Author: CCW

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee”

Christmas brings us to Bethlehem to contemplate the wonder of Christ’s holy birth but its deeper meaning points us already to Jerusalem. They are the twin poles of the devotional and doctrinal imagination of Christianity. Each is bound up in the other. Nowhere in Christmastide are we made more aware of that than on The Feast of Stephen.

He is not only the proto-martyr, the first martyr to Christ, the first figure in the Christian Scriptures to be named as one who died because of his faith and identity with Jesus. He is also the witness to the Christian concept of the connection between sacrifice and service in the face of suffering, indeed, in the face of evil.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha as he would come to be known, rejected Hinduism through his encounter with suffering. Stepping out of the shelter of his castles in Nepal, he encountered an old man, a sick man, and a dead man being carried to his funeral byre; all forms of human suffering. He also met a wandering beggar, a Hindu ascetic, whose path Gautama decided to follow in the search for truth and wisdom and in the quest to overcome human suffering. Meditating under the Bodhi tree, he found enlightenment and became in time the Buddha, the enlightened one, inaugurating one of the great religions of the world. What was the enlightenment? It is captured in the four noble truths of Buddhism: suffering exists, the origin of suffering is desire, eliminate desire means the end of suffering, the way of overcoming desire and the self is found in the eightfold path. At the heart of the enlightenment is the idea that suffering arises because of the illusions of the self. There is no you. That is but an illusion and one which leads to suffering. Suffering is part of the illusion of you.

Suffering. The Feast of Stephen shows us another way of overcoming suffering, namely through sacrifice and service in which another truth is discovered and known. We find the truth of humanity in Christ in following him and by the quality of his life in us. It is found, too, in a deeper dimension of suffering, namely, suffering as the result of human evil. Stephen is stoned, a particularly gruesome form of execution, sadly still with us in some parts of the world. He is stoned to death because of his religious conviction, we would say. One of his persecutors, it appears, is a young man whose name was Saul. A persecutor of The Way, as the early followers of Christ were called, Saul will become Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles. Here in this ‘Christmas story,’ he is utterly implicated in the murder of Stephen.

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“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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