Emmanuel - God is with us - Christmas Day

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

I’ve just moved flat and seriously ‘downsized’. It meant getting rid of about 4,000 books to various good homes, and of course you begin to look at them once you start bidding them farewell.

And so it was that last night I found myself reading The House at Pooh Corner, the Latin version of course, Domus Anguli Puensis.

“Pooh”, said Piglet taking his paw.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just checking that you were there…”

Humans, like piglets, are social animals. We need the sense that someone is ‘there’. We are, for all of our lives, in some way dependent upon others.

God himself is a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal intimacy of the Trinity.

Then in his incarnation which we celebrate at Christmas, God became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk. The little boy, Jesus, needed Mary to be there, to hold his hand.

As a grown man too Jesus needed companionship and had many friends: men, women and children.

He had an inner circle of close friends: James and John, and Peter - there with Jesus through the ups and downs of his ministry.

And there at the end of his short life 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 some were there at his crucifixion: his best friend John, and his mother Mary, who had bought him into the world in that stable in Bethlehem.

So now, physically, he is with us on this planet no more. No hand to hold. But there is an even profounder reality of God’s continuing companionship. For Mary has conceived and born a son, and his name is Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.

He is with us because he lived here 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.

Sometimes at Christmas, they show that wonderful animated version of Oscar Wilde’s lovely story, The Selfish Giant. The Giant has been taught to share his garden with all the local children by the appearance of a mysterious little boy at a very low ebb in his life.

But although he searches for this child among the children throughout the rest of his long life, he never finds him, until one day he sees him in a tree in his garden.

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?"

For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."

"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love."

"Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."

By being among us Jesus has also taught us that all humans are made in his image, and are to be loved and cared for – another theme of Christmas and our compassion for the poor and needy.
This means that all our kinships and friendships are part of God’s being with us, being there.

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 there with them.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder, especially as we get older, of the empty seats around the table.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples are filled with foreboding as they realise that Christ is leaving them, from the manger to the skies.

So the end of Matthew’s Gospel re-echos the beginning. 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; he’s there, here, with us.

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

We started with the boy Christopher Robin, thought about the boy Jesus, and I end with a lesson from another little boy.

A while back I was in Stockholm with my good friends Stefan and Helena and their little boy Einar. We were in a flat he’d never been in before and at one point his parents left the room with our host.

He looked at me, said something in Swedish, then remembered I was that poor simple man who didn’t understand anything anyone said. So he came over, put his thumb in his mouth, and reached up and held my hand. Just checking I was there.

I hope you have a very happy Christmas, and a deepening sense in your life of the continual and reassuring presence of God.

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

Emmanuel - St John the Apostle

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

And a reading from one of my Christmas presents from many years ago – from Winnie the Pooh:

“Pooh”, said Piglet taking his paw.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just checking that you were there…” (The House at Pooh Corner)

Humans, like piglets, are social animals. We need the sense that someone is ‘there’. We are, for all of our lives, in some way dependent on others. It’s why especially at Christmas we hate to think that anyone will be ‘alone’.

You probably heard the huge response there was to the Today programme’s Christmas Eve interview with 89 year-old John Arthur who would be alone at Christmas. One listener even wanted to fly him over to Paris for the Christmas weekend.

God himself is a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal intimacy of the Trinity.

And when he creates mankind in his own image, then he wishes to include them in the society of the Godhead. So Genesis tells us that he walks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden.

In our Old Testament lesson today we hear of his closeness to Moses; as Exodus puts it: “Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”

Then in his incarnation which we celebrate this Christmastide, God became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk and subject to Mary and Joseph. The boy Jesus, God enfleshed, needed them to be there.

As a grown man too he needed companionship and had many friends: men, women and children.

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 they were there at his crucifixion: his best friend John, and his mother Mary, who had bought him into the world in that stable in Bethlehem – [point to Rood Screen] there are John and Mary, at the foot of his cross as they are in churches throughout the world.

Today in the church’s calendar we remember that Apostle John. He wrote the most reflected and mystical account of the life of Jesus and although his authorship of the fourth Gospel, the three epistles and the mysterious book often known as the Revelation of St John the Divine, is much debated, there is certainly a corpus of literature that can be called Johannine.

John Keble draws from all those sources in our final hymn today. (See below)

The other disciples were obviously slightly miffed that John had such a special place in the affections of Jesus, especially the Apostle Peter. The verse before today’s Gospel reads:

“Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper.” (John 21.20)

And then the recommissioned Peter goes on to ask the resurrected Jesus, who was telling them that he would be leaving them soon, “so what’s going to happen to John? Is he going with you?”

It’s a fascinating passage, but I don’t want to discuss it now, so on to the present day.

Jesus was born – we continue to celebrate that over the 40 days of Christmas and epiphany; and Jesus has died and risen again and is now ascended back to the Father. Physically, he is with us no more. No hand to hold. No one for John to lean against.

But hinted at in today’s Gospel there is an even profounder reality of God’s continuing companionship with John and with all of us.

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

He is with us because he 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.

And he has taught us that all humans are made in his image, and are to be loved and cared for. 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.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder, especially as we get older, of the empty seats around the table.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples are filled with foreboding as they realise that Christ is leaving them, from the manger to the skies.

So the end of Matthew’s Gospel echoes the beginning where our text is written: “they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.” At the end of the Gospel 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 - he’s here, with us.

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

A while back I was in Stockholm with my good friends Stefan and Helena and their third child, a young boy, Einar. We were in a flat he’d never been in before and at one point his parents left the room with our host.

He looked at me, said something in Swedish, then remembered I was that poor simple man who didn’t understand anything. So he came over, put his thumb in his mouth, and held my hand. Just checking I was there.

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

Hymn by John Keble (1792-1866) for St John the Apostle's Day

Word Supreme, before creation

Born of God eternally,

Who didst will for our salvation

To be born on earth and die,

Well Thy saints have kept their station,

Watching till Thine hour drew nigh.

Now 'tis come and faith espies Thee;

Like an eagle in the morn

John in steadfast worship eyes Thee,

Thy belov’d, Thy latest born.

In Thy glory he descries Thee

Reigning from the Tree of scorn.

Much he asked in loving wonder,

On Thy bosom leaning, Lord.

In that secret place of thunder

Answer kind didst Thou accord,

Wisdom for Thy Church to ponder

Till the day of dread award.

Lo, heaven's doors lift up, revealing

How thy judgements earthward move;

Scrolls unfolded, trumpets pealing,

Wine-cups from the wrath above;

Yet o'er all a soft voice stealing,

"Little children, trust and love."

Mary - Advent 4

“Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.”

Luke 1.28

What is the connection between macaroni and the Virgin Mary?

Give up? It’s Christmas Carols.

I’m sure over the next few days we will be listening to lots of carols like ‘In Dulci Jubilo – Let us our homage show’ and ‘A Hymn to the Virgin’- Of one that is so fair and bright,
Velut maris stella, which both date back to the 14^th century.

And like many other mediaeval carols, they are macaronic. That is, partly in English and partly in Latin.

The adjective ‘macaronic’, is used to describe any text which is a jumbled mixture of the vernacular – English or German or whatever - and Latin or Latinized words; or indeed words from any other languages.

In the secular world this mixture of languages was often used in burlesque or satire.

The word comes from the New Latin ‘macaronicus’, literally, resembling macaroni: presumably, suggesting lack of sophistication or simple rustic wisdom.

And this is one of the hallmarks of these mediaeval carols, which makes them so attractive, and at the same time rather annoying.

They are often full of homespun devotion to Our Lady and theological naivety.

The Latin is perhaps supposed to give them a bit more weight.

But rather like putting on a posh accent while still using appalling grammar, the overall effect is one of lovable, and even laughable, simplicity.

And it is perhaps hardly surprising then that these macaronic carols were often used to depict Our Lady and the birth of Jesus. For the event is both simply profound and yet profoundly simple.

So there is something deeply mysterious and theological about Mary the Theotokos, the God-bearer, who is the focus of the readings and prayers on this fourth Sunday in Advent.

Yet, at the same time, there is something slightly risqué and ‘common’ about a pregnant teenager who claims to be a virgin. There is something of the barrack-room joke about it. We’ve all heard them and laughed at them. It is the human way to laugh at great mystery.

What does this tell us about the Christian attitude to Mary and her place in our salvation and daily living?

It was music that first began to give me an inkling of devotion to Our Lady, back in my teens.

Not surprisingly, my good puritan Baptist church had no images of any kind in the building - not even a cross until the swinging 60s.

So Mary only featured in Christmas Carols. And even then some of the words had to be changed to protect theological sensibilities.

Remember that line in Adam lay y bounden: ‘Ne had the apple taken been, the apple taken been, ne had never Our Lady a-been heavene queen’.

Well you can’t have that! So it was changed to ‘Ne had never Christ’s glory on earth ever been seen.’ A not-so-subtle Christological shift there from Our Lady to Our Lord.

But despite all this, as a teenager exploring passion and fallings in love, it was hymns and carols that often inspired my devotion. I recognised that just as Jesus was the most lovable man; the man from God; the second Adam; the man who was God;

so Mary was the most loveable woman, the woman chosen by God, the second Eve; the perfect Mother of Our Lord; a friend, a comforter, who like any good mother, understands and cares.

Here again is an earthiness that the common man understands. Here in this straightforward peasant girl is a mystery almost too great for us to bear.

In today’s Gospel we read of the Visitation, when Mary visits her older cousin Elizabeth, already six months gone with John the Baptist, to talk about pregnancy and birth, and pain and Joseph and hopes and fears.

She had gone because of the Annunciation (depicted in Arthur Hacker's wonderful painting on the front cover of the service sheet – it looks better in the Tate https://mikefrost.net/the-most-tender-of-all-advent-paintings/ )

– when the angel Gabriel visited Mary to tell her she was to be the bearer of the Word made flesh – Jesus.

Whatever happened between Mary and God, between this Angel and Mary; it was such an exceptional happening that no other human being has ever experienced such, before or since.

And the words of these mediaeval, macaronic poems pile up epithets and allegories to draw us out in love of God, and love of this simple woman who became such a channel of grace. Deep, unfathomable mystery and simple, animal, mother-love, for Jesus - and for us.

So what is our response to this remarkable woman who is at the heart of the unfolding Christmas story?

It should surely be the same as hers – astonishment at God’s intervention, complete lack of comprehension – how could this happen? And yet complete trust that God is working his purposes out in our lives and in our world – ‘be it unto me according to thy word’.

Rainer Maria Rilke in his poem on The Annunciation from Das Marienleben, catches the cosmic significance of this pregnant young woman. He suggests that even the Angel Gabriel cannot believe the message he is to deliver to this young Israeli woman. He is astonished.

When the angel stepped in,

he did not take her by surprise,

It was as though a ray of sunlight or moonlight

had entered her room,

No, she did not even blink!

But when he bent close his youthful face

she looked into eyes that looked into hers,

their gaze so powerful that the world outside

was suddenly empty

and the multitudes' visions, their deeds

and their burdens

all were crowded into them: just she and he;

this girl, this angel, this spot.

And they were both astonished.

Then the angel sang his melody.

“Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” Luke 1.28

(Rainer Maria Rilke, from Das Marienleben

translated & adapted by Alice Van Buren and Russell Walden)

God's self-communication

God’s self-communication

Prov 8.1, 22-31; Col 1.15-20; John 1.1-14 (2nd Sunday before Lent)

“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8

Facebook. What's it all about? In the five years since it started on 4th February 2004 it has become a social phenomenon. There are over 175 million people signed up in this worldwide network of friends. They upload 850 million photos each month.

There are 20 million active user groups, including St Paul’s Knightsbridge, Stale Expressions of Church and the Richard Coles Admiration Group.

And what’s it all about? Well at it’s most basic level it is about communication on the worldwide web. But more than that, it’s about presenting an image of yourself to family, friends and anyone else who is allowed to see your facebook.

And of course it is highly selective in what you choose to display. I wouldn’t try to give a false impression to people who look at my facebook. It’s just that I don’t happen to have any photos of myself that weren’t taken at least 10 years ago.

And when my hard-working colleagues read in my status that ‘Nick is on a course’, it is only for the sake of brevity that I haven’t written, slightly more accurately, ‘Nick is on a golf course!’

However, you still pick up a fairly good impression of what someone’s like from their facebook.

You could just write a letter. The Valentine’s card I received yesterday spoke volumes: “Every time I see you dearie, I can believe in Darwin’s theory.” It’s a succinct and topical way of saying they admire my animal magnetism.

But if I want some one to know what really makes me tick, I need to spend time with them face to face. Self-communication is better done person to person.

Even then, there are limits as to how completely I am able to communicate myself to another person, partly because I don’t fully know my own self.

The Christian faith is in essence the self-communication of God to us human beings, and it has been a progressive revelation over several thousand years.

The Bible tells us that God’s first self-communication was in creation itself. In today’s Gospel, John deliberately starts with a reference back to Genesis, ‘In the beginning was the Word’.

The passage from Proverbs refers to this Word as ‘Wisdom’ who says: "I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world 
and delighting in the human race (8.30f)”

St Irenaeus was to express this in his famous phrase: The glory of God is Man fully alive: Gloria Dei vivens homo.

St Paul puts it this way in the opening of his letter to the Romans:

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

We celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday this weekend. So let him have the last word on this:

This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather the impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe including man as a result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man and I deserve to be called a theist.

But in the wisdom of God, simply becoming a theist by considering the universe was not all that God wished to say about himself.

So, thousands of years later in human development, there was a fuller, deeper self-communication: the Word, the Divine Wisdom, became flesh, and dwelt among us.

This was the greater self-communication of God in Christ, a human being like us who lived and taught among our ancestors.

And in a world that was full of pain and suffering, which was, as Darwin observed, red in tooth and claw, God not only became one of us, but suffered with us and for us.

There is of course no answer to the question of why God created so much pain and death in his universe. It’s an essential part of the process of evolution and was a problem that stopped Darwin and many others from fully embracing the God of love whom we see in Jesus Christ.

But although the life and cruel death and resurrection of Jesus doesn’t give us an answer to our questions about the cosmos as it is, it does signify to us the depth of God’s concern and identification with our struggles, and his great desire to reach out to us in love.

There is a third and crucial stage in the progressive revelation of God and this is not determined by the unfolding of history, or the development of human culture and self-understanding.

It is determined by our own personal response to the love of God.

Facebook aficionados will know that you receive messages from people who wish to ‘be your friends’ and who are then able to see your facebook.

But before they can do this you have to accept their request, and if you don’t want to, you simply press ‘Ignore’. They are not told that you have ignored them, and the hope is that they will eventually forget they asked to be your friend and go away. But some are persistent.

God not only reveals his wisdom and glory in creation; he not only reveals his love and compassion in Jesus Christ; he persistently, persistently requests our friendship.

In Kant’s words: “God is not an it to be discussed, but a Thou to be met.”

Or in the words of the Psalmist and of our text this morning: “O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.”

Men and women, down through the centuries have experienced, have tasted the love of God. By the mystery of the Holy Spirit we believe we are able to apprehend God, to know him.

This is what John marvelled at when he wrote in this morning’s Gospel:

But to all who received him… he gave power to be become the children of God… and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

This was what Irenaeus had in mind when he wrote: the glory of God is Man full alive.

This is what Jesus meant when he said: “I have come that you might have life and have it in all its fullness.”

At this Table we see all the progressive revelation of God, all his self-disclosure met in the meal of his love.

We bring the gifts of creation: bread and wine, music and liturgy, the best that our culture can offer; and we offer the one perfect and complete sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the suffering servant; and we bring our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice. We take God into ourselves. There can be no fuller self-communication this side of death.

As we draw near with faith, the invitation to friendship with God is given again this morning:

“O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.” Psalm 34.8

The Virginity of Mary - Advent 4

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Luke 1.38

I must have told you about the man who is on his first parachute jump. The instructor says: "you just jump out of the plane, the chute automatically opens, you land in that field - there'll be a nice cup of tea waiting for you."

The man is sceptical. "What if the chute doesn't open?" "No problem. You pull the emergency chute cord. Another parachute opens, you land in that field - there'll be a nice cup of tea waiting for you."

The man jumps. Nothing happens. He pulls the emergency cord. Nothing happens. As he plummets to earth he's muttering to himself: "Bet there's no cup of tea either..."

Today I want to speak about the virginity of Mary, the mother of our Lord. When I was studying theology in the 60s and 70s, ‘the virgin birth’ was a hot topic of debate and you would often be asked whether you ‘believed in it’.

The theologian Rudolph Bultmann had been busy ‘demythologising’ the Gospel in the 40s and 50s and the virgin birth was one of the doctrines that had gone out of the window.

Modern people couldn’t believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, the argument ran, so rather than have it as a stumbling block, it should simply be removed.
And what has this got to do with the man with the parachute? Well, if neither of your parachutes has opened, then debating whether or not ‘there is a nice cup of tea’ is rather pointless.

Put the other way round, if you believe that God, the creator of all, entered the space time continuum, and came to our tiny planet, and implanted himself within a foetus in a womb in Palestine over two thousand years ago, then in comparison, the virginity of Mary is a miracle of small matter.

To use Jesus’ own metaphor in a different way, why swallow a camel and then strain at a gnat.

On the other hand, there is no spiritual merit in believing a hundred impossible things before breakfast.

Do we need to believe in the virgin birth?

Richard Hooker was a very early Anglican theologian at the end of the 16th Century. He famously gave the model of a three-legged stool – Scripture, Tradition and Reason – as being the balanced way of considering theological questions.

So let’s apply this to the virgin conception of Christ.

Scripture, such as that read today in the Gospel, the most important leg for Hooker and for the church down the centuries, seems to point to the virginity of Mary, although it is not an absolutely solid case.

Tradition is certainly on the side of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is in the two most important creeds, the Apostles’, and what we shall say in a few minutes, the Nicene creed. Indeed, the perpetual virginity of Mary, something I shall come back to in a moment, was established in the Lateran Council of 649.

And the third leg, Reason? Well yes, I and many others see the doctrine as eminently reasonable. The conception of Jesus, from our limited point of view, was a supernatural act.

If he was and is truly God and truly Man, then Mary provides his human lineage, and God the Holy Spirit provides his divine DNA, if you like.

We shall say in the creed in a moment: “and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” And some of us will bow to acknowledge the awesome miracle of the incarnation, the graciousness of God in coming among us as one of us.

The doctrine is part and parcel of the mind-stretching, miracle of the incarnation. I hardly think it makes that miracle any easier to believe, if we don’t have to believe in a virgin birth.

The perpetual virginity of Mary, Mary ever-virgin, is a much harder doctrine to defend. It certainly has tradition on its side, even Luther and the protestant reformers adhered to the dogma.

But a plain reading of Scripture does not seem to support it. Mention of Jesus’ brothers has to be explained by saying they were in fact cousins, or Joseph’s children by a previous wife who had died.

And as for Reason, I and many of my colleagues would say that it is not reasonable to expect Mary to have remained a virgin throughout her married life.

This brings us on to the final point which we might call the cultural icon of the Virgin Mary.

Whether she remained a virgin or not, the enduring image of Mary in art, music and popular devotion, is of a pure young woman who willingly submitted to the incredible will of God.

And in this, she touches both on our common humanity and on our immortal longings for God.

In our common humanity there is a recognition that as sexual awareness grows there is some ‘loss of innocence’ – and we hardly know what we mean by the phrase.

It is not about some mediaeval concept that sex is bad or polluting, it is rather to do with the realization that the world is more complex and our relationships more messy than childhood might have led us to believe.

Our sense of wonder becomes dulled, our expectations of life take disappointment into account.

We can never look at life through the simple, and in some senses, pure eyes of childhood again.

And yet in Mary, especially with the child who is God on her lap, we have a picture of the miracle of innocence regained.

It’s captured in the Christmas Carols:

I syng of a mayden
That is makeles;

Moder and mayden
Was never non but she;
Wel may swych a lady
Godes moder be.

Or again:

There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu;

For in this rose contained was
Heaven and earth in little space; Res Miranda – what a wonderful thing!

And in this most powerful icon, we see ourselves as we long to be: pure, full of wonder, intimately in touch with God our maker and sustainer. We see trust and calm contentment – the sleeping cat in the bottom left of Barocci’s picture on the front cover.

We see too, our immortal future, and somehow this young woman’s faith helps us to believe. She is like us and draws us out in faith to gaze upon her son in wonder and worship.

And then, the Blessed Virgin Mary encourages us to echo with her and all the saints through the ages:

“Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Luke 1.38

Carols

I syng of a mayden
That is makeles;
Kyng of alle Kynges
To her Son she ches.

He cam al so stylle
There his moder was
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the gras;

He cam al so stylle
To his moderes bowr
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the flour;

He cam al so stylle
There his moder lay
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the spray;

Moder and mayden
Was never non but she;
Wel may swych a lady
Godes moder be.

1. There is no rose of such virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu;
 Alleluia.

2. For in this rose contained was
Heaven and earth in little space;
 Res miranda.

3. By that rose we may well see
That he is God in persons three,
 Pares forma.

4. The angels sungen the shepherds to:
Gloria in excelsis deo:
 Gaudeamus.

5. Leave we all this worldly mirth,
And follow we this joyful birth;
 Transeamus.

6. Alleluia, res miranda,
 pares forma, gaudeamus,
 transeamus.

Christmas Fact & Faith, Advent 4

Christmas Fact & Faith

Advent 4: Isaiah 7.10-16; Romans 1.1-7; Matt 1.18-25

“I am with you always, to the end of the age”. (Matt 28.20)

How do we know this boy was born on Christmas Day? Well, here, I have my birth certificate! I was born on 25th December 1949 to Stanley George Mercer and Betty Mercer (nee Steele), at 160 Old Shoreham Road.

So how do we know that the man who bought enlightenment to the world was born on Christmas Day? Well, it’s there in the church registers: Isaac Newton was born on 25th December 1642.

As Alexander Pope wrote: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, 'Let Newton be!' and there was light."

Well I could go on listing Christmas babies, but one infant that would certainly not appear is Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury said recently, the only thing we can be sure of from the Bible is that Jesus was born to Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. No other historical facts are clear.

Luke’s Gospel gives a number of clues which help to guess at Jesus’ birthday. I won’t bore you with the details, but the best and commonest guess is around mid September in 3BC. Or it could have been May, which would allow you to sing:

God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,
Remember, Christ, our Saviour, was born sometime in May.

The early church was never really concerned with the historical details of Christ’s birth. As we saw in today’s Epistle, Paul was convinced of the historical Jesus, who was born of Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and rose again for us.

Christians were Easter people for three hundred and fifty years before they first had a Midnight Mass to celebrate the nativity of our Lord, on a date which was chosen to coincide with a number of midwinter festivals.

The Gospel writers were historical, but they were always more concerned with the theology of Jesus, than with setting out some short biographical sketch.

So Isaiah’s prophecy about ‘a young woman’ in today’s OT reading, is slightly re-interpreted by Matthew as he translates Isaiah’s Hebrew into ‘the Virgin’. The predominant tradition in the Early Church, made explicit by Luke’s Gospel, was that Mary was a virgin.

There was a certain theological symmetry in this. If Jesus was truly God and truly man, then it made sense that he would be born of a woman, but conceived by the Holy Spirit. (It wouldn’t work the other way round of course!)

And then Jesus’ human lineage is important, as he must be born of King David’s line if he is to fulfil prophecy.

Curiously, it is Joseph who is shown earlier in Matthew’s first chapter to be a direct descendant of King David.

So the connection is through a foster father - there is no direct blood line through Mary (unless you understand Luke 3 as giving a genealogy of Mary rather than Joseph - as a few do).

Here’s another interesting little Gospel detail, that on the three occasions an angel appeared to Joseph, it was always in a dream. Mary met them face-to-face.

It is to Joseph’s eternal credit, that he believed what the angel said in his dream. Most men would require the real thing: a ten foot angel, wings and all, writing in flame on a wall, before they believed that their virgin fiancée was pregnant with a divine child.

Matthew doesn’t labour the point, (if you’ll pardon the pun) because he is again making a theological statement about the nature of this Son of God: Joseph is to name him Jesus, Saviour; and others will recognise him as Emmanuel, God with us.

But Matthew, like all the Gospel writers, wants to take us deeper than history or even theology.

I’m sure you remember that little vignette from Winnie the Pooh?

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

Humans, like piglets, are social animals. We need the sense that someone is ‘there’. We are, for all of our lives, in some way dependent on others.

God himself is a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal intimacy of the Trinity. And through the incarnation, he draws us into that divine circle of love.

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

He is with us because he shared our joys and sorrows and so 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 and cared for. 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.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder, especially as we get older, of the empty seats around the table.

And this is why I chose my text from the end of Matthew’s gospel.

The disciples are filled with foreboding as they realise that Christ is leaving them, from the manger to the skies. So the end of the Gospel re-echoes the beginning: 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; he’s there, with us.

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

So the Christmas Gospels are not concerned to answer all the factual questions we have about dates and stars and kings and stables.

And they are not even primarily concerned to set forth sound incarnational theology.

But in the words of John’s Gospel “ these things are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20.31)

In the end, it is in believing that we discover the truth of the incarnation, and come to grasp the fullness of life in the fullness of Christ.

Another Christmas baby, 300 years ago on 18th December 1707, was Charles Wesley. Let me finish by reading you one of his short hymns, ‘Celebrate Immanuel’s name’ which brings together the theology of today’s Gospel, with the warm experience of God’s love and presence in our lives.

Celebrate Immanuel's Name, the Prince of life and peace.
God with us, our lips proclaim, our faithful hearts confess.
God is in our flesh revealed; Heav'n and earth in Jesus join.
Mortal with Immortal filled, and human with Divine.

Fullness of the Deity in Jesus' body dwells,
Dwells in all His saints and me when God His Son reveals.
Father, manifest Thy Son; breathe the true incarnate Word.
In our inmost souls make known the presence of the Lord.

Let the Spirit of our Head through every member flow;
By our Lord inhabited, we then Immanuel know.
Then He doth His Name express; God in us we truly prove,
Find with all the life of grace and all the power of love.

Adolescent Christ

The Adolescent Christ

“And Jesus grew in wisdom and maturity, and in favour with God and men.” Luke 2.52

I was sitting with old friends this week discussing their children. I remember each of the five being born and have seen the two oldest married. The fifth child, a precocious twelve year old, had come to London this week to see the spectacular new production of Much Ado with her parents.

But our conversation was taken up with the fourth child; an unusual child, now a teenager; his parents describe him as ‘special’. There’s nothing as far as anyone knows ‘wrong’ with him, but since 11 or 12, he has been a strange boy, completely unlike his four siblings.

As parents, they are mystified. His upbringing was no different to the others and yet they wonder how this delicate soul will cope in the world as he grows older and hopefully more independent.

Most parents experience a degree of wonder, bewilderment and sometimes anxiety, as they watch their children pass through adolescence. Where will it all end?

Ten years ago I visited Nazareth, and climbed the 250 steps up to the Church of Jesus the Adolescent. Although it’s French Gothic in style, its foundation stone was laid just 100 years ago. It affords a wonderful view over Nazareth’s rooftops and the Galilean hills.
It is the chapel of a trade school, run by the Salesians of Don Bosco, where teenage Palestinians are trained, some still to be carpenters – a church dedicated to a boy their own age – the adolescent Jesus.

We can visualize the baby Jesus (although cannot grasp exactly how he is God). We have a mental image of the man Christ Jesus, although almost invariably framed by those blue-eyed, blond Jesuses around the Sunday School walls and in our confirmation bibles.

But an adolescent Saviour? - gawky and spotty with a voice that can’t make up its mind – it’s difficult to imagine. And as for a ‘sinless’ teenager – it makes us redefine our understanding of the sinlessness of Christ.

The Bible is remarkably silent about the years between Christ’s birth and his final three years of public ministry.

There is just this one incident recorded, which Luke introduces with the verse before today’s Gospel: "the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him." (40) This is to look back on the previous 12 years. Then Luke finishes the story by looking forward to the adolescent years and early adulthood: "Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour". (52)

Perhaps the purpose of the story is to remind us that the incarnation was a reality at every stage of the human life of Christ, from conception to death on a cross. He was as we are, and yet always lived in perfect harmony with his heavenly Father.

I wonder what his self-understanding was as a 12 year old? We all dreamed then, didn’t we, that we were someone special; we were somehow different; our thoughts were somehow more profound than others’. We had a destiny. And when we discovered what sex was, we knew we must have been adopted, for our parents could never have done anything like that!

Jesus must have had such thoughts and shared them with close friends on the hillsides around Galilee. He wondered who he would marry, or if he would marry.

And here in the Temple, as he approaches his thirteenth birthday and official Jewish manhood, he is caught up in the spiritual and religious discussions of the day.

Luke’s account mirrors the story of the boy Samuel. Interestingly, throughout world literature, you will find endless stories of precocious 12 year olds discovering their destiny. We were thinking of Harry Potter and the more recent Eragon at Midnight Mass, but there are parallels in Moses, Cyrus, Alexander, Apollonius, Si Osiris and Buddha, to name but a few.

There is nothing supernatural here in Luke’s account however, and although the boy discusses well what he would have been taught in school, he is not ‘teaching the teachers’. You only find that in the apocryphal writings such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Arabic Infancy Gospel.

Jesus is simply growing in his spiritual awareness and understanding of the grown up world.
A point John Pridmore makes in the Church times this week when he writes: “There is a life in relationship to God appropriate to the years when the child is becoming an adult. It’s good news for Year 7s.”

Jesus tells his parents, who have been so desperately looking for him, that he must be "about his father’s business", or “in my father’s house” – the Greek is impenetrable here, but either translation gives the right flavour.

Mary and Joseph are not the first parents of adolescents who are baffled by their behaviour and their answers. Jesus is not the first teenager who doesn’t know what his mother is so worried about. It happens again in his adult life when she is worried that he isn’t eating well. He is possible the only creator of the universe who has ever been told by his mother to put a vest on because it’s cold out!

All parents must go through the pain of letting their children grow away from them. They must know how gradually to let go. For if they hold on too long or too tightly, there will be tears before bedtime and probably years of therapy.

We don’t know what Jesus meant by this strange reply. Had he at this age grasped that he was in some unique relationship with God? He knew the village gossip about his own birth. The other boys at school must have made jokes about his mother.

But it would not seem possibly for a 12 year old even to entertain the possibility that he was God made human. On the other hand, maybe it was easier for a 12 year old than a 33 year old?

Whatever, it is evident that he had at this age a clear sense of vocation, even if it was as yet unclear as to what this would mean.

As we pray for those around us who are ‘growing up’ we should remember that early aspirations are often correct indications of where they are heading.

I’m just reading John Cornwell’s fascinating memoir, A Seminary Boy (Fourth Estate, 2006), which is a deeply moving account both of a child’s powerful sense of vocation and of the bewilderment of perplexed and sometimes angry parents failing to make sense of it.

So as we continue to keep the Christmas Feast of the Incarnation – God as baby, boy and man;
as we stand at the door of the 2007th Year of grace;
let us pray for and nurture the adolescents among our families and friends;
some of them ‘special’, like my friends’ son;
and let us pray for ourselves, that as the years go by, it may be said of us as it was said of our Lord:

“And Jesus grew in wisdom and maturity, and in favour with God and men.” Luke 2.52

Midnight Mass 2007

Christmas Midnight Mass Incarnation

“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” John 1.14

Like most families, we have developed various traditions around Christmas. I and my 5 brothers and sisters and their families never attempt to spend more than 3 hours together in the same house – or even on the same continent. This year two sisters are in Florida, one in the South of France, a brother in Dubai and another in St Alban’s. It’s a tradition that has kept us a big happy family.

There are so many traditions wrapped around Christmas, some more recent than others:

Nine Lessons and Carols– 1880
Queen’s Christmas Message on TV – 1957
Christmas Trees – 1840s
Christmas Cards – 1844
Christmas Crackers – 1850s
Christmas Pudding – well not as we know it, but 14thC
Christmas Day falling on December 25th – 330
Midnight Mass – 340
The Nativity Scene – 1223

And in recent years of course, Hollywood has got in on the act. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without that now greatest of traditions, an epic sword-and-sorcery blockbuster.

Harry Potter wrestles with the evil wizards, corrupted by their own power. The various Lords of the Rings struggle with good and evil. Last year it was schoolchildren again, entering Narnia to do battle in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

This year, it’s the turn of Eragon, a larger-than-life story of dragon riders, cruel sorcerers and evil despots. It’s certainly action-packed but somehow doesn’t match up to the subtly of Tolkien or Lewis.

It has all the usual ingredients that we love in our ‘grand’ stories. An orphan boy lives with his uncle out in the sticks, discovers amazing powers and leaves home to be schooled in the ways of magic and dragon riding, and along the way, to ‘fulfil his destiny’. So far, so good – and so very similar to Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings... But what is missing in this year’s Christmas blockbuster, and it’s quite a substantial omission, and a departure from tradition, is God.

Or, to be more specific, a Godlike figure: a venerable sage with a pure white beard whose powers are to be feared, and whose wisdom can only be dismissed at great cost to the hero. Chances are that in the course of events the old man will also end up sacrificing his life for the greater good, only to be resurrected in a form even more powerful than before.

Step up, Obi-wan Kenobi, Albus Dumbledore, Gandalf and the Oh-so-obvious Aslan. You are God-types in our Christmas epics.

And this brings us to the tradition that lies behind all our Christmas tradition.

For in all the best tales of sorcery and magic; in the most loved heroes of our myths and sagas; there is a longing in all of us to discover the extraordinary, behind the ordinary. It is a human yearning for a deeper significance to our life on earth.

As Christians, we believe this immortal longing is part of God’s gift to humanity. It means that at our best, we long and strive for peace and hope and love and justice and a better world.

But much more than this, all these myths and Christmas epics point to our longing for God himself. As Augustine says: “He has made us for himself and our hearts will not rest until they rest in Him”.

And here, in this ordinary baby, born to a peasant girl in Palestine 2000 years ago, is the most extraordinary event in the 15 billion years of our cosmos. God, who created all things, became a human being and lived among us. He entered all the pain and the heartache of our world, which is why we celebrate his birth by celebrating, at this altar, his death.

But here we celebrate also his resurrection, for he is Emmanuel, God with us for this life and in the life to come.

At this Midnight Mass we repeat the belief and the hope of Christians throughout the world and down through the centuries: that this is not another grand myth of magic and miracles. It is the underlying Truth of the Universe; it is the transforming Truth of the Gospel; it is the Truth that, in the words of Jesus, sets us free, to live life to the full – an extraordinary life.

Of course we have become so used to myths, that we hardly dare believe that this is a true myth; that God can be “born in us today”. Yet that is what we celebrate around the world tonight

Father Alan quoted from a John Betjeman poem this morning, and his familiar words sum up what most of us feel when faced with the miracle of the incarnation; the enfleshment of God in the baby Jesus:

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things...
…Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

May you have the happiest of Chrismasses and sense the extraordinary presence of Christ in your own lives.

“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory.” John 1.14

Water into Wine, Epiphany 3

Water into Wine - Epiphany 3

“You have kept the good wine until now.” (Jn 2.10)

I was down at my sister’s in rural Sussex for a new year party. I helped myself to an open bottle of red wine in the kitchen, only to find after the first memorable mouthful, that it was her neighbour’s pea-pod wine. As I smiled beneficently to the neighbour, I was thinking, ‘what a waste of good pea-pods’. The only advantage of this early petard to the palate was that everything tasted wonderful thereafter.

Professor Eric Mascall, of blessed memory to many of you, preached on this miracle some years ago at St Mary’s. He berated the heretics of the temperance movement for maintaining that there was no real transformation of the water into wine; rather the pure and noble water appeared like best claret when contrasted with the vinegary libation that was being served up towards the end of what may have been a weeklong wedding feast.

This attitude was summed up by one of our evangelical radicals, Gerald Coates: “Jesus’s first miracle was to turn 200 gallons of water into wine and the church has been trying to turn it back into water ever since!”

So what is this rather strange miracle all about? Why does our Lord choose a party where the wine’s run out to reveal his Godship? Well in a way he doesn’t choose to do it. His mother pushes him, all unknowingly, into this first miracle. I’m sure Mary never thought for one moment that he would solve the wine shortage by a dramatic intervention in the space-time continuum.

And there’s another problem with this story. Did it actually happen like this? Barnabas Lindars and others think that it probably didn’t. Many scholars suppose that the story is built around what was originally a parable of Jesus, about the new wine of the kingdom. Water into wine stories abound in Greek mythology and Pliny tells us of a spring that turned to wine on the nones of January, that is, Epiphany time. So perhaps the early church was doing another one of its Christianising pagan festivals routines.

Many other scholars, and I, think it was a miraculous incident. I have never quite seen the point of trying to explain away miracles, unless you want to explain the entire life of Christ in naturalistic terms. If you believe in the miracle of the incarnation, and the resurrection of a dead Christ, then a handful of other miracles hardly produces a stumbling block to faith. When you’ve bought your airline ticket, it seems futile to debate at length whether flight is possible or not. Well, miracle or not, what is John trying to say to us?

We have seen before how the synoptic evangelists Matthew, Mark and Luke use words to describe the miracles of our Lord in terms of portentous acts of power - miracles; while in the Fourth Gospel, John refers to them as ‘signs’. He is not concerned so much with the inbreaking of the kingdom of God; he is more concerned with what these miracles signify about the Son of God. He is not so much concerned with the coming kingdom and the return of Christ; he is more concerned with the mystery of this God made Man.

In theological terms, while the other Gospels connect miracles with eschatology, the last things; John connects miracles with Christology, the nature of Christ himself.

In this first of the seven signs around which John builds his Gospel, the evangelist is already posing the great question of his treatise: “Who is this Jesus of Nazareth?” Is he God or Man? Is he the Messiah?

Clearly this nature miracle of water-into-wine points to a Godlike control of the natural world. Archbishop William Temple puts it with poetic conciseness: “The modest water saw its God and blushed. ”

Now remember that John is writing some years after the Gospel events. He has seen what happened to the hoards who believed because they saw the miracles, and who quickly disappeared when the miracles stopped. John emphasises that Jesus is wary of those whose faith just rests on miracles. So later in this chapter in verse 23 we read: “When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the miracles that he was doing. But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people.”

The firmer footing for faith is seen in the symbolism of the water into wine, which contrasted the contemporary practice of religion, with the Christian faith that Christ had come to proclaim. So let’s look at those contrasts that John alludes to.

The stone water jars were used for the many ritual handwashings which accompanied a Jewish feast. (Stone was easier to keep clean than earthenware.) John will be showing in his Gospel how these constant ritual purifications were to be replaced by the one sacrifice of Jesus, which was to cleanse permanently from sin.

Secondly, the law of Moses had power to convict of sin, but little power to free from the grip of sin. Even the prophets looked forward to the time when the law would be written on our hearts; when believers would want to follow the law of love, because of the indwelling Spirit. There are echos here of John the Baptist’s words at our Lord’s baptism – I baptize with water, but he who comes after me will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. This was the rich wine of the Kingdom.

And thirdly, the water represented the insipid nature of a fear based religion - keep the law or else! Christ’s new wine was to build a community based on responsive love. When we have grasped that Christ has loved us and given himself for us, then we will want to show our love by obedience to his teaching.

In John’s account, Mary sets the pattern of Christian response for us. Perhaps she was part of the catering team for what must have been a family wedding. Joseph seems not to be around at this stage, and the guests have drunk more than is polite – we have all hosted those sort of parties. It’s when that waggish definition of hospitality springs to mind:

Hospitality - the art of making people feel at home when you wish they were.

So Mary looks in loving dependency to her son. The Hebrew idiom with which he responds “Woman, what have I to do with you?” is both affectionate – ‘Dear Mother’ - and yet also an indication of Christ’s changing role with respect to his family.

Mary gives him one of those knowing motherly looks and turns to the servants and says - “do whatever he says”. Mary has long followed the path of love and obedience to Jesus.

We are sometimes so used to our Christian faith that we forget how staggering it is. We forget the wonder of being alive, conscious humans in a remarkable world; we forget the mystery that, despite all our weaknesses and disappointments, God has drawn near to us in Jesus.

Epiphany is the season of revelation and in today’s Gospel, John invites us to ponder the amazing Christ – God made man for love of us; the bread of life, come down from heaven; ready to take the water of our lives which we offer, and to turn them into the rich wine of life with him.

In a moment we will echo those words read earlier from the book of Revelation. “Blessed are those who are called to the wedding feast of the Lamb.”

And as we come and receive, may we realise afresh the Gospel truth of grace and love; and respond, like Mary, in trust and joyful obedience.

Then, day after day, as we deepen our spiritual life, we will be able to pray in gratefulness to God:

“You have kept the good wine until now.” (Jn 2.10)

Emmanuel, Midnight Mass 2005

Midnight Mass – 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

And a reading from one of my Christmas presents from many years ago – from Winnie the Pooh:

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

Humans, like piglets, are social animals. We need the sense that someone is ‘there’. We are, for all of our lives, in some way dependent on others.

God himself is a social being: Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the mystical, eternal intimacy of the Trinity.

Then in his incarnation which we celebrate this Christmas night, God became a tiny dependent baby, mewling for his mother’s milk and subject to Mary and Joseph. The boy Jesus needed them to be there.

As a grown man too he needed companionship and had many friends: men, women and children.

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 they were there at his crucifixion: his best friend John, and his mother Mary, who had bought him into the world in that stable in Bethlehem – (Rood Screen) there are John and Mary, at the foot of his cross as they are in churches throughout the world.

So now, physically, he is with us no more. No hand to hold. No Lion to hug.

But there is an even profounder reality of God’s continuing companionship.

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

He is with us because he 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 and cared for. 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.

But companions leave us and Christmas is always a reminder, especially as we get older, of the empty seats around the table.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples are filled with foreboding as they realise that Christ is leaving them, from the manger to the skies. So the end of Matthew’s Gospel re-echos the beginning: 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; he’s there.

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

Last weekend I was in Stockholm with my good friends Stefan and Helena and their little boy Eynar. We were in a flat he’d never been in before and at one point his parents left the room with our host. He looked at me, said something in Swedish, then remembered I was that poor simple man who didn’t understand anything. So he came over, put his thumb in his mouth, and held my hand. Just checking I was there.

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

I hope you have a very happy Christmas, and a deepening sense in your life of the continual and reassuring presence of God.

Love Actually, Carol Service 2005

Love Actually

I was given an Early Christmas present the other day – Love Actually (DVD) - an improvement on last year's gift from the same person – 'Life’s Little Deconstruction Book – self-help for the post-hip'.

The film is indirectly connected with Christmas because the interwoven stories come to some sort of dénouement on Christmas Eve: the prime minister (played by Hugh Grant) falls for a down-to-earth domestic help with chubby thighs - from south of the river! A little boy feels the pain of unrequited love; a smitten novelist falls in love with his Portuguese cleaner but they don’t speak the same language.

The film has a curious title - Love Actually - but it comes from the words in the opening sequence of the film which shows people hugging and greeting one another in the airport arrivals lounge. The narrator says:

“General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed - but I don't see that - seems to me that love is everywhere.
Igniting laughter, wreaking havoc, breaking hearts, daring commitments, forcing choices, catapulting spirits, forging inroads, creating risks - ecstatic, exciting, unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient, inexplicable, inelegant, unequalled.
Love actually is all around.”

It’s a common enough sentiment. It was the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death the other day and we were reminded again that ‘All you need is love’. But at a deeper theological level as well as at ordinary human level, love actually is all around. It’s part of the deeper meaning of Christmas.

A theme that runs through the film is communication between people in love; and between people who simply love one another in the bonds of friendship -

For the joy of human love,
brother, sister, parent, child,
friends on earth and friends above...

Christmas signals God’s supreme communication of love; a communication of his very self for God is love and so ‘Love came down at Christmas’.

In the words of the Bible: “God so loved the world…”

We give Christmas presents as tokens of love for one another, because God first gave us, on that first Christmas, his supreme gift of love: the gift of Jesus.

The late John Betjeman muses on the meaning of these Christmas presents and how they relate to G0d’s surprising gift to mankind:

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things...
…Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

The Bread and the Wine remind us, as do many of the carols, of the cost of God’s Christmas gift of love. True love is not about a sentimental feeling or costly gifts. It is about giving ourselves in love to God and then to others.

May you have a very happy Christmas and experience the mixed blessing of God’s love:

Igniting laughter, wreaking havoc, breaking hearts, daring commitments, forcing choices, catapulting spirits, forging inroads, creating risks - ecstatic, exciting, unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient, inexplicable, inelegant, unequalled.

Foregiveness

Forgiveness

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11

It is said that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Last Supper he used the innocent face of a choir boy for his portrait of Our Lord. Much later (and he took many years to complete it) he looked for a suitable model for Judas and found it in the degenerate and corrupt face of a dissolute young man recruited from the gutter

Something familiar about the face prompted him to ask the young man about his origins. And to his surprise and horror it was the same choir boy who had fallen into a life of debauchery and sin.

And this is part of our common human dilemma. For the same face can present innocence and corruption. We, as fully human creatures, are endowed with the awful responsibility of choice.

As Paul puts it later on in this letter:

“So I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me.” (7.21)

Children: hands up if you never do anything wrong!

Let’s explore this subject by way of another sinner who struggled with the Flaw at the heart of human nature, John Donne (1573-1631). He belongs to that period of English church history that is presently hotly debated. His life spans the years in which Anglicanism as a distinctive form of Christianity – encompassing Catholic and Protestant elements – came into being.

Donne came from a Roman Catholic family. Yet, after a vivid and chaotic life, he embraced the current Anglicanism of Jacobean England. There is a debate about this. Was Donne a precursor of the Catholic-minded High Churchman or a convert to the prevailing Calvinism of the Church of England at that time?

One of his poems illustrates this debate very well – A Hymn to God the Father. It’s a poem about choice. And choice – God’s choice of us, His election, His predestination of His creatures – is at the heart of the Catholic/Calvinistic apposition, as it was at the heart of Donne’s life.

As you read this poem you are reminded of the choices and contrasts in Donne’s career: from ‘Don Juan’ to Dean of St Paul’s; from ‘Man of the World’ to ‘Man of God’; from dashing young love poet to the shrouded marble corpse that still stands today as his memorial in the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Donne knew all about original sin and Augustine and Calvin’s emphasis on the ‘total depravity’ of man. He would take very seriously indeed the 9th Article of Religion, formulated just before his birth: that "man… is of his own nature… inclined to evil".

Not surprisingly then in his poem Donne first confesses the effects of original sin: the sin of Adam; the first choice that went so very wrong, but also the choices now that we know will go wrong: the weight; the burden (almost too much to bear) of our ethical, moral being.

Even from outside the Garden we still hear God’s voice announcing: "Behold the man is become like one of us, knowing good from evil". Donne writhes in that Calvinistic, that human consciousness of the trapped-ness of existence. And to lighten it a little, he makes a play on his name ‘Donne’, throughout the poem. Let me read the first verse that looks back to Adam’s sin:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

He’s trapped. And yet, even within this moral prison, he is aware of something else: a counter weight that is both a clue to Donne’s own spiritual experience and to the internal workings of Anglican spirituality in general. The clue is in the second verse, and it lies in this corporate nature of our sin. We’re in this together.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Donne’s past life was a torment to him. He knew only too well the lure, the compulsion, of sin. But he was especially shamed by the memory of those he had won to sin by his own sins: those who made his sin their door to corruption. And this is most painful to him as it is to us!

But look more closely at this poem. In this torture there is healing. In this remorse there is redemption. And here maybe is the Catholic counter-point to Donne’s Calvinism. For the Church teaches that sin is relational. We drag others down with our sin.

But at the same time the opposite is true. Namely, that our repentance, or sanctity, can raise others up! Furthermore, we can be redeemed by that same common humanity that was this first cause of our sin.

And here is the pivotal point of the poem as it was the pivotal point of Donne’s life. Yes, he found degradation in abuse, the rage of his human relationships. But his ultimate salvation comes through that humanity: our humanity which God has made the instrument of our redemption in the human Christ Jesus.

Donne is perhaps the first truly Anglican poet. For in this poem we see him poised – historically, doctrinally - between Protestant and Catholic insight; between saint and sinner; between human experience and biblical truth. This is what Paul wrestles with in this epistle.

For Donne, this resolution is fully worked out as the poem (more of a confession than poem) reaches its climax in the final verse – a final verse that, curiously enough, reminds us of another 17th century poet with far better Protestant credentials; namely John Bunyan.

You may recall in Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is shown a vision of a man locked in a room: the room of his own despair; despair that he can ever be saved; despair that he can ever be loved by God.

And this too is Donne’s last fear – his greatest horror. Why? Because it is the underlying neurosis of the human condition; now, in the 21st century, as then in the 17th.

We too fear being locked into an empty Godless universe. We too fear being locked out from the love of an Almighty Parent-God.

But Donne, unlike many today in the West, can see - can allow himself to see - the human face of God shining from the face of this clouded universe.

John Donne believes in the Incarnation; believes that God and Man, the objective and the subjective, the spiritual and the material, meet in the person of Jesus Christ – we are alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

In our sophisticated, liberal Western lives, we sometimes forget the simple assurance and wonder of the Gospel: that our sins are forgiven.

I remember Neil, who had a past, after communion – tears streaming down his face – 'you ought to put tissues in the pews!' he stammered. He was overwhelmed with the fact that he was forgiven and loved by God.

Let this Gospel sacrament this morning remind you, as you taste the bread and the wine, that you are forgiven, and that you should

“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6.11