We have seen his glory….
Glory – such a great word…. Wonder and splendour and holiness and wow.. all rolled into one…
Someone I used to work with used to use it as a kind of exclamation – something happened and he would say ‘Glory!’ And the Gospel tells us that the angels sang ‘Glory to God in the highest’ when they heard the good news about the birth of Jesus…
My family will know that one of the things I love to do when we visit a great echoing building – usually a church – is to sing – and test out the sound… often a very fine place, a beautiful place and a place that makes you go ‘wow’! And one of the things I sing is…
Glory to God, glory to God, glory in the highest…
Glory..
But glory is a word that’s hard to pin down somehow. You may remember from Alice through the Looking Glass that bizarre exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty about glory…
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”‘
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
..
The Humpty Dumpty story is absurd of course. But the thing about Christmas is that God did choose glory to mean something else…
Normally we associate glory with the very highest, poshest, smartest, most high status things… A stately home, a great career, the finest achievements… I always thought it would be nice to be called Gloria rather than dull old Susan… Glory is gold, glory is sparkle, glory is Harrods and palaces and the best that money can buy..
But at Christmas we celebrate a story about God deciding that glory means something different. Glory was found, not in a palace, but among the animals. Glory was found not in the temple, but in a small village… round the back of an inn.. Glory was found not in King Herod, but in a teenage mother with her baby. Glory was found in a human face… What brings people to their knees in praise need not be all the things that the world finds impressive, but simply an apparently ordinary baby… Glory is not only in the highest. Glory is in the lowest…
But that doesn’t just change the meaning of a word. It changes the way we look the world, the way we care for each other, the way we live, the way we make the world better…
This year we’ve heard the terrible story of Grenfell Tower… A building which no-one thought was amazing or glorious, which was neglected and disregarded… and where the people living in it, though they rose high into the sky were treated as the lowest.. People who were immigrants, those living with poverty… The shock of what happened there offered us a lesson from which we have to learn.. The glory of God, the image of God, was seen in those faces… and the glory of God suffered there… The glory of God is in the highest and the lowest… And the message of our faith is that all of us, however ‘low’ some may place us, are lifted into glory by God… we are all high in God’s eyes…
The challenge then, for all of us, is to live as those who believe that God’s glory is found, now as in the first century, in the lowest… and then to honour the glory of God wherever and in whosoever it is displayed. In every human being, in every part of God’s creation is the glory of God.
The theologian Irenaeus, centuries ago, used to say that ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’.. I hope you will all live to the full this day, and make this day a new birth.. for that’s what we are truly celebrating… Glory!!