Category: Sermons

“They presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh”

The tradition of giving gifts at Christmas time originates with the coming of the Magi to the Child Christ in Bethlehem. From the three gifts comes the idea of the three magi from the East, from Anatolia. They are the proverbial come-from-aways. They are the original truth-seekers. They come having followed a star. They have come seeking the light of truth and led by that light they have come to Christ.

But they have not come empty-handed. They have come bearing gifts to the one who is the greatest gift of all. Love, suggests Aquinas, is in the nature of a first gift through which all other gifts are given. But what about the gifts of the Magi?

These are gifts which teach us about the nature of gift-giving. They are not exactly useful gifts – like socks and mittens, scarves and mufflers or like the useful gifts at a baby shower, diapers and wipes, soft blankets and towels. Beyond the useful gifts that we give to one another there are the useless gifts, the gifts that honour the one to whom they are given. In a way, the three gifts of the Magi are really useless gifts, gifts that essentially teach us about the meaning of the One to whom they are given.

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

I love this passage from St. Luke’s gospel. Not just at Christmas but as a maxim for the life of the Church, year in and year out. And how wonderful that it is heard, year in and year out, on New Year’s Day, at the ending of one civil year and the beginning of another! How perplexing though that what is kept and pondered in the heart of Mary is connected with what must seem to be a most arcane and disturbing event, the circumcision of Christ.

The rite is associated with what it means to be Jewish. In the context of the Gospel, it is intended to be understood in terms of Christ’s submission to the Law, the Torah, in its particular forms. An allegiance and loyalty to what is transcendent and utterly beyond the phenomenal world is signaled in the flesh, in what is simply most, well, there is no getting around it, most male. Intriguingly, in more modern times, until very recently, the medical profession, especially in North America, tried to provide medical reasons for the practice.

This misses the point historically and religiously from the standpoint of ancient Israel and contributes very little to the metaphorical transformation that circumcision undergoes via the New Testament, especially through Paul. The circumcision of the heart, he argues, is what is necessary for our true commitment to God, not simply some questionable surgical procedure, about which there continues to be debate within and without Judaism, a debate which is only heightened by the disturbing and hideous matter of female genital mutilation in Arabic countries closely associated with the aspects of African tribalism. There is simply no getting around these things in the contemporary culture. There is, instead, the need to think through them and beyond them but in a way that does complete justice to the foundational principles of Christianity and Judaism and Islam.

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“These were redeemed from among men,
being the first-fruits unto God and to the Lamb”

It is a compelling and yet a most disturbing Christmas story but, like the other festal days of Christmas, it reflects upon the deeper meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Unlike the commemorations of St. Stephen and St. John, however, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, as this day has come to be called, actually belongs to the narratives of the nativity.

Like so many biblical passages, the story is multi-layered. It is, on the one hand, an account of the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about the Messiah. “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” locating the Flight into Egypt in terms of a New Testament riff on the Exodus story of Pharaoh’s policy of infanticide as a way of controlling the minority worker population of the Hebrews within Egypt. Here it takes on a further political aspect: Herod’s fear of a child-king who would be a rival to his throne.

Joseph takes Mary and the child Christ into Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath and fury but “out of Egypt” Jesus the Son will return to Nazareth and beyond to bring redemption to all people just as Moses led the people of the Hebrews out of the Pharonic captivity and into the wilderness to become the people of God, the people of the Law. On that score alone it is a powerful narrative and unfolds before our eyes something of the Christian understanding of divine Providence at work in and through the Scriptures.

It is, on the other hand, a powerful story about the meaning of redemption in the face of the most horrible sufferings and loss that is imaginable; the slaughter of little children. The Collect takes our breath away with its incredible insight that “thou madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths.” It is for many utterly unthinkable, a most disturbing claim that unsettles us and makes us most uncomfortable. I fear that for some this story and the theological idea expressed in the Collect is so revolting that they become atheists. The scene, even as told in the restrained language of Matthew, is such an affront to our conceptions of justice, especially divine justice. How revolting and impossible to say, at least at first glance, that children were made to die for Christ’s glory!

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“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you”

No one more fully conveys the deep wonder and mystery of Christmas than John the Evangelist commemorated on the second day after Christmas. The Prologue of his Gospel has been the great Christmas gospel for more than a millennium and a half; his epistles, too, provide the most theological apologia for the essential doctrine that Christmas celebrates, namely, the doctrine of the Incarnation.

From the blood-soaked ground of Stephen’s martyrdom we rise on eagles’ wings to the contemplative vision of John. It is his insight into what we see and hear that makes the Christmas mystery. The theological insight of John informs most profoundly what comes to be the Church’s creedal proclamation. This child is “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light; Very God of Very God; Begotten not made.” Such creedal statements echo the words of John at Christmas. Without doubt such statements are the fruit of a theological reflection upon John’s witness. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” he says. And that which has been seen and declared to us is “that which was from the beginning,” a phrase which captures at once the opening phrase of his Gospel, itself a commentary on the opening statement of The Book of Genesis. “In the beginning God”… “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

In the epistle reading for his Christmas feast day, “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” is the essential revelation of the Word made flesh. And like the Christmas gospel, the purpose of this holy understanding is also revealed, namely, “that ye also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” The essential Christmas message is about God with us.

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“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. … Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.”

Nothing concentrates the meaning of Christmas more directly and more disturbingly, perhaps, than the Feast of St. Stephen celebrated on the day after Christmas. He is commemorated as the first martyr, the proto-martyr, whose witness, for that is the proper meaning of martyr, namely, witness, is the prototype, the model of all martyrdom. As the lesson from The Book of the Acts of the Apostles makes abundantly clear, Stephen achieves his eponymous crown (stephanos in Greek means crown) by losing his life not simply at the stone-throwing hands of a vicious mob but by losing himself in Jesus Christ. He has taken the Christ whose holy birth we have just celebrated as the model of life itself, the life of forgiveness. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Suddenly, the Christmas mystery illumines the mystery of the Passion of Christ and vice versa.

Following Christ is our Christian vocation. The Feast of Stephen opens out to us the radical nature of that following. It is to let the life of Christ define your outlook and being. More poignantly, it is to let the essential element of sacrifice and forgiveness have complete rule and sway. The Feast of Stephen is one of the three holy days of Christmas that open out to us the radical meaning of Christ’s holy birth. Human redemption comes with a price, the heart-blood of the Son of God become the Son of Man. Our witness, too, necessarily means sacrifice … and forgiveness.

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“And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city”

Nothing is more certain in this world than death and taxes, it is commonly said, a saying attributed to Daniel Defoe and Benjamin Franklin. How intriguing that death and taxes should be the features of the two centers of Christian contemplation: Bethlehem and the mystery of Christmas; Jerusalem and the mystery of Easter! Somehow God uses the matter of our common mortality, death, and the matter of our social and political lives, taxes, to teach us about his grace and goodness. Easter is the overcoming of death by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the mystery which is centered on Jerusalem. Christmas is the birth of Child Christ, which is centered on Bethlehem, where Christ is born because of the decree of Caesar Augustus “that all the world should be taxed.”

It is, I think, a pleasing overstatement which captures the power and the extent of the Roman Empire into which world Christ is born. Somehow all of the mechanisms of Empire and Government become, in spite of themselves, the instruments of divine and heavenly providence. In a way, it is the logic of the Incarnation itself; God embraces and redeems his Creation to himself. Even by way of taxation!

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“Of his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace”

Christmas, it seems, is all about excess, about fullness. At least, in our material culture we want it to be about more and more, whether it will be or not is our contemporary anxiety and worry. Christmas sometimes seems to be altogether too much of a muchness, whether it is gifts or food (or books!) or drink or parties or more and more anxieties. The pressures can be altogether too much; the pressures are great to get it all just right, whatever that means.

