A year ago on Christmas morning I attended the Eucharist at St Thomas’s Salisbury, which was then my parish church. There was a new vicar in post and he was celebrating his first Christmas. As is the way with new vicars (at least, some new vicars) he had Ideas, with a capital I. One of these was the expansion of the traditional nativity play. None of the exclusivism of a cast for him: every child present was invited to come in costume, as an angel, a shepherd or a wise man – whatever he or she fancied, or, more likely, whatever his or her harassed parents could rustle up amidst the mad rush of breakfast consumption, lunch preparation and stocking-opening . This being a parish with a lot of children in it, the effect was rather spectacular. There were choirs of angels, great flocks of shepherds, an embarrassment of wise men, and much lusty singing around the manger.
Like Christmas lights in shopping streets, nativity plays are one of this country’s seasonal Aunt Sallies. Someone somewhere will always be found arguing, or appearing to argue, for their inappropriateness to the modern age. I disagree, and rank the nativity play’s detractors alongside Ebenezer Scrooge and those joyless Protestants who tried to ban Christmas pudding over 300 years ago.
Mind you, I also disagree with those who think them merely a convenient vehicle for the channelling of school-age exuberance at this time of year. And I disagree with those who think them just a spectacle for proud parents and grandparents to watch and applaud. That’s quite a lot of disagreement for a festive morning, so let me try to make the case for tinsel and tea-towels, for stuffed sheep and Away in a Manger.
Those who participate in a nativity play do more than learn the words and sing the songs. They live the story, and so they set a pattern for us all. You see, secular traditions of present-giving, party-going and over-eating threaten to overwhelm the story of the angels and shepherds. But a far greater danger arises when that story stops being something that we live and becomes just another tradition, when it takes its place alongside the TV specials and the pantomime as something to be enjoyed at this time of year.
I’m not sure that my colleague in Salisbury went far enough. How much better it would have been if he’d insisted that everyone, whatever their age or status, had come equipped to take part in the nativity play. And be warned – this still-new vicar is capable of having ideas, too. Maybe in twelve months time I’ll be looking out at a crowd of extras from some old-fashioned Biblical television blockbuster. For I believe we are all called to be players in God’s great drama. We are all called to be shepherds and angels and wise men. Is that not the point of the birth we celebrate this morning?
If you are unconvinced allow me to approach this differently, from the perspective of the villains of the story, the perspective of the innkeepers of Bethlehem and of Herod the king. The innkeepers turn away the exhausted couple; they wash their hands of the pregnant teenager. Each of us has had some experience of closing the door on the needy. Herod seeks to destroy the thing that threatens his throne. Each of us has felt undermined by the new, the different, the unexpected. Each of us has sought to choke it at birth. The shadowy underside of the nativity story reflects the shadowy underside of our own stories.
Sadly, perhaps other parallels between the story and our stories are harder to find. The angels set the heaven alight with the joy of their praises. Are we full of joy this morning, or full of anxiety, anxiety at the state of the lunch, or the state of the church, or the state of our investments? The shepherd trusted the angels and left their flocks to the uncertainties of the hillside and the ravages of wolves. Are we full of trust this morning, or full of suspicion, suspicion of one another, or of the mass media and the banks, or of those of different faiths? The wise men persevered on a journey through mountain top and desert waste. Are we set to persevere this morning, set to follow the star wherever it may lead, until we discover the truth of Christ for ourselves? Or does sound as though it might interfere with our carefully manicured plans for the New Year?
So never mind charades: here’s a parlour game for this afternoon, when the nose has been cut off the Stilton, the chocolates have been opened and the port is flowing freely. In 2007 which nativity character did you most closely resemble? And in 2008 which will you seek to imitate? I may be merciful, and may not insist on a dress code of angels’ wings, sparkly crowns and rustic dressing gowns next Christmas. But I hope to see a lively company of players who have made the story real in their communities. Thus, only thus, will Christ be brought to birth for our city, in our time. Amen.
Saturday 29 December 2007
The Eucharist of Christmas Night, 2007
Quietly she holds him, cradled in her arms,
rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm.
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race,
always heading downwards, then dripping from her face.
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
and as his eyes stare skyward there’s only her to see.
Tender lines on a mother’s love for her child: they might have been written for Christmas night. But in fact they have as their context not a stable in first century Bethlehem but an estate in twenty-first century Liverpool. They are the work of Stephen Jones, and were written for his son Rhys. And they do not end there, but continue:
Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same.
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name,
ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood,
telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love.
Eleven year old Rhys was murdered in August this year, shot dead as he returned from football. He is just one of the twenty-seven young people who have been killed with guns in this country in 2007, some of whom have lived their short lives, and lost them, only a few miles from this place.
These are uncomfortable truths to contemplate in the candle-lit warmth of Christmas night, hard truths about the life of this city: about its huge wealth and its grinding poverty, its limitless potential and its utter hopelessness, its overweening confidence and its cringing fearfulness. Yet if the birth we have gathered to celebrate has nothing to say to Rhys and the others, if it has nothing to say to our world city and to its bitter divisions, then I believe it has nothing to say.
Can the manger speak to Merseyside? Can the stable speak to Stockwell? What can this night offer a city that is so cynical and so weary?
John tells us that this night the Word is made flesh. This night the world becomes the place to which God is actually present, the place in which God becomes embodied. In other words this is not some forgotten planet in a far-flung corner of an isolated solar system. This is the very place in which God chooses to dwell and in which he chooses to reveal himself to humankind. So the deaths of Rhys and of all the others are of supreme significance. They are the deaths not only of God’s beloved children but also of his beloved brothers, whose human life he begins to share this night in Bethlehem. God’s is the first heart to break when a young life is taken, God’s are the first tears to fall and it is God’s revulsion we share when we contemplate such a crime, such a sin.
Yes, this night the Word is made flesh. But it is such vulnerable flesh, the flesh of a newborn baby, tiny, naked and utterly dependent. God comes not as a weapon-wielding hard-man, subduing the streets of Liverpool and Lambeth before him, but as a child. Thus does God show us what it is to love one another. It is not to bend one another to our own will; it is not to coerce one another into a pattern of behaving and thinking that is really our own. To love one another is to trust one another; it is to place ourselves in one another’s hands. So love needs allies in the world. If firearms are ever to take their place alongside slingshots in the museum of humankind; it poverty is ever to be driven from these shores; and if hope and opportunity are to flourish in place of drug use and gang violence then love needs spokesmen, advocates and activists. Love needs you and me. Tonight we reaffirm our adherence to love’s cause.
So this night speaks to us of God’s love for humanity, and of the precariousness of that love’s endeavour. But can it possibly address the third, despairing stanza of Stephen Jones’s poem?
But the child will never answer, forever to stay young.
Dying in a car park, it’s not where he belongs.
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son,
his life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone.
The manger does not hold the Word made flesh for very long, for the Word grows to mature adulthood. Thirty-three years pass, and a day comes when another mother cradles her son’s lifeless body in her arms, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and weeping over him. And then, perhaps only then, do we discover the significance of this night for our broken lives and disturbed times. For we discover that just as the wood of the manger bears Christ’s life to the world so too does the wood of the cross bear Christ’s life to the world: glorious life, life unending, life in all its fullness, life as God had always intended that life should be. Because of the life that begins this night death has no ultimate power over the children of Croxteth Park or over the children of London. It has no power over the young soldiers of Congo or over the orphans of Baghdad, or over any child in any place.
For this night heaven is once more joined to earth, and God comes to dwell with his people and they with him, for all time and beyond all time, full of grace and truth. This night we gaze upon his glory, and we know it to be glory as of a Father’s only Son. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
rocking oh so gently, protecting him from harm.
Her tears are flowing freely, off her cheeks they race,
always heading downwards, then dripping from her face.
A mother holds her baby, as close as close can be
and as his eyes stare skyward there’s only her to see.
Tender lines on a mother’s love for her child: they might have been written for Christmas night. But in fact they have as their context not a stable in first century Bethlehem but an estate in twenty-first century Liverpool. They are the work of Stephen Jones, and were written for his son Rhys. And they do not end there, but continue:
Now fast forward eleven years, the scene is much the same.
A mother holds her baby, whispering his name,
ruffling his matted hair, his face covered in blood,
telling him to stay with her and wrapping him in love.
Eleven year old Rhys was murdered in August this year, shot dead as he returned from football. He is just one of the twenty-seven young people who have been killed with guns in this country in 2007, some of whom have lived their short lives, and lost them, only a few miles from this place.
These are uncomfortable truths to contemplate in the candle-lit warmth of Christmas night, hard truths about the life of this city: about its huge wealth and its grinding poverty, its limitless potential and its utter hopelessness, its overweening confidence and its cringing fearfulness. Yet if the birth we have gathered to celebrate has nothing to say to Rhys and the others, if it has nothing to say to our world city and to its bitter divisions, then I believe it has nothing to say.
Can the manger speak to Merseyside? Can the stable speak to Stockwell? What can this night offer a city that is so cynical and so weary?
John tells us that this night the Word is made flesh. This night the world becomes the place to which God is actually present, the place in which God becomes embodied. In other words this is not some forgotten planet in a far-flung corner of an isolated solar system. This is the very place in which God chooses to dwell and in which he chooses to reveal himself to humankind. So the deaths of Rhys and of all the others are of supreme significance. They are the deaths not only of God’s beloved children but also of his beloved brothers, whose human life he begins to share this night in Bethlehem. God’s is the first heart to break when a young life is taken, God’s are the first tears to fall and it is God’s revulsion we share when we contemplate such a crime, such a sin.
Yes, this night the Word is made flesh. But it is such vulnerable flesh, the flesh of a newborn baby, tiny, naked and utterly dependent. God comes not as a weapon-wielding hard-man, subduing the streets of Liverpool and Lambeth before him, but as a child. Thus does God show us what it is to love one another. It is not to bend one another to our own will; it is not to coerce one another into a pattern of behaving and thinking that is really our own. To love one another is to trust one another; it is to place ourselves in one another’s hands. So love needs allies in the world. If firearms are ever to take their place alongside slingshots in the museum of humankind; it poverty is ever to be driven from these shores; and if hope and opportunity are to flourish in place of drug use and gang violence then love needs spokesmen, advocates and activists. Love needs you and me. Tonight we reaffirm our adherence to love’s cause.
So this night speaks to us of God’s love for humanity, and of the precariousness of that love’s endeavour. But can it possibly address the third, despairing stanza of Stephen Jones’s poem?
But the child will never answer, forever to stay young.
Dying in a car park, it’s not where he belongs.
A mother holds her baby, her child, her world, her son,
his life has been robbed from him, she can’t believe he’s gone.
The manger does not hold the Word made flesh for very long, for the Word grows to mature adulthood. Thirty-three years pass, and a day comes when another mother cradles her son’s lifeless body in her arms, wiping the blood and sweat from his face and weeping over him. And then, perhaps only then, do we discover the significance of this night for our broken lives and disturbed times. For we discover that just as the wood of the manger bears Christ’s life to the world so too does the wood of the cross bear Christ’s life to the world: glorious life, life unending, life in all its fullness, life as God had always intended that life should be. Because of the life that begins this night death has no ultimate power over the children of Croxteth Park or over the children of London. It has no power over the young soldiers of Congo or over the orphans of Baghdad, or over any child in any place.
For this night heaven is once more joined to earth, and God comes to dwell with his people and they with him, for all time and beyond all time, full of grace and truth. This night we gaze upon his glory, and we know it to be glory as of a Father’s only Son. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
Monday 3 December 2007
The First Sunday of Advent 2007
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
Those words conclude what Christians affirm to be true of Jesus Christ when they repeat the Nicene Creed. They sum up the doctrines of the End Times and the Second Coming, in Greek the Eschaton and the Parousia, the doctrines to which Advent points remorselessly, despite the lures of Christmas shopping and cocktail parties.
