Category: Sermons

“Herod … slew all the children that were in Bethlehem”

Christmas is for children, it is frequently said and rightly so bearing in mind that we are all the children of God and especially at this holy time when God became a little child. And yet, so much for children in our violent and brutal world where the innocent little ones are all too frequently the casualties and victims of horrendous acts of violence. And so, too, in the Christmas story.

The most troubling scene in the Old Testament, it seems to me, is the story of the Levite’s concubine. Abused and ravaged, she dies with her hands outstretched on the threshold of her master’s house; her body then cut up and circulated to all of the tribes of Israel as witness to the collective betrayal of the Law and of the universal laws of hospitality, the like of which had never before been seen in Israel. But the most troubling scene in the New Testament, it seems to me, is the story of the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem, killed because of Herod’s envy and fear about a rival King, on the one hand, and out of unbridled power without truth, without justice, without compassion, without restraint, on the other hand. Just so it speaks to our disordered world.

That this story belongs to the Christmas mystery is itself most telling and most moving. If it is the most troubling scene, it is also one of the most moving. It shatters all of our sentimental nonsense about Christmas. In this story we confront the deeper meaning of Christ’s Incarnation and face the realities of human wickedness, then and now. We don’t want to hear it and many are utterly unaware of it. And yet it marks the last of the three special Holy Days of Christmas, all of which comment upon the deeper meaning of Christ’s holy birth.

At issue, I suppose, is whether we are up to pondering this mystery. Almost universally overlooked, this story more than any other speaks directly and powerfully to the worst of the worst in our sad and troubled world, fractured and broken, violent and destructive. Christmas by virtue of this Christmas story is not a distraction but a condemnation of human folly and its violence. None of us escape this story. It belongs to the sad and sorry pageant of human violence, to the continuing spectacles of genocide and destruction that more than any other age belong to the story of the last one hundred years. It speaks as well to all of the deaths of the little ones in the name of convenience and expediency however complicated and complex the context. To ponder this story is to enter more fully into the Christmas mystery such that joys tinged by sorrow are deepened into faith and worship.

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“Even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written”

John is the great Evangelist of the mystery of Christmas at once soaring into the heights of divinity on eagle’s wings and with an eagle’s sight and witnessing to the reality of the Incarnation. “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 … declare we unto you.” His Gospel and Epistles testify to the nature of the Incarnation and counter the earliest debate and heresy known as docetism which argues that God could not be God and engage our humanity by becoming human. Spirit and matter are utterly opposed; there is a fundamental dualism to reality in such a view.

John the Evangelist argues to the contrary that the mystery of the Incarnation of God’s Word and Son reveals the greater mystery of God himself. God does not cease to be God in becoming man. In the life of Christ as the Gospel reading makes clear “there are also many other things which Jesus did” and, no doubt, said, that have not been written; indeed so many “that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” The mystery of Christmas is about the inexhaustible mystery of God in the wonder of his intimate engagement with us in the humanity of Christ. The Word made flesh, that Word “which was from the beginning,” from the principle of all life and thought, “was with the Father, and was manifested unto us.”

Things have been written in witness of these things “and we know that his witness is true,” John says about himself it seems. We may think that is a kind of special pleading but it is in the context of Peter following Jesus and asking about “the disciple whom Jesus loved following,” the disciple “which also leaned on his breast at supper” and as John tells us, the disciple who said at the last supper “Lord, which is he that betrayeth thee?” They are all strong arguments about the person of the Evangelist and about what he has heard and seen, and even more, what he has come to understand and believe. The Gospel reading belongs to the resurrection appearances of Christ and reflects on the theme of betrayal and crucifixion – all testament to the reality of the body of Christ at the same time to the divinity of Christ. All things which belong to the witness of John the Evangelist, he who wrote these things.

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“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

Today is The Feast of Stephen, “when the snow lay round about, Deep and crisp and even,” as the old carol puts it. Many of our Christmas memories and associations are shaped by the hymns and carols of the season, some of which have little or no relation to anything directly in the Scriptural story. No snow after all in little Bethlehem long ago, no feast of Stephen for that matter, historically speaking; that only comes later. But why then, The Feast of Stephen on the day after Christmas? Because it illumines the whole meaning and purpose of Christ’s Incarnation. It is entirely about sacrifice and service. It opens us out to the real meaning and vocation of our humanity but only through God’s condescension.

The great carol, Good King Wenceslas (Tempus Adest Floridum) is, however, a kind of critical commentary on the Christmas mystery. It speaks in provocative images of the idea of the rich and great ones reaching out to seek the good of the poor and lowly in contrast to exploiting them. Thus it is about treading in the steps of the master, and, in a lovely image, “heat was in the very sod / Which the saint had printed.” But who is that master and saint? In the carol it is King Wenceslas, the tenth century Duke of Bohemia seen as rex justus, a just ruler, but the model and archetype of all justice and compassion is the figure whom Stephen serves even unto death; it is the Lord Jesus. He is the model and the meaning of the spirit of divine humility. The hymn and story are a powerful counter to the pretensions and posturings of the proud and mighty of our world and day; a powerful illustration of what true justice and compassion means.

The Feast of Stephen is the necessary counter as well to the overblown sentimentalities of Christmas. It reminds us of the brutal violence in human hearts and in our world and day. An uncomfortable thought. It is really a kind of critical corrective to the affairs of the Church and all other powers and authorities everywhere when they forget that they live for a purpose and not simply for themselves. In a way, it is as simple as that.

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“For unto you is born this day in the city of David,
a Saviour which is Christ the Lord.”

It is an intellectual challenge that I sometimes like to set for myself, namely, to take a phrase from Scripture and see if one could tease out from that one phrase the essential teachings of the Christian Faith. Crazy, I know, but it means giving serious consideration to the words of Scripture and to what can be found in them, realizing just how much is revealed or at least suggested in them. There is, of course, the obvious problem that such an exercise probably means reading a whole lot more into things than what is there; the problem of isogesis rather than exegesis.

But in the ‘alt fact’ or ‘post-fact world,’ there is the need to pay close attention to interpretation. There are no facts independent of interpretation, even to say what the facts are involves interpretation as to why something is a fact that matters and to what extent. There are lots of ‘facts’ that are merely incidental and in a way meaningless. Despite the claims that are sometimes made by some physicists and some atheist philosophers, we don’t and can’t live in a purely random world of contingency. If everything is contingent, meaning that everything could be other than what it is, then logically there could be nothing. “Nothing is but what is not,” after all, as Shakespeare intuited! Interestingly, he was talking about the nature of evil.

Yet, as Averroes and Aquinas knew, the very idea of contingency requires the existence of the necessary, a necessary principle of being. Aquinas puts the argument in the most extreme case: if all is contingent, then everything potentially could not be therefore there would be nothing at all and if so, then no way for anything to come to be unless there was a principle which necessarily exists and cannot not exist. In short, there can be no contingency without necessity. Contingency in the finite world depends utterly upon a necessarily existent first principle which we call God.

What has any of this curious speculation have to do with Christmas? “For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour which is Christ the Lord.” A powerful phrase that illumines the great mystery of Christmas, it captures the sense of wonder and excitement of the infancy narrative of Luke, the quintessential Christmas story, full of details and apparent facts. It is a familiar story and scene which has moved the imaginations of poets and artists throughout the centuries. Its images are still deeply embedded in the psyche of our contemporary culture.

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“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”

Christmas challenges all the absurd certainties of our worried and weary world, a worried and wearied world, perhaps, because we are too much “assured of certain certainties” and only too “impatient to assume the world” (T.S. Eliot, Preludes). A virgin and a mother, a child who is God, a night that is eternal day, the Word and Idea of God made flesh, God with us and towards us and for us without ceasing to be what He is in himself – God. These are surely the ideas that challenge us. Christmas speaks powerfully to all our fears and worries, to the anxieties which arise from the absurd certainties and arrogance of the vanities of our reason when left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts.” It challenges all of the absurdities of power and domination in a world of violence and destruction, a worried and weary world, indeed.

“O weary, weary were the world / But here is all aright,” as G.K. Chesterton’s lovely poem, A Christmas Carol, puts it. Christmas proclaims the redemption of our humanity in all of its fullness, the redemption of our hearts and minds, of our souls and bodies. It is all found in God. That we might know this wonder and mystery, we have the wonder and mystery of God with us, Emmanuel. “The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart, / His hair was like a fire./ (O weary, weary were the world,/ But here the world’s desire.)”

No doubt, it may seem de trop, all too much. And there have even been times when Christmas was banned by Christians, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, not simply because people seemed to be having too much fun (and we can’t have that, can we?!), but because all of the images that came to surround the celebration seemed to be idolatry, mistaking God himself for the things which God has made, confusing the Creator with the Created. Christmas seemed to be mere superstition, “painted-over paganism” and anti-religious, a betrayal of the holy.

The first Book of Common Prayer (1549), too, was mocked as being “but like a Christmas game” by traditionalists, particularly in Cornwall, who wanted to retain the mystery of the Latin Liturgy and a sense of the holy as mysterious and incomprehensible. The association of the English liturgy with “a Christmas game” suggests something frivolous and not serious, something not really real. How to think the mystery of Christmas, it appears, is not a new challenge; it is the challenge for every age.

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“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”

We have come full circle from The Sunday Next Before Advent to The Fourth Sunday in Advent and indeed, largely by way of John’s Gospel. With the repeated acclamation by John the Baptist about Jesus as “the Lamb of God,” the Advent themes of expectation and longing for the redemption of our humanity reach a crescendo of intensity and excitement.

Today’s Gospel is known as “the record or the witness of John” and it presents a parade of questions and counter-claims about John the Baptist and the Christ. The repeated question about “Who art thou?” being asked of John is turned to the one who comes even on “the next day.” This year the very next day is Christmas Day.

It is a rich collection of images and ideas that this Sunday presents for us to ponder. “There was evening and there was morning, one day” we read in the Genesis story of creation. So now, too, it seems. Sunday for Christians is the Sabbath day because of the Resurrection of Christ, a day to ponder the mysteries of God in creation and redemption. Today is the last Sunday of Advent heralding the wonder of Christ’s nativity and yet today is also Christmas Eve. The next day is Christmas itself. All of the themes of the Advent are concentrated in the intensity of the questions belonging to the witness of John and are concluded in his statement, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The intensity of the questions in the Gospel are complemented by the note of expectation and joy in the Epistle reading with its strong exhortation to rejoice, for “the Lord is at hand.”

“The Lord is at hand” means that God is with us, our Emmanuel, in the one who comes after John, the one who is worthy, it seems, of our attention and acknowledgement. We contemplate the mystery of God in Christ Jesus in whom alone we find peace. “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Christmas is not a game, a human invention, a figment of our imagination. No. It is about the wonder of God’s engagement with our humanity opening us out to peace and joy and love and hope. It passes human knowing because it is fundamentally about the motions of God coming to us in the humanity of Jesus. It does not negate the activity of our reasoning but gathers it into something more than all of the machinations and manipulations of an instrumental reason which seeks only to dominate and destroy.

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“My Lord and my God”

The cycle of the Saints’ Day celebrations illumine the seasons of the Church year. Andrew heralds the Advent and inaugurates the tradition of Christian discipleship of bringing others to Christ, in his case, initially Simon Peter. Other figures, too, such as John the Baptist and Mary, belong to the theological landscape of Advent, the one preparing the way by repentance, the other as the chosen vessel of Christ’s Incarnation. What, then, about Thomas, the Saint of the Advent, too, it seems? His feast day falls so close to the winter solstice, the darkest day and longest night, and so close to Christ’s nativity. Two things, perhaps. His feast marks the intensity of the inwardness of the Advent of Christ and grounds Advent and Christmas in the mysteries of the crucifixion and the resurrection without which they have no meaning.

