Year: 2015

“And this shall be a sign unto you”

In the quiet calm of Christmas morning we celebrate Christ’s holy birth. There is a certain meditative quality to our gathering, it seems to me, after all the fuss and bother, the excitement and the expectancy of Christmas Eve. There is a certain uncertainty to our world and day, a world of fears and anxieties, to which the quietness of Christmas morning wonderfully counters. We are called to the truth of ourselves individually and collectively by our gathering at Bethlehem. The real and deep truth of our humanity notwithstanding the parade of atrocities globally is found in our communion with God in Jesus Christ. It is found in the humble yet awesome scene in Bethlehem.

We are no longer “assured of certain certainties” nor quite so “impatient to assume the world,” as T.S. Eliot puts it. Our world is a dark and disturbing place where we confront the disorder and the disarray of human hearts in acts of terrorism and destruction. Suddenly our cultural certainties seem far less certain; our cultural arrogance much more dangerous. How do we face such things? Do we simply retreat into the ghettoes of our churches, huddled behind closed doors of “certain certainties”, clinging to what we call our personal faith having despaired of the Faith itself? Or do we take a hold of this story contemplatively and enter more fully into its mystery and truth, the mystery and truth of the universal and catholic Faith?

“This shall be a sign unto you,” Luke tells us the angels say to the shepherds and so to us. We are one with the shepherds as the receivers of angels’ words. They are together the messengers of “good tidings of great joy”. “For unto you,” to you and me, “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” A saviour – Jesus, Yeshua, means saviour. Christ means the anointed one of God. Words which we take for granted through their familiarity take on a special significance. What it all means is startling. It contrasts with all of the expected signs of salvation and exaltation. What does salvation mean? What does Christ the Lord mean? Salvation speaks to the wholeness and the completeness of our humanity, to our re-creation and redemption from sin. Christ the Lord speaks to the deep mystery of Christ as God, as “I am who I am” via the biblical circumlocution of Lord for the holy name of God revealed to Moses in the burning bush, the revelation of the principle upon which the being and the knowing of all things depend.

(more…)

Print this entry

“When all things were in quiet silence and the night was in the midst of her swift course, then thy Almighty Word leaped down from heaven, from thy royal throne”

What does Christmas mean in a post-Christian and post-secular culture? Perhaps a time to reclaim something of its essential meaning. There are, to be sure, all of the many and varied traditions of family and community, of secular and social customs and practices that surround and often overwhelm us. What does Christmas really mean?

This is not the same question as what does Christmas mean to you and me individually and subjectively. What Christmas means to you and your family and circle of friends is important but results only in a kind of relativism which is unable to explain what anything means in itself. How do we think about Christmas and about its essential meaning?

“I am tired of hearing jingle bells,” someone said at the Capella Regalis concert here last Sunday night. That wasn’t on the programme. And yet that is one of the songs of the season, I suppose, just like Santa Claus is invariably and unavoidably part of the season, if not for many the heart of Christmas. We confront an almost overwhelming array of images that bombard our ears and eyes, not to mention their effect on our pocket books. It increasingly appears that Christmas is an economic event. Do your duty to the economy and spend, spend, spend. That is surely one of the reasons for the season! And yet, however much such things as giving and getting, buying and spending, consuming and consuming and consuming are a feature of the Christmas season now extending in the commercial world from at least Halloween to sometime late this afternoon, they don’t really explain anything. Why Christmas? Why a word that has inescapably a Christian religious reference in a post-Christian world?

(more…)

Print this entry

“My Lord, and my God”

Words of faith arise from doubt and uncertainty. The Feast of St. Thomas occurs on the shortest day and the longest night of the year in the week of the winter solstice that brings us to the Christmas festival of light and love. Somehow his feast helps us to think more deeply about the advent of Christ and its meaning, even to “melt the clouds of sin and sadness” and to “drive the dark of doubt away.”

“’What is Truth’, said jesting Pilate; and wouldn’t stay for an answer,” Sir Francis Bacon famously begins his celebrated essay On Truth. Like Pilate, Thomas asked a question of Jesus earlier in John’s Gospel just after Jesus spoke of “go[ing] to prepar[ing] a place for you … that where I am there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going” to which Thomas asks, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus responds famously “I am the way, and the truth and the life.” Unlike Pilate, Thomas, it seems, stayed for an answer and then again returned for an answer to his doubts and questions about Christ’s resurrection. “My Lord, and my God” are his profound words of faith that arise from the face-to-face encounter with the Risen Christ whose body bears the marks of his crucifixion.

It is that question and answer about the bodily reality of Christ that makes The Feast of St. Thomas an advent feast and catapults us into the mystery of the Incarnation. It serves as well to connect Christmas and Easter; the nativity and the resurrection are like two complementary mysteries, each illumining something of the deeper meaning of the other. The Gospel for his Feast day is the resurrection story of Jesus teaching the disciples behind closed doors and finally Thomas, too, about the resurrection, itself a testament to the Incarnation.

(more…)

Print this entry

“The Lord is at hand. In nothing be anxious”

Ready yet? Or are you still running madly about in circles in the mindless busyness that so often and so easily overtakes us? Perhaps we need this Sunday in Advent just like we need Advent more than we realise in order for Christmas to have any real meaning. “Repent ye, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand,” is the Advent mantra. It comes to further expression today in the notes of expectancy and joy, of wonder and peace signalled in the readings. “The Lord is at hand,” Paul says in Philippians with a sense of rejoicing, a “rejoic[ing] in the Lord alway”, he says.

And in the gospel reading from St. John, too, we seem to be going in circles, indeed to have come full circle. The passage this morning ends where the gospel reading for The Sunday Next Before Advent in our Canadian Prayer Book begins. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” John the Baptist says, pointing us to Jesus. There, on The Sunday Next Before Advent, it serves as a kind of transition between the ending of the Trinity season and the beginning of Advent. Here on The Fourth Sunday in Advent it signals the meaning of the one whose coming we await, the one who is at hand always.

We are going in circles just not mindlessly but mindfully, I hope. At least that is the purpose of the Church’s proclamation in Advent. Perhaps it is only now in an increasingly post-Christian and post-secular world that we can begin to enter more fully and more mindfully into the mystery of God with us now and always without the social veneer and cultural patina so often mistaken for the real thing. Perhaps we can begin to see how the Christian Faith simply intensifies the great religious mystery of our being with God that belongs to philosophical religion more generally and which allows for a principled discourse with other religions and even our post-secular culture, particularly in its multicultural confusions.

Our advent wreath is about a circle of light. It challenges the rather linear nature of our thinking and our doing, as if time were all and everything, itself a kind of mindlessness in the endless parade of the contingent and the random. It reminds us instead of how our lives are embraced in the eternity of God and that time has no meaning apart from its being gathered into the fullness of God’s truth and light, into the eternal present of God.

(more…)

Print this entry