Emmanuel - Christmas Day 2001

Emmanuel

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us." Matt 1.23

“Pooh”, said Piglet taking his paw.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just checking that you were there…” (The House at Pooh Corner)

I did a project on piglets when I was an undergraduate. It was really my room-mate, Andrew’s project - he was an applied biologist.

We weaned 6 piglets at two weeks, 4 weeks and six weeks. Then we jogged out to the university farm before breakfast each morning and weighed the 18 little piggies (easier said than done), each alone in their own snug little sty. The experiment was to see how early they could be safely weaned.

Sadly, our main finding was that piglets have little piggy nervous breakdowns when they are separated too early from the litter. They are social animals, and integral to their health and well-being is companionship, the warmth of others.

Piglet needed Pooh to be there.

Most mammals are social, and humans are no exception. We were not created to be alone, and we only sustain aloneness with some difficulty.

In the first chapters of the Bible we read of Adam naming the animals and finding none suitable for the companionship he longed for. But then Eve is created: bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; a companion.

God himself is also a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal society. And so it was natural for God to enjoy friendship with his creation. He walked in the garden with the man and woman, in the cool breezes of the evening.

Then in his incarnation, he became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk and subject to Mary and Joseph for half of his life.

As a grown man too he needed friends. Jesus was fully human. He had many friends: men and women; he loved children and had presumably watched many grow up in his wider family and had doubtless played with the children of some of his disciples.

But he had an inner circle of close friends: James and John, and Peter - there with Jesus for the transfiguration; there in the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus wanted them with him in his most agonising hour of decision. He goes off to pray, but keeps returning: “just checking that you are there, and preferably awake”. And they were there, after the women, at the resurrection. Of the three, Jesus had a Best Friend - John, who stands by his mother at the cross.

Now there is no more God, walking with us in the cool of the day. There is no more physical Jesus, ready to sit and chat, and share a drink.

But there is a profounder reality of God’s companionship.

For the virgin has conceived and born a son, and his name is Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.

He is with us in a number of ways.

Since he lived here on earth, and shared our joys and sorrows, he can empathise with us in all that we go through. He is not distant and unmoved, but he is with us in all the richness and vagaries of our lives.

Then he has taught us that all humans are made in his image, and are to be loved, second only to God. So all our kinships and friendships are part of God’s being with us.

We cannot hug God, but we can hold the hand of a friend to check that they are there. And in our turn we can sit with friends and strangers, and by our physical presence assure them that God is with them.

And if through the birth of this baby, Emmanuel, God is with us; then as St Paul says, God is for us and who can be against us? Christmas dispels any superstition that God is somehow out to get us; ready at the least excuse to consign us to hell!

The manger scene is charged with love and a self-giving God who longs still for the companionship of his creation.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder of the empty seats around the table. The disciples were filled with foreboding as they realised that Christ was leaving them, from the manger to the skies.
So he reassures them in his words of parting: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. (Matt 28.20)

Here is an even deeper spiritual mystery. For it has been the experience of Christians through the ages, that by God’s Holy Spirit, they sense the loving presence of God; Emmanuel, closer than the breath on our lips.

It is of course very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that. Loving our partners and friends is very subjective, but nonetheless real for being that.

And what of Emmanuel, God with us, beyond the close of the age?

This has been a year with not a little grief and anguish. John the Divine lived in more uncertain and turbulent times than ours and in his vision, Emmanuel gives the ultimate reassurance of his presence and Being:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." (Rev 21.1-4)

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us."

Voice Crying in Wilderness

Voice in the Wilderness

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness” John 1.23

Advent is almost passed. Christmas is nearly here. The last penitents are queuing at the confessional. The purple vestments will soon rest from their labours until lent. The Christmas trees are in church but not yet bedecked. The shops are advertising their New Year Sales.

And on this last Sunday before the nativity of our Lord, that strange and uncomfortable cousin of our Lord comes crying in the wilderness. With prophetic vision he calls on us to understand rightly what we are about to enact.