The Epistle reading from Ephesians not only recalls the apostolic foundation of the Church but also our Christian vocation through that foundation to be “an habitation of God through the Spirit,” even as Christ is the Divine Word who dwelt among us, Mary being the “habitaculum dei,” the little habitation of God for us, as the Fathers put it. But it is the Gospel that especially arrests our attention. It is the story of so-called “doubting Thomas,” the Thomas who was not with the other disciples on the evening of the Resurrection when Christ appeared to them “behind closed doors,” the Thomas who hearing about Christ’s appearing said he would not believe “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side.” Not just seeing as believing, it seems, but touching is required as well.

The story already anticipates and belongs to the refutation of what will be the earliest heresy known as docetism. The distinction between spirit and matter, between God and the world, between God and man is held absolutely and in a dualist manner. Spirit is good, and matter is evil and in its various gnostic forms, salvation is about the liberation of spirit from matter in which it is trapped. There is, in other words, no redemption of the natural world, no redemption of our humanity, only a “beam me up, Scotty” kind of Star Trek view of salvation which denies the integrity of the material world empirically speaking. From such a view, the Incarnation of God is impossible and an affront to the Divine nature. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection can only be a kind of play, a mere seeming; in short, a sham. And, by extension, the virgin birth must be false. Contrary to the wonderful words of the Te Deum, God would have abhorred the Virgin’s womb!

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“And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up,
and lift up your heads”

Well, Apocalypse Now to be sure, with “signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear”. Sounds like the evening news. But perhaps you took some comfort even from the Dies Irae last week in the contrast between the forms of the secular apocalypse and the features of the sacred apocalypse; the one seemingly hopeless and in despair, the other precisely about hope and joy. Not however by putting any trust in ourselves but by looking unto God and his Word.

Advent is inescapably apocalyptic. It is about our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s Word coming to us, the Word which awakens us to the truth of God which is the true and only measure of our lives. On The Second Sunday in Advent we are awakened to the presence and the truth of God coming to us in the pageant of Holy Scripture. In the face of the impending doom and gloom of our world and day, we are awakened to hope and joy. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” Paul tells us, referencing the Hebrew Scriptures, though, ironically, what he says will extend to the writings of the Christian Scriptures including his own letters. But learning what? He tells us the purpose of the “things [which] were written,” the purpose of the Scriptures: “that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” That word “hope” is mentioned four times in today’s epistle. That hope is about our life in Christ now and always. The point is wonderfully captured in Cranmer’s celebrated Collect which expresses an Anglican sensibility about the Scriptures as God’s Word which we are to “hear…, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest; ” in short, fully immerse ourselves in them. Why? Because they gather us into the life of God.

In his homily on A Fruitful Exhortation Unto the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture, Cranmer notes that “he that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place, or temple, of the blessed Trinity.” That means attending to the Scriptures. “The Scripture of God,” he says, “is the heavenly meat of our souls; the hearing and keeping of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy. It turneth our souls; it is a light lantern unto our feet. It is a sure, steadfast, and everlasting instrument of salvation.” Scripture is a doctrinal instrument of salvation because it is written for our learning. It turns our souls to God.

This is a high doctrine of Scripture that emphasizes a learning that is about wisdom and truth in contrast to an instrumental reason which all too often manipulates and destroys by reducing ourselves and one another to machines, objects, and things at the expense of the thinking that makes us truly human. Advent offers a corrective and a critique of human reason at once confronting us with the continuing sagas of folly and wickedness in a world where power trumps truth and opening us out to the redemption of our humanity by recalling us to God through his Word and Son.

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