Year: 2013

“Now it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree
from Caesar Augustus”

A sermon, snowstorms notwithstanding! This is beginning to become a habit. This is the third time in ten days that I have had occasion to say that.

“A decree from Caesar Augustus,” and yet there is a greater decree, a greater Word, a greater command that “has come to pass” and which brings us, like Mary and Joseph, to Bethlehem, if not literally, then spiritually and intellectually. You may hope that it is not to be taxed!

It has often struck me how for Christians the aspect of the holy land has a different connotation and meaning than it does for Jews and Muslims, complicated as that may be for them as well. It is curious in a way because Bethlehem and Jerusalem, to name the twin poles of the Christian doctrinal and devotional imagination, are barely mentioned in the Islamic Qur’an, Bethlehem only once and Jerusalem by name not at all, and, while Jerusalem has a kind of pride of place in the Jewish Scriptures, the place of Bethlehem there is a bit more nuanced, at once “the greatest” and “the least” of cities, for example, providing one of many cases for some creative and imaginative interpretation on the part of Christian commentators, I might add!

The crusades notwithstanding (and that story is more nuanced that some would have us believe), all of the ancient holy places of the Scriptures have taken on a different kind of meaning for Christians. Prince Charles has recently and rightly decried the attacks on Christians in the Middle East, fearing the grim reality of no Christians in the land where Christianity had its birth. True, and yet there is something profound about an understanding which transcends, albeit without denying, the sheer force of locality and place. It is especially part of the story of the Jewish diaspora and an undeniable part of the Christian as well as the Islamic story. There is not only the journey to Bethlehem by shepherds told by Angels and by Magi-Kings led by a star; there is also the flight into Egypt of the holy family and the return of the Magi-Kings “into their own country another way.” Christmas would have us abide in Bethlehem, to be sure, but already the story takes us away from Bethlehem; it suggest another kind of abiding, our abiding in the truth of God wherever we are.

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“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”

Christmas is too much, isn’t it? Haven’t you all said or, at least, thought that, especially in the commercial circus and all the hustle and bustle and tinsel and wrap of the last few weeks and days? What’s all the fuss? Why all the bother?

Because of what we hear and see tonight and I don’t mean Santa Claus and his reindeer and all his elfin minions that, dare I say, look a bit like child labour! No. I mean the wonder we behold in all of the words proclaimed and sung, in all the great parade of images that belong to the mystery of Christ’s Holy Birth. Well, that’s surely what you expected me to say, isn’t it! We celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, long ago and far away, and yet close at hand in head and heart for each of us now and always.

There is something quite profound and holy in Christ’s birth contained in the rich fullness of the Christmas scene. It is all too much but it is altogether about the muchness of God being with us. There is a fullness of images to Christmas that is altogether more than all our busyness. Here, tonight, in our worship we may find its meaning that redeems our frenetic and frantic activity. How?

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“I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness”

“Christianity,” Ignatius of Antioch observes in his letter to the Romans, “lies in achieving greatness in the face of the world’s hatred.” He was on his way under Imperial Guard to face martyrdom in Rome in the first decade of the 2^nd century. He was no stranger to the world’s hatred. Yet he understood something greater than the powers of the world, namely, the power of God’s Truth and Word Incarnate in Jesus Christ.

He exemplifies something of the prophetic qualities of John the Baptist who in the great Gospel for The Fourth Sunday in Advent reveals the true nature of his ministry and life. He does not live for himself but for another, “the latchet of whose shoes,” he says, he is “not worthy to unloose.” He points not to himself but to Christ, to Christ as the Lamb of God, the one whom, he says, “takes away the sin of the world.”

It is a powerful testimony. Known as the record or witness of John, there is poignancy and an intensity to what we hear and see. In the to-and-fro of questions with the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem,” we glimpse a spiritual tension and frisson belonging to cultures in their moments of crisis and uncertainty. Who are you and what are you about? they ask, in genuine puzzlement, it seems to me. Their questions serve to bring out the truth of John the Baptist and even more the truth of Christ which he serves. Nowhere is the ministry of John the Baptist more concentrated for us; nowhere does prophecy point us so directly to Christ. In the Christian understanding of things, prophecy finds its fulfillment in Christ Jesus. He is Immanuel, God with us, and that essential insight changes everything.

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This is the second of two Advent Meditations on the theme “Mary in Holy Waiting”. The first is posted here.

“Blessed are those servants, whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching”

Watching and waiting are the spiritual activities of the soul in the season of Advent. They signify our looking towards God, our looking expectantly at the coming of God’s Word and Son. Mary in Advent is in Holy Waiting; a waiting upon the fullness of time, upon the birth of God’s Word and Son through her. Her waiting is the watching and waiting of the Church upon the motions of God’s Word coming to birth in us.

Tonight also marks the commemoration of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch and martyr. His commemoration complements our Advent programme about Mary in Holy Waiting. One of the Apostolic Fathers, that is to say, one of the early figures of the Christian Church who, whether they knew the Apostles personally or directly (some may have, some may have not), nonetheless preserved and transmitted “the apostolic teaching and tradition between the time of the Apostles themselves and the latter years of the second century” (Max Staniforth, To A.L.M. (Intro) to the Apostolic Fathers).  Ignatius was martyred, c. 115, after an episcopal career of some forty years. A figure of great renown, we actually know very little about him apart from his character that is revealed in his seven remarkable epistles written on the road to his martyrdom in Rome. We do not even know the exact charge which led to his martyrdom.

His epistles bring out, I suggest, the essential Marian quality of watching and waiting upon the Word and Will of God. Three things stand out in his epistles: his embrace of martyrdom; his insistence upon the three-fold ministry of the Church, especially episcopacy; and his emphasis upon the doctrine of the Incarnation against the Jews and the Docetists – the latter being the term for the earliest heresy of the Church, already attacked in the epistles of John, that claims that the human life of Christ is all a kind of play-acting, a sham, a mere appearance in contrast to reality since the idea of God becoming man is abhorrent where matter is seen as evil and spirit as good and pure.

In many ways, Ignatius’ epistles already point in the direction of a creedal understanding of the Christian faith that will emerge more explicitly in the fourth century. The key doctrine for him is the Incarnation which leads to his conviction about martyrdom and about the ordered life of the Church. His epistles breath that positive spirit of living for and with Christ already signified in Mary’s fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word,” the idea of our life with God because of God’s embrace of our humanity. For Ignatius this wonder contributes to a new sensibility, a conviction about immortality such that martyrdom is the necessary witness to the truth of Christianity, a martyrdom which he enthusiastically accepts like Mary’s “be it unto me according to thy word.” In a world of suicide bombers, this may trouble us but if we look more closely we can see how different this Ignatian/Marian sense of commitment and witness is from these contemporary acts in which martyrdom is really an act of terrorism for political purposes to which religious concepts have been sadly twisted and perverted.

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