Month: December 2018

And the angel of the Lord came upon them

From the thunderous and majestic words of the great mystery of Christmas night of “the Word made flesh [who] dwelt among us”, we come to the quiet wonder of Christmas morning. A quiet time of contemplation, a time to think with the angels.

The logic of Christmas in the classical Common Prayer tradition, liturgically and theologically speaking, is quite instructive. We proceed from the eternal birth, Christ’s eternal Sonship, on Christmas Eve with its focus on the Incarnation as grounded in the life of God, God as Trinity, to the Christmas of the Angels, as it is sometimes called, who reveal to the shepherds the birth of a Saviour; “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God” in the ringing words of what will become the Gloria. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” This in turn leads to the Christmas of the Shepherds on The Octave Day of Christmas who say “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us,” words which follow directly upon this morning’s gospel. This logic is the reverse of an older and a modern more linear pattern of celebration but as such grounds everything in the life of God. That is the intriguing and important feature and one which redeems all the wonderful complexity of the images of Christmas, both religious and secular in all of their various forms.

Here we have some of the more familiar features of the Christmas story as told by Luke in a remarkable economy of expression. “A decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed” sets Joseph in motion “with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child” to Bethlehem. There “she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” Such are the basic elements of the story. Matthew will also provide an account read on The Sunday after Christmas but no mention of a manger or ‘no vacancy’ signs at the inn. Only with the story of the coming of the kings after the birth do we even get the mention of Bethlehem. Joseph, though, is told that the Son “conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost” and that his name shall be called Jesus, “for he shall save his people from their sins,” and all this in fulfillment of a prophecy from Isaiah that “a Virgin shall conceive … a Son” who shall be called “Emmanuel” meaning “God with us.” Another layer of essential meaning to the basic story, we might say, without which it is not much of a story. Such things complement the real story of Christmas in John about “the Word made flesh.”

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When all things were in quiet silence
and the night was in the midst of her swift course,
then thy almighty word leapt down from heaven, from thy royal throne.

I have to confess that this lovely image from the Wisdom of Solomon (18.15) has always captivated my imagination. It captures wonderfully the special mystery of Christmas and complements the extraordinary readings we have already heard. The readings from Hebrews and from The Prologue of John’s Gospel challenge all our conceptions about Christmas. For where in those readings do we hear any mention of a babe born in a manger, any mention of little Bethlehem, any mention of Mary, the Virgin Mother, any mention of Joseph, any mention of ox and ass, of sheep and lambs, let alone camels and kangaroos; well, why not or at least a moose or two or maybe a beaver? And yet, all those images are profoundly shaped and governed by the great thunderous words of The Letter to the Hebrews and by what is, perhaps, the most profound passage of philosophy and theology that has ever been penned, The Prologue of John’s Gospel. It is the great Christmas Gospel.

“Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,” the poet George Herbert says, and he names them, “The Trinitie, and Incarnation;/ Thou hast unlockt them both,” he says,  “And made them jewels to betroth/ The work of thy creation/ Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure” (Ungratefulnesse). The mystery of Christmas enclosed in a poetic nutshell! But one worth cracking open. We behold simply a double mystery, the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity. Both are locked up together and both are unlocked to view on this holy night.

What on earth am I talking about, you are asking yourselves or at least you should be. Well, I am talking exactly and precisely about the wonder and the mystery of this holy night, the wonder and the mystery of Christmas. Something has drawn you here. It certainly isn’t the pursuit of profit or prestige. Nothing so contemptible in the contemporary culture than religion, to say nothing of the institutional churches. Certainly no commercial or consumer benefit or gain to be found here; quite the opposite, it might seem that the Church is out for your money, more hands in your pocket than the banks. Just joking. Well, maybe.

No. Something speaks to our souls, it seems to me, that draws us towards the idea of ‘truths held sacred’ and all the more so in a culture of darkness and despair. Our culture, our world, our day. It is not that we are simply too much with ourselves, too much preoccupied with a multitude of worries and concerns, what Jesus names, at least in Tyndale’s early English translation, as our “being carefull,” meaning our being full of cares, our busyness, what has more recently been translated as our anxiety. Mightn’t we say Angst r’ us because we are too full of cares about all the wrong things and in all the wrong ways, especially, perhaps, at this time of year? I leave it to you to fill out the ledger in terms of your own lives. The stress of presents and meals, of travel and plans, of parents, of grandparents, of in-laws, of the neediness of children and childrens’ children; the neediness, let’s face it, of us all. No, the greater problem is that we are sceptical and unaware of what speaks to our darkness and despair.

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The Lord is at hand

Advent reaches a high note of expectancy just as the questions of the Advent season come to a kind of crescendo on this The Fourth Sunday in Advent. Both Epistle and Gospel open us out to the “bountiful grace and mercy” of God coming to us in the quiet waiting and watching of Advent.

“The Lord is at hand”, Paul proclaims in his Letter to the Philippians and there is in this a wonderful sense of joy. “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice.” God is the Lord and as God he is always at hand, always present, always near. Such is the truth of God. Such, we might say, is the simple “givenness of things”, as the novelist and modern reformed theologian, Marilynne Robinson, so wisely notes. The simple “givenness of things” is about the truth of God in whom all things have their being and their meaning. To be open to that realization is our joy which contrasts completely with the despairing nihilism which sees reality as something into which we are simply thrown, “the thrownness of being”, you might say. As if life and human experience were but an empty nothingness, altogether meaningless and without purpose or understanding. Such a view is utterly dogmatic and narrow. We need the questions of Advent to awaken us out of our various dogmatic slumbers, to awaken us to the divine gift of a world given for thought and delight.

The questions of Advent are more about us, about our understanding of God whose truth and majesty is eternal and as such is always with us. It is you and me who absent ourselves from the idea and the presence of God.

Advent prepares us for the radical Christian understanding of God being at hand, always near and always coming to us. That Christian understanding focuses primarily upon the coming of Christ and as such upon the meaning of God with us in the great defining term, “Emmanuel”, which means God with us. This morning we will sing the greatest of the Advent carols, the Veni Emmanuel, a 12th century medieval carol which enlarges in rich and wonderful scriptural terms the meaning of Christ as Emmanuel, God with us.

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My Lord, and my God

‘From darkness and doubt, Good Lord, deliver us.’ It could be a paraphrase of the Litany. We have heard, too, in the Exhortations to Communion about confession, even private confession, as belonging to our coming to Communion, “with a full trust in God’s mercy, and with a quiet conscience,” including “the avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness” (BCP, p. 91). There is a wonderful paradox that we commemorate Thomas, the one who is known as ‘doubting Thomas’  for through his doubt, our faith is confirmed all the more.

In the time of the longest night in the darkness of nature’s year, we look to the Light of Christ coming in the darkness when we will hear that “the darkness overcame it not.” Likewise with the matters of doubt and uncertainty in our souls. Advent is the season of watching and waiting in the darkness. What do we mean by darkness? Is it simply the absence of light? Are we bereft and left simply with our doubts and fears?

St. Thomas is the saint of the Advent even more so than St. Andrew whose feast usually but not always falls within the Advent season. The Feast of St. Thomas always falls just four days before Christmas; the only variable is whether if falls within the week of the Third or the Fourth Sunday in Advent, or when the 21st of December is the Fourth Sunday in Advent, it gets transferred to the following Tuesday (Dec. 23rd.) In any event, it is always in Advent.

It is significant that the Gospel reading is the Easter story about Thomas’ doubting the witness of the other disciples to the Resurrection of Jesus. “Except I shall see,” he says, except I touch, “put[ting] my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust[ing] my hand into his side, I will not believe.” It is a powerful moment. But behind the closed doors of the Upper Room, Christ appears again to the disciples and, most importantly, to Thomas. “Thomas,” he says, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing.” It is a marvellous moment of truth and of our awakening to truth in the ways that belong to each of our forms of knowing.

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