowds of people would queue to see her, to ask her wisdom and her future predictions.

The Classical writer Cicero tells us that no important decision, no matter of government,

no business of any important individual, was conducted without consulting the Oracle of Delphi.

The priestess of Apollo was one of the most powerful people in the Ancient World,

and Delphi, one of its most significant religious centres.   

At the Temple’s shrine, near the place where the Oracle sat, was a round, sculpted stone, that looks a bit like a beehive.

 This was the omphalos, the navel, the ‘belly-button’ of the world.

The Ancient Greeks believed that Zeus set two eagles flying at equal speeds from opposite ends of the world.

Their paths crossed at Delphi, and so Zeus placed the stone there, at the very middle of the earth.  

Throughout human history, people have thought that their own significant places, whether political or religious,

               have been the centre of the world.

Omphalos stones have also been found in Egypt, at both Thebes and Karnak.

Cusco, the capital city of the Inca Empire, gets its name from the Quechua word for ‘navel.’

Likewise, in traditional Jewish stories, the foundation stone on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the place from where creation began.   

There is even a small omphalos stone in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, near the place of Christ’s burial.

In our own time, we might not use stone markers or the language of belly-buttons,

but we still see those places and things that matter to us as the centre of the world.

We hear about the ‘Westminster Bubble’ of politicians in London, the ‘media bubble,’ the ‘ivory towers’ of academics,

or the ‘social media echo-chamber’ of people with whom we agree…

The Church can also be its own bubble, with its own language and ways of being.  

On this great feast of Christmas, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus, God-made-man,

all our ideas about centre and periphery, about what is important, all these things are cast aside.

God has come among us not at Delphi, or Rome, or Cusco, not even at Jerusalem, but round the back of a busy tavern

     in a backwater town, in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.

God has come among us not in a palace or a Temple but in the modest home of a carpenter and his young wife.

And Christ at his coming is not attended by priests and courtiers, but by shepherds.

At Christmas, Heaven touches earth in ways we could not expect and cannot explain!

Our ideas of power and privilege are turned on their heads.

The priest-poet, Malcolm Guite, expresses this beautifully in a poem that I’ll read, called On the Edge.

Christmas sets the centre on the edge;
The edge of town, the outhouse of the inn,
The fringe of empire, far from privilege
And power, on the edge and outer spin
Of turning worlds, a margin of small stars
That edge a galaxy itself light years
From some unguessed at cosmic origin.
Christmas sets the centre at the edge.

And from this day our world is re-aligned
A tiny seed unfolding in the womb
Becomes the source from which we all unfold
And flower into being. We are healed,
The end begins, the tomb becomes a womb,
For now in him all things are re-aligned.

The old centres, the old omphaloi, of the world are left to crumble – Delphi and Rome, even the Temple at Jerusalem.

And so too, our own centres will fall to ruin, our modern omphaloi: Westminster, Fleet Street, Oxford, and Silicon Valley.

For in the birth of the God-who-comes-among-us, all things are made new.

All the world’s hatred and anger and sin is recast by this holy child and his life of love.

Those who live on the margins, the poor and the oppressed, are shown justice and mercy.  

All our false centres of the world exclude and push people away, they keep people out, they maintain the status quo –

but in the Incarnation, everything changes.

If you have every felt marginalised, pushed out, left behind, then Christmas is for you.

If you have every felt powerless, or helpless, then Christmas is for you.

For the holy child of Bethlehem, the Ancient of Days in all the vulnerability of human flesh, the meeting place of heaven and earth,

              the true omphalos, makes every human heart the centre of the world, with a love beyond all telling.

‘And from this day our world is re-aligned…’

The Word became flesh and lived among us, lived among you and me, and lives still.

In the lowliness of his birth, Christ has raised up our human nature and made us beloved children of God.

His life calls us, challenges us, to live in faith, hope and love, to share his divine life in our broken and needy world.

As Christ has come among us in human flesh, and as we soon celebrate the sacrament of his body and blood,

it is not to places of political or religious power and influence that he comes, but among us.

‘For now in him all things are re-aligned…’

And as, this Christmas, you welcome Christ again into your heart,

               there is the centre of the world.