Category: Sermons

“But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

And so must we. It is, in a way, the deep meaning of Christmas. We find our abiding in God by pondering the wonder of God’s Word incarnate in Jesus Christ. It means coming, like the Shepherds on Angels’ wings, to “see this thing that has come to pass” and to ponder its meaning. How? By keeping all the things that are said about Christ in our hearts and minds, to be sure, and even more to ponder them.

It is a strong image. “Love is my weight,” Augustine said, echoing what is said here about Mary in St. Luke’s Gospel. Here is “the world’s desire,” to use the words of Chesterton’s poem and hymn. We ponder the mystery of the Incarnation and what it means.

The Octave Day of Christmas helps to underscore some of the essential features of the Incarnation. Christ is the Word made flesh who came unto his own, a phrase which suggests, first, the ancient people of God, the people of Israel, but, secondly, our humanity in general. But, in becoming flesh, becoming man of woman, means, as it does for all of us, a birth in a particular place, a particular culture, and with a particular history. We may use the phrase ‘a man or a citizen of the world’ but all our lives are inescapably local. This place at this time subject to these conditions. And so, too, for the holy birth of Jesus.

Yet here is the great wonder and truth of the Incarnation: through what is individual and particular we are opened out to what is universal. God makes himself known through the things of the world and nowhere more completely and more strikingly than in the birth of Jesus Christ.

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“The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise”

So much hidden and revealed in a parenthesis, it seems. “The birth of Jesus Christ,” Matthew tells us, “was on this wise.” He goes on to confront the strange and wondrous nature of Mary being with child but not of Joseph but of the Holy Ghost and provides a wonderful insight into the mindset of gentle Joseph, “a just man,” we are told who does not want “to make her a public example.” A laconic phrase, it hides the harsher realities of the situation of women who were stoned for adultery, a custom that has sadly not entirely disappeared from our world and day. In other words, Joseph is in the dark about what is going on at this point. Yet we see something of his character: rather than expose her he “was minded to put her away privily.” That doesn’t means doing her in!

It is only at this point that he is let in on the plan by the angel of the Lord, who pretty much explains everything to him in a dream. The dream is a kind of ancient world IT, information technology, a means to convey information. The angel’s information to Joseph is very specific, not much in the way of obfuscation or ambiguity. The angel, in a rather lapidary fashion, straightforwardly explains the situation to Joseph: don’t be afraid to take Mary as thy wife; the thing which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost – you have to wonder what on earth he made of that; she shall bring forth a Son; you – meaning Joseph – “shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins.” Of all the angelic statements, this one probably made more sense than the others. The idea of Yeshua, Saviour, is rooted in the Jewish Scriptures and looks back to Joshua, Yeshua, and now ahead to Jesus.

Joseph is to call the child Jesus. He is given the naming rights, a significant point, the rights of a father, though Joseph is technically only the step-father. It signals the theme of the Incarnation, namely God’s embrace of our humanity in Jesus Christ and the ways in which he is incorporated into the structures of human life, in this case the family. It establishes identity at the same time as suggesting the unique otherness of Christ.

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“And in their mouth was found no guile”

They are the Holy Innocents, the last of the jewels in the Christmas crown of the Child Christ. They are without guile or deceit, and so are unable to harm, hence innocent (Latin, in nocens). And they are, it seems, without speech, hence infants (Latin, in fans).

Unnamed yet known, unnumbered yet numbered, The Feast of the Holy Innocents belongs directly to the festival of Christmas. They are in the narratives of the nativity of Christ in the story of the flight into Egypt. They die in place of Christ who ultimately dies for all. They are the very paradigm of the innocent victim in the truest sense.

It is an awful and frightening spectacle even for an age like ours inured to brutality and slaughter. “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked … sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem.” There is blood in Bethlehem, the blood of the little ones who die because of the wrath and envy of Herod. We live in a world where unnamed and unnumbered thousands of little ones die, the innocent victims of the social, political and personal machinations of others. How can we possibly make sense of the senseless slaughter of the little ones? Whether it is in Rwanda, in Syria, in the Sudan, or in the urban confusions of modern culture in the issues of abortion, child neglect, abuse and exploitation, we confront the hideous enormity of human sin and suffering.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents attempts the impossible. It connects their deaths to Christ and in so doing offers consolation and comfort to the Mothers in Israel, like Rachel, who confront the unbearable loss of their children. It is one of the hardest and yet profoundest aspects of the pastoral ministry to have to bury the little ones whose deaths seem impossible to comprehend. We are like “Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.” And we are not in our loss and sorrow. It just doesn’t seem right. And, of course, it isn’t, but the great theological idea here is that their deaths participate by anticipation in the redemptive death of Christ crucified. Their deaths are not without meaning; they become in the words of the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, “redeemed among men, being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb.”

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“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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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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