The paradoxes are even greater. Christ is born in a lowly stable. We want the glitter and glitz, the dazzling brightness of gold and silver, of rich silks and perfumes, of gadgets that whirl and whizz, of wine and chocolate, of all manner of sensual delights. We want the more and more of all that delights the senses only to find that it is, perhaps, really all too much, a sensory overload, and yet empty and nothing. We are caught up too much with ourselves only to find that we have missed the real meaning of Christmas. We have missed the real paradox of God’s great little one who brings us so much and more than we can ever embrace and comprehend, so much and more spiritually.

It is not about the stuff. It is about God with us, “the Word made flesh,” the mystery of Emmanuel, the great blessing which is the extravagance of God’s grace, even “grace upon grace.” “Of his fullness have we all received.”

Lost in the desire for ‘stuff & things’ (sounds like the name of a new chain of stores), we forget the greater mystery. It is not the mystery of matter, an endless succession of stuff and things; no, Christmas is the mystery of God’s embrace of our world and humanity. It is the mystery of human redemption and the redemption of creation itself. The extravagance of Christmas is God’s embrace of the material world, its redemption, we might say, that allows the world of our material pleasures to become the greater vehicles of heavenly grace, if only we will behold and see.

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“The Lord is at hand”

Advent is the season of watching and waiting. So we have been saying, over and over again, it seems. Yet it needs to be said and it needs to be heard. There are always four Sundays of Advent that bring us to Christmas but there are not always four full weeks of Advent. This year the Advent season is as long as it can possibly be because Christmas falls on a Sunday. We get the full benefit of the Advent season, if we will take advantage of this time of watching and waiting. We need it for it is the counter to what I sometimes call the ‘frenectitude’, if I may coin a term, for this frantic and frenetic time. Our busyness becomes a kind of mindless madness. I speak, I am afraid to say, from personal experience!

We need the quiet darkness of Advent, especially in a culture of fearful anxiety. “In nothing be anxious,” Paul tells us this morning, literally “be not careful” in its older translation by William Tyndale, meaning be not so full of cares and worries. “Rejoice in the Lord,” Paul says. And, then, speaking to a culture of excess, he says, “let your moderation be known unto all men.” Moderation. And what is the antidote to our frantic frenetic busyness? Prayer. “Prayer and supplication with thanksgiving,” he says. And prayer in its most basic sense is all about asking. And asking is all about questions. And Advent is all about the questions; questions that catapult us into the presence of the one who comes. They are intrinsic to the watching and waiting. They are our watching and waiting. Advent is the season of questions.

What is our watching and waiting? It is our watching and waiting expectantly, our watching and waiting in hope, our looking and longing for something more and better, for some greater good, for blessedness. Advent is, in every way, the season of hope.

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“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

John the Baptist calls us to repentance. He calls us to a fundamental change of outlook, a new orientation, a constant metanoia, which is nothing less than a radical transformation of attitude requiring renunciation and repudiation; in short, a resolute ‘no’ to the world.  Mary calls us to a willing acceptance of the one who comes. “Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Her ‘yes’ to God embodies the very nature of faith itself.

The Word made flesh comes to birth through her because that Word now fully defines her being. It marks an ever deepening understanding of the Mystery to which she so completely gives herself. It is borne out of her faithful hearing, her constant attentiveness to the Word and Son of God.

These two figures recall us to the profounder principles of our spiritual identity. They challenge us about our engagement with the world, to be sure, but without being taken captive by either the rhetoric of an idealised future or the rhetoric of an idealised past. They recall us to God in the motions of his love towards us. Let him who has an ear “hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.” In a way, as Augustine remarks somewhere, “the Scriptures are like letters from home,” perhaps, even emails, we might say; they remind us of who we are essentially and spiritually.

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“Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see.”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

&John the Baptist calls us to repentance. His cry is the mantra of Advent: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He calls us to a fundamental change of outlook, a new orientation, a constant metanoia, which is nothing less than a radical transformation of attitude requiring renunciation and repudiation; in short, a resolute ‘no’ to the world.  Mary calls us to a willing acceptance of the one who comes. “Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Her ‘yes’ to God embodies the very nature of faith itself.

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