Break Forth, O Beauteous Heavenly Light

Christmas Day: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98;

Hebrews 1:1-12; John 1:1-14

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

December 25, 2025

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."   – Isaiah 52:7

One of my favorite opening film sequences is from Chariots of Fire. I remember seeing it when it was in theaters in 1981. Truly, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the movie in all its depth – the elementary school athlete in me loved, loved the races. But the opening sequence is truly a thing of beauty. The members of Britain’s 1924 Olympic track and field team are running along the beach (on West Sands in St. Andrew’s, Scotland, it turns out). The swell of Vangelis’ iconic score accompanies them. (On the playground as we ran around my friends and I would pretend we were in the movie, singing out that opening theme. I’m only a little embarrassed to admit that I loved it so much that I bought soundtrack years later.) The camera focuses on the runners’ feet as they jog barefoot on the wet sand just at the edges of the ocean’s waves. Truly, how beautiful on the sand, if not the mountains, are the feet of these messengers who ran the race that was set before them, “with hope in [their] hearts and wings on their heels,” as Harold Abrahams’ eulogist says in a brief snippet of his memorial service that merges into the opening jogging scene.[1] Theirs was a beautiful agon, the Greek term for athletic contest that signified not a mere game but the striving, the perseverance, the beauty of a life lived pressing back against oppression, lived amid struggle.

On this Christmas Day we are given images of joy and resplendence, of light, of the goodness of created materiality – the divine Word being made specifically flesh and dwelling among us. We are reminded that the very foundation of our salvation rests upon a beauty that so surpasses our grasp that our most articulate response is awe, expressed in the language of glory. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace. Praise God for the beginning of a story that time itself cannot contain – for “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing” (John 1:1, 3) – even time itself – “came into being.” In this Word was life, was light. Here was divine beauty expressed in all creation and carried forth in the vulnerability and power of a human life, the divine tent pitched in our midst. How beautiful the feet of this messenger who announced peace, who brought salvation, who embodied Good News. Who was light shining in the midst of shadows.

In his book Readings in St. John’s Gospel, published in 1939 and 1940 during his thirteen-year stint as the Archbishop of York, shortly before being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple writes of the persistent beauty of this light amid darkness.

Imagine yourself standing alone on some headland in a dark night. At the foot of the headland is a lighthouse or beacon, not casting rays on every side, but throwing one bar of light through the darkness. It is some such image that St. John had before his mind. The divine light shines through the darkness of the world, cleaving it, but neither dispelling it nor quenched by it.[2] 

Temple goes on to note that the Greek word καταλαμβάνω that our version of the text translates as “overcome” – as in “the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5) – can also be translated “grasped,” or “comprehended,” which was how his version rendered it. The term literally means “to take down or under,” he notes, which can mean to “take into the mind,” as in comprehend, or to “take down,” as in “overcome” or vanquish.  These two translations seem to drive in opposite directions: “for to apprehend light is to be enlightened by it and to overcome light is to put it out. Yet the word truly means both of these.” He continues, “So strange is the relation of the light of God’s revelation to the world which exists to be the medium of that revelation.”[3] Amid a world that cannot overcome it, that light yet saves, shines. Glory to God.

Glory, we sing in this season, stretching in Christmastide into Epiphany, together with the angels who bear witness to this majesty. Glory, we express in awe for this divine accompaniment, for the promise of our and creation’s own healing, liberation, and renewal. In his book The Mood of Christmas, Howard Thurman, the mystic, spiritual writer, and theological mentor of a generation of civil rights leaders, has written:

In Jesus, all [people] may see the illumined finger of God guiding them in the way that they should go, so that high above the clash of arms in the conflict for status, for place, for privilege, for rights, [they] can hear speaking distinctly and clearly to their spirit the still small voice of God, without which nothing has real meaning, with which all the rest of the journey, however difficult, however painful, however devastating, will be filled with a music all its own and even the stars in their appointed rounds and all the wooded world of nature participate in the triumphant music of [their] heart.[4]

His words remind me of the antiphon we sang earlier in this service: “break forth, O beauteous heavenly light and usher in the morning.” This morning our invitation is to listen for that music, to join in it, to look for the beauty that guides the feet of all those, all of us, running the race set before us. The beauty of the struggle to bear forth the light of Christ in the world despite the shadows that surround us in this time of intensified oppression. The awe meant to be elicited by this season, is not simply an embellishment, or a nostalgia. It is essential to our call in these days. For, Thurman continues,

There must be always remaining in every[one’s] life some place for the singing of angels – some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by an inherent prerogative throwing all the rest of life into a new and created relatedness. Something that gathers up in itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright white light of penetrating beauty and meaning – then passes. The commonplace is shot through now with new glory – old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our life, despite all of the hardness of life, despite all of the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels.[5]

This morning, may we again join in that singing, that angelic chorus, to draw forth our awe. May we grasp the bedrock truth that awe, that beauty, is essential to the work before us, to the call God issues to us. Thanks be to God for the miracle of Christmas, of God coming into our midst and pitching the divine tent in Jesus Christ. May we join in song, in thanksgiving, in awe and gratitude, for this beauty. Let us sing once more: break forth, O beauteous heavenly light and usher in the morning. Amen.

[1] The opening sequence of Chariots of Fire: https://youtu.be/bgO0XA3LkYM?si=YefSzcZ5ExsxDjze

[2] William Temple, Readings in St. John’s Gospel (First and Second Series) (London: MacMillian and Co., Limited, 1939, 1940, 1950), 7.

[3] Temple, 8

[4] Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations (Friends United Press, 1973, 2011), 7.

[5] Thurman, 8