This is number 8,752,206 in a series of Christmas sermons that have been preached over the past 2,000 years. And it is altogether reasonable that there be yet another Christmas sermon, different I hope, because every time period, age, and nation understands this event from its own perspective. But I would like to suggest that we Christians misunderstand this event, we reduce it to a kind of exercise in sentimental self-indulgence, when we do not observe it from the context of its Jewish roots: Christmas as the celebration of the fulfillment of the whole religious project of Judaism. And it is only if we hold on to this that we can, as I say, save Christmas.

What is this Jewish religion? What did the Jewish religion, as it came to be known, offer to the world that was different and unique? Well, if you read the Hebrew Scriptures there is a clear clue. Because the one thing that the great religious figures of Judaism, the prophets - - for example, Moses, or David at his best, - constantly protested against was idolatry. Idolatry, simply defined, is the exaltation of any human creation to the status of the divine. But this definition needs to be elaborated and its clarification is found in the Book of Exodus, where so much of the heart of Judaism lies. Perhaps you remember that narrative: the famous "burning bush" scene. What moved this strange God, unlike every other god of the ancient Near East or North, or South, or anywhere in the world, so far as we know it, to intervene in human history is expressed in those deathless words: "I have seen the oppression of my people. I have come to relieve their suffering". In other words, the most acute form of idolatry was the constitution of any human creation, whether it be political, economical, or philisophical, that somehow had power over people. And what the Jews did in this enormously audacious move was to say, "No. The sacred, the divine, is to be located", as the Book of Genesis extraordinarily puts it, "in the image of God, which is the human being".

What is the divine? We use this word all the time and associate it with things like angels. It is basically very simple: the divinity, as anthropologists put it, is the locus of ultimate power and value. Let me give you an instance of how the Jews worked this out. In those familiar lines from the first chapter of Genesis, God made all of the stars and the lights of the heavens, and God made all the powers of fertility of plants and animals. What was being said in those texts was precisely a demolition of religion as usual. As astrology, one of the most ancient religions on the face of the earth, is based on the idea that the stars rule us. Or, the powers of fertility rule us. The divinization of fertility sex, which through a series of metamorphoses is still with us today, is the most ancient and universal form of religion. The Jews, however, were different because they believed it is human beings who bear the mark of God. And then, of course, one has to be very careful about this. Because idolatry takes on all kinds of forms, most of them anonymous. There are certainly overt cases, for example, in ancient Egypt, where the Pharaoh could be worshipped as the incarnation of the divine, or periodically in ancient Rome, Roman emperors would proclaim themselves divine, which, of course, made political systems sacred and subordinated the people who lived within these systems. Tribalism, the great and continually besetting sin of human beings, is simply another form of idolatry. The former Yugoslavia is no fluke. It is simply business as usual. And the heart of the great problem in the former Yugoslavia is to say that somehow these other human beings are not quite human, they are not quite as human as we are. And so idolatry takes the form of radical nationalism. It did not take the Natzis to show this to us.

Then we watch the evening news. Look at the economic classes, where to be rich is obviously to be god-favoured and to be poor is just as obviously to be somehow reprobate. To be black is to be only three-fifths human. In the past, this was actually worked out in percentages! Only one-hundred years ago England, our mother country, revoked slavery. With regard to gender, there is this recent counter-movement in which we want to retrieve the age of the goddess (which exists more in peoples' imaginations than in real human history). But the impulse to do this is very clear because we all surely know men image God much more adequately than those earthly, mindless, effectively over-driven creatures who are female. So, we have been able to use everything - - our language, colour, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, economic status, and our academic status - - as forms of idolatry and, therefore, to say to the other than I: You are less human than I am. And so in this man Jesus, this Jew, we Christians find and believe that God has played his/her final trump by saying, "This human being fully incarnates both the fullness of humanity and God". And because we believe that is so, every possible pretext for elevating one human being over another human being is radically undercut, invalidated, and de-legitimized. And so, even ecclesiastical institutions, for which the temptation to idolatrize themselves is perhaps most sharp, and most subtle, must be aware that they too, we too, would like to elevate ourselves over and against everybody else and deny the humanity of everybody who is not one of our crowd.

So you see there is nothing very sentimental in the heart of the Christmas event; nursing a drunk, sheltering somebody who is homeless and mentally deranged, or at least unbalanced, or taking care of the mentally retarded people. I am sure you know, if you have ever tried to help these individuals, that there is no romance in any of these acts. But there is the reality of the Christian thing, the Christmas thing, the Jewish thing. And finally, we should take another cue from the Jews because the Jews had a constant struggle all through their history to misconstrue their own election, their status as God's chosen. In fact, there is an entire book that some great Jew wrote precisely to disabuse every possible Jew of that time and subsequent times: the book of Jonah, which depicts this Jewish God sending a Jewish prophet to announce God's mercy to the Jews' most fiendish enemies. It is not a cute little tale about a fish swallowing a human being. So, if this danger is there, as it continues to exist today, then Christmas should be the great caveat, the great warning. And so, you can push this to its ultimate point of audacity and say, "You cannot believe in God if you do not believe in this divine image in every human being!" Or, as the first Letter of John puts it, as does the rest of the biblical texts, both throughout the Hebrew bible and the New Testament: "How can you say you love God whom you have never seen, yet have the contempt for the fellow human being standing right next to you". How can you do that? You cannot do that, and that is what all of these wonderful sayings about "Away in the manger" and "Silent night" and "Come all ye faithful" are all about. So, Christmas is this wonderful time to say, once again, to ourselves, "What does it mean to be faithful? Who is faithful, and faithful to what?".