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Sermon - Christmas Sermon - 25th December 2007
St Alban’s 11:00pm and 8.00 am
I am currently reading this book by Joy Carroll, called “Beneath the Cassock, The Real-life Vicar of Dibley.”(i) Joy Carroll was one of the first women to be ordained priest in the Church of England. She was the woman whom Richard Curtis, the writer of the television program the Vicar of Dibley, used as a role model. I love the program, because it is so down to earth. Dawn French as the Vicar, Geraldine Granger, is wonderfully ordinary and anything but parsonical and clerical and is frail and human as are the rest of us. So as I started to read the book was looking forward to the outrageous behaviour of the Vicar as presented in the program. As I read on I became more and more unhappy. Geraldine Granger and Joy Carroll are from different worlds it would seem. What Joy Carroll calls exciting seems to me to be the usual stuff of being a priest. Being a woman may make it a little different for her but for me it was strange and worrying because I could not find anything out of the ordinary. Her ministry seemed to me to be very ordinary and predicable. All of what she called the funny things that happened in her life seemed to me to be what happens in ministry in general. However, in the ordinary things of life, as the hymn says, “God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year”.
That reminds me of Christmas. There is sometime about Christmas that is actually a bit strange and potentially worrying. When we’re invited into the stable to see the child, in the muck and smells and ordinariness of it all, we are really being invited into the centre of creation. This is how God works; this is how God is. The entire system and power of the universe is contained in this small bundle of shivering flesh, a baby born in difficult circumstances. God has given himself away so completely that we meet him here in poverty and weakness, with no trumpeting splendour, no clouds of glory. This is how he is: he acts by giving away all we might expect to find in him of strength and success as we understand them. The universe lives by a love that refuses to bully us or force us, the love of the cradle and the cross.
It ought to shock us to be told year after year that the universe lives by the kind of love that we see in the helpless child and in the dying man on the cross. We have been shown the life force of the universe; and it ought to worry us. We who are so obsessed about being safe and being successful, who worry endlessly about being in control, who cannot believe that power could show itself in any other way than the ways we are used to. But this festival tells us exactly what Good Friday and Easter tell us, even if it is familiar to us, that God fulfils what he wants to do by emptying himself of his own life, giving away all that he is in love. God is always, from all eternity, pouring out his very being in the person of the Word, the everlasting Son; and the Word, who has received everything from the gift of the Father, and who makes the world alive by giving reality to all creation, makes a gift of himself by becoming human and suffering humiliation and death for our sake.
‘From his fullness we have all received’; Jesus, the word made human flesh and blood, has given us the freedom, the authority, to become God’s children by our trust in him, and so to have a fuller and fuller share in God’s own joy.
We live from him and in him. The whole universe exists because God has not held back his love but allowed it to flow without impediment out of his own perfection to make a world that is different from him and then to fill it with love through the gift of his Son. Our life as Christians, our obligations, our morality, do not rest on commands alone, but on the fact that God has given us something of his own life. We are caught up in his giving, in his creative self-sacrifice; true Christian morality is when we can’t help ourselves, can’t stop ourselves pouring out the kind of love that makes others live. Morality, said one prominent modern Greek Orthodox theologian, is not about right and wrong, it’s about reality and unreality, living in Christ or living for yourself. Being good is living in the truth, living a real life that lets the intense creativity of God through into his world. The goodness of the Christian is never a matter of achieving a standard, scoring high marks in a test. It is letting the wonder of God’s love knock sideways your ordinary habits, so that God comes through, the God who achieves his purpose by reckless gift, by the cradle and the cross.
When St Paul in his second letter to the church in Corinth insists on the need for generosity towards the poor in the church at Jerusalem, he appeals, not to an abstract moral principle, but to the fact of God becoming human. ‘You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’, he writes, ‘that though he was rich yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich’ (II Cor. 8.9). He doesn’t argue that we must simply reverse the relations, so that those who were poor become rich and those who were rich become poor, but rather for a situation in which everyone has something to contribute to everyone else, everyone has enough liberty to become a giver of life to others. When material poverty is extreme, it is difficult to have that dignity, though, miraculously, so many poor people have it; the greatest gift we can give to another is to let them give as freely as they can, so that they can supply what we are hungry for. Love is given so that love may be born and given in return. That is the driving force of the universe; that is what we see in the helpless child of Bethlehem, God so stripped of what we associate with divinity that we can see the divine nature only as God’s act of giving away all that he is.
If we want to live in the truth, to live in reality, to live by the Spirit who is breathed out from the Father and the Word, this has to be our life. It is not an academic question. It is a time to ask ourselves whether we are really living in the truth, motivated by the power of God’s universe that is revealed to us in the child of Bethlehem. It may mean risk, it will mean facing the prospect that the prosperity of the developed world can’t go on expanding indefinitely; it may mean that we have to look at our security far more in terms of how we make each other safe by guaranteeing justice and liberty for each other. But we shall have recovered a passion, a generous anger about the world’s needs that is our surest long term answer to issues of security because it looks to a situation in which all are free to give and receive.
The law of all being, which has kindled all life and which burns without restriction in every moment of the life of Jesus from birth to resurrection, will have kindled in us. ‘I have come to cast fire upon the earth’, said Jesus. We may well and rightly feel a touch of fear as we look into this manger and see the life so fragile and so indestructible, so joyful and so costly. But this is the life of all things, full of grace and truth, the life of the everlasting Word of God; to those who receive him he will give the right, the liberty, to live with his life, and to kindle on earth the flame of his love.
In the ordinary lives we lead, you with your calling and I with mine, God’s light is born in us so that the darkness that others live in, and of which we ourselves are often afraid, maybe driven out and Jesus the Word of God maybe be perceived burning in the ordinary times and deeds of our lives.
i. HarperCollins Entertainment, London, 2002. Based upon a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury, www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/000950.html.