Perhaps those lures are welcome, not only for their innate attractiveness, but also for their capacity for distracting us from where the season would have us concentrate our gaze. The End Times and the Second Coming are difficult. On the one hand they conjure up images of harmless cranks on mountain tops, Beyond the Fringe-style; on the other they have about them a far from harmless whiff of religious fundamentalism.
Yet there is no avoiding the doctrines of sudden, universal and divinely-determined End Times. They run through our Scriptures like a deep seam. Isaiah’s prophecy evokes a coming era of universal peace and mutual trust. Paul’s epistles exhort their readers to keep awake and live as those on the threshold of a great and unimaginable change. And throughout all four Gospels Jesus speaks of the day of his return.
So the doctrines are genuinely catholic and of unimpeachable orthodoxy: yet for many of us they are far from being preoccupations of our lives of prayer and faith. ‘Jesus is Coming – Look Busy’ has become a comic staple of T-shirts and office plaques.
We are time-poor individuals for whom considering next week’s diary is a luxury, and for whom, to coin a phrase, eternity can wait. We are a pessimistic generation for whom the notion of change for the better is an article of unbelief, and for whom that other phrase, that things can only get better, once so famously coined, is faintly risible.
If we do think about the End Times at all it may be to think of them in terms of the approaching certainty of our own deaths. Many sermons have been preached encouraging us to cultivate familiarity with our mortality. I know. I’ve preached some of them. Yet a distinctive line of liberal theological thought goes farther and identifies (or confuses) our own death with the End Times. They are something we will face when we die, rather than something that will happen once and for all.
Or it may be that we prefer to mythologize the doctrines. We assume that the words can never have been meant to be taken seriously. We infer from them that the return of Jesus and the earthly idyll of Isaiah are metaphors for the self-realization and transformation of the soul. We thus push the doctrines into the safe arena of the spiritual.
These are strategies of avoidance, and strategies to be avoided. They offer an illusory security that Christ never offers.
The first, conflating the universal End Times with our personal end time, seems to offer us some control of our destinies. If we appear before the throne one by one, if we are processed individually, as it were, then we may think we have a much better chance of manipulating the system. There will be less chance of the critical voices of the neighbours we’ve never got on with being heard. We will be held to account for those things for which we ought to be held to account, those that are our personal responsibility, and not for those which are not. We will face God alone and be judged by him alone. There’s something rather appealing in that. We have our own lawyers, our own doctors, sometimes our own priests. Why not our own ultimate hearing before our own personal God?
The answer is that this belies the Baptismal covenant into which we have entered and which binds us inexorably to every other baptized person. In this of all weeks we might reflect on the words of England’s greatest poet of faith, William Blake:
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief.
Surely as the baptized we live together, die together, and are judged together: as another poet of Anglicanism puts it, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’.
The second, mythologizing the doctrines, enrols us alongside those early Gnostic Christians for whom the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation was so threatening that they felt compelled to explain it by slashing the world in two: the gross, corrupt physical, and the pure, noble spiritual. At death, said the Gnostics, we are liberated from our mortal bodies and are freed at last from the world and its evil temptations. There’s something rather appealing in this, too. Our age is keen on the spirit. Doctrines labelled ‘spiritual’ have some cachet and are generally regarded as not needing too much explanation.
Yet orthodox faith has never allowed such division. We are created as persons, not as more or less happy coincidences of mind, body and spirit. It is in the embodied person of Jesus that God comes among us, and it is the embodied person of Jesus that is transfigured, raised and glorified. We have no licence for believing that the created world is destined for the eternal scrap-heap; we have every possible licence for believing that God’s purposes embrace the world and intend its redemption.
Faith in the End Times as either purely personal or purely spiritual is not the faith of our tradition. We believe that he will come again in glory. We believe that he will judge the living and the dead. We believe that his kingdom will have no end. We believe in an end that is universal; that is salvific; and that is God’s.
That belief offers those who do not share it an explanation for our lives. Doesn’t it?
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
and his kingdom will have no end.
Those words conclude what Christians affirm to be true of Jesus Christ when they repeat the Nicene Creed. They sum up the doctrines of the End Times and the Second Coming, in Greek the Eschaton and the Parousia, the doctrines to which Advent points remorselessly, despite the lures of Christmas shopping and cocktail parties.
Perhaps those lures are welcome, not only for their innate attractiveness, but also for their capacity for distracting us from where the season would have us concentrate our gaze. The End Times and the Second Coming are difficult. On the one hand they conjure up images of harmless cranks on mountain tops, Beyond the Fringe-style; on the other they have about them a far from harmless whiff of religious fundamentalism.
Yet there is no avoiding the doctrines of sudden, universal and divinely-determined End Times. They run through our Scriptures like a deep seam. Isaiah’s prophecy evokes a coming era of universal peace and mutual trust. Paul’s epistles exhort their readers to keep awake and live as those on the threshold of a great and unimaginable change. And throughout all four Gospels Jesus speaks of the day of his return.
So the doctrines are genuinely catholic and of unimpeachable orthodoxy: yet for many of us they are far from being preoccupations of our lives of prayer and faith. ‘Jesus is Coming – Look Busy’ has become a comic staple of T-shirts and office plaques.
We are time-poor individuals for whom considering next week’s diary is a luxury, and for whom, to coin a phrase, eternity can wait. We are a pessimistic generation for whom the notion of change for the better is an article of unbelief, and for whom that other phrase, that things can only get better, once so famously coined, is faintly risible.
If we do think about the End Times at all it may be to think of them in terms of the approaching certainty of our own deaths. Many sermons have been preached encouraging us to cultivate familiarity with our mortality. I know. I’ve preached some of them. Yet a distinctive line of liberal theological thought goes farther and identifies (or confuses) our own death with the End Times. They are something we will face when we die, rather than something that will happen once and for all.
Or it may be that we prefer to mythologize the doctrines. We assume that the words can never have been meant to be taken seriously. We infer from them that the return of Jesus and the earthly idyll of Isaiah are metaphors for the self-realization and transformation of the soul. We thus push the doctrines into the safe arena of the spiritual.
These are strategies of avoidance, and strategies to be avoided. They offer an illusory security that Christ never offers.
The first, conflating the universal End Times with our personal end time, seems to offer us some control of our destinies. If we appear before the throne one by one, if we are processed individually, as it were, then we may think we have a much better chance of manipulating the system. There will be less chance of the critical voices of the neighbours we’ve never got on with being heard. We will be held to account for those things for which we ought to be held to account, those that are our personal responsibility, and not for those which are not. We will face God alone and be judged by him alone. There’s something rather appealing in that. We have our own lawyers, our own doctors, sometimes our own priests. Why not our own ultimate hearing before our own personal God?
The answer is that this belies the Baptismal covenant into which we have entered and which binds us inexorably to every other baptized person. In this of all weeks we might reflect on the words of England’s greatest poet of faith, William Blake:
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief.
Surely as the baptized we live together, die together, and are judged together: as another poet of Anglicanism puts it, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself’.
The second, mythologizing the doctrines, enrols us alongside those early Gnostic Christians for whom the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation was so threatening that they felt compelled to explain it by slashing the world in two: the gross, corrupt physical, and the pure, noble spiritual. At death, said the Gnostics, we are liberated from our mortal bodies and are freed at last from the world and its evil temptations. There’s something rather appealing in this, too. Our age is keen on the spirit. Doctrines labelled ‘spiritual’ have some cachet and are generally regarded as not needing too much explanation.
Yet orthodox faith has never allowed such division. We are created as persons, not as more or less happy coincidences of mind, body and spirit. It is in the embodied person of Jesus that God comes among us, and it is the embodied person of Jesus that is transfigured, raised and glorified. We have no licence for believing that the created world is destined for the eternal scrap-heap; we have every possible licence for believing that God’s purposes embrace the world and intend its redemption.
Faith in the End Times as either purely personal or purely spiritual is not the faith of our tradition. We believe that he will come again in glory. We believe that he will judge the living and the dead. We believe that his kingdom will have no end. We believe in an end that is universal; that is salvific; and that is God’s.
That belief offers those who do not share it an explanation for our lives. Doesn’t it?
Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
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