With all the intuition of an artist, pursuing his lonely vocation from God, he draws men and women into the unimaginable purposes of God.

A former Dean of Westminster, Michael Mayne, in his latest book, Learning to Dance, (DLT, 2001) suggests three abilities of the artist:

*they can show us what the world discloses when we learn to give it our full attention
*they can remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent
*and they can enable us, in Auden’s phrase, ‘to break bread with the dead’

In other words, they use the natural world, the supernatural world and our collective memory; to transform the here and now. And if this is true of the work of artists as I think it is, then it is also true of the ministry of John the Baptist.

He calls people out of the cities and villages into the natural world - the wilderness. He is a man of nature, with his camel hair clothes, leather girdle and his diet of locusts and wild honey. John somehow realises that his message of repentance and heart religion is better heard in the grandeur of God’s raw world.

Landscape and barren waste, raging seas and mountains, flowers and stars, the river Jordan in which John’s disciples are baptised - all are charged with greater significance, and all disclose deity. In the words of St Paul:

“Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Rom 1.20)

And even the beauty of man-made things can point to their divine Initiator if we will listen to our hearts. Here is CS Lewis:

“The books or the beauty in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing... They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (The Weight of Glory, SPCK, 1954, p8)

Secondly John reminds his followers of the hidden power of the transcendent. Matthew tells us that the voice cried in the wilderness: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." (Matt 3.2)

The fabric of the temporal world is to be ripped apart by the birth of a baby. The virgin conceives; the supernatural invades the natural; the dawn from on high breaks among us and John declares he will baptise, not with the natural water, but with the transcendent fire of the Spirit.

Finally, John allows his disciples to break bread with the dead. Although what he preaches is in some ways new, he sees it only as a fulfilment of all that has gone before. The fullness of time has come and that spoken of by the prophets will surely come to pass.

This herald of Christ understands the present because he is soaked in the past. Sadly, the Christian voice is often a voice in the wilderness because so few in our society understand our roots. They do not break bread with the dead, they merely raid their tombs when it is convenient.

I read the little explanation on the back of a Celtic cross that hangs on my wall the other day. It is a copy from the original in St Kevin's Church Glendalough, in Ireland.

“A cross is the meeting of the horizontal and the vertical, yin and yang, feminine and masculine. In the Celtic cross the circle spins this union into infinity, into the cosmos, from the profane to the sacred.”

And there I was thinking it was something to do with Christ and Christianity! This is not breaking bread with the dead, it is breaking faith with the dead. Our collective histories and traditions are an essential part of responding appropriately to the present. It is impossible to appreciate where we are without acknowledging where we have been.

This is true at an individual level as well, and whether it’s sitting with friends and family this Christmas reminiscing, or telling our therapist, or reliving our past through Friendsreunited.com - these all enrich our present and help us to see more clearly where we really want to go.

Of course these three categories of Michael Mayne that we have been exploring in the ministry of John the Baptist, all find focus here at this altar in this mass.

These Holy Mysteries also

*show us what the world discloses when we learn to give it our full attention
*remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent
*and enable us, in Auden’s phrase, ‘to break bread with the dead’

In our Catholic tradition, the mass invites us to give our full attention to the physical world. It provokes our five senses of sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing. There is a physicality about the mass: about movement and eating, and gold and purple, and polyphony and pungency - which draws us beyond itself, and leaves us longing for Another Country and for the Beloved.

And then the Bread and the Wine remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent, mysteriously present in them - a power to transform us from mere animals scraping about the planet to survive; to spiritual beings made in the image of God; capable of beauty and heroism; of friendship and wonder.

And here we break bread with the dead: with the innumerable company of the saints all gathered around the altar. Our liturgy brings our collective memory of God’s saving acts into focus. It incorporates the truths grasped by those who have gone before us in the faith.

So we are called by God, in our turn, to follow John the Baptist as voices crying in the wilderness, always preparing the way for Christ, heralds of his coming; pointing men and women to the transcendence which is all around them if they will but turn and see; opening their hearts and minds to hear

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness”