25.12.2015
Archbishop Michael Jackson’s Christmas Day Sermon
“The timing could hardly be better for us to connect incarnation, creation and justice” than at Christmas 2015, Archbishop Michael Jackson, stated in his Christmas Day sermon. The Archbishop delivered his sermon in Christ Church Cathedral during Festal Sung Eucharist this morning.
In his sermon the Archbishop focused on the big questions of incarnation. Christmas offers the opportunity to reflect on these questions: good and evil, of life and death, of suffering and flourishing, he said. These questions, posed at Christmas, are not designed to put us off but rather to give us fresh assurance that God is with us.
But Dr Jackson said that 2015 is different. “These big questions hit us at a time when we are now rather frightened and confused by the world itself as we live in it and as we have made it through politics, through armaments, through heartlessness, through disengagement, through neglect of The Other and through lifestyle choices of consumerism over against community; and through the almost supine absence of engagement around a fresh expression of The Common Good in our own place and in our own time. Most of all incarnation is about justice…
“The timing could hardly be better for us to connect incarnation and creation and justice. The world beyond, the world outside the churches has issued a challenge and an invitation to all of us to connect creation, justice and ecology in Paris a few weeks back; and the challenge is inescapable for churches and for religions who connect all of these aspirations with faith principles and with the revelation and disclosure of God in the created order,” he stated.
He said that those of us living in relative comfort must make the connection that incarnation gives us to those who witness in ways that are extraordinary. “Our relationship with those who witness to incarnation and salvation in terrible times spurs on our own energy to seek out pathways of compassion, a roadmap of response and a manger of care,” the Archbishop said adding: “Looking these questions in the eye is what The Paris Summit asks us to do”.
The full text of the sermon is below.
Christmas Day, December 25th 2015, Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin
St John 1.12: But to all who did accept him, to those who put their trust in him, he gave the power to become children of God.
A sermon preached by the Archbishop
QUESTIONS OF THE BEGINNING
A recent book entitled Discovering Genesis (Iain Provan, SPCK 2015, page 1) beings by asking the following confident questions:
‘Why do we encounter the world as an ordered place in which life flourishes? Where do human beings fit into the scheme of things? How are they supposed to live, and what are they supposed to do? Why is there evil in the world, and why is there suffering? What is God doing in the cosmos to rescue it from evil and suffering?’
QUESTIONS OF THE INCARNATION
St John’s Gospel takes up these big themes directly from Genesis and offers them back to anyone who will read as a gift from God to the world through the person of Jesus Christ. We may indeed have lost sight of the humility and the imagination, the faith and the patience, to accept gifts from God, because somehow we repeatedly find ways to lose God. And so – rightly and opportunely at Christmas – these big questions of good and evil, of life and death, of suffering and flourishing become part of what we refer to as incarnation. They are not designed to put us off; they are designed to give us fresh assurance that God is with us, that Emmanuel has come. 2015 is somehow different; the ambient temperature has somehow changed. These big questions hit us at a time when we are now rather frightened and confused by the world itself as we live in it and as we have made it through politics, through armaments, through heartlessness, through disengagement, through neglect of The Other and through lifestyle choices of consumerism over against community; and through the almost supine absence of engagement around a fresh expression of The Common Good in our own place and in our own time. Most of all incarnation is about justice – and too many of us want other people to do justice for us. The timing could hardly be better for us to connect incarnation and creation and justice. The world beyond, the world outside the churches has issued a challenge and an invitation to all of us to connect creation, justice and ecology in Paris a few weeks back; and the challenge is inescapable for churches and for religions who connect all of these aspirations with faith principles and with the revelation and disclosure of God in the created order.
THE LIFE OF CHRIST AND OUR LIFE
Within the Christian framework, the very things and the very people we disregard become the very reasons that God comes to earth, in historical time, in spiritually remembered time and in currently lived time. Incarnation is giving as a direct self–giving for the flourishing of The Other. Questions like this are not solved once for all. They live in the lives of each of us, and they live on in the lives of those who succeed us. Questions like this are part of the weave of the life we live and make up the burning issues of all time. History comes to meet us and asks us to make history in our time. The pathway of Jesus Christ is mapped out for us through life, death and resurrection; through Bethlehem, Calvary and Emmaus; through the contemporary birth of every baby who brings joy and delight; and through the contemporary death of every young and old person who never even thought that this would happen, until it all suddenly happened.
Incarnation is immediate. It also offers us a framework for shaping and patterning our lives along the lines of God’s life in and through the life of Jesus Christ. It is often felt that Christianity is a placebo for people who cannot cope with life in a faster lane; in fact it is quite the opposite. The questions that flow through from Genesis to John are not for the faint of heart. They are questions that have never provided instant or immediate answers, either from within the lives of those who ask, or from within the pages of Scripture and the worship of the Church and the witness of its people. We have to make incarnation work in the world. These questions have, against the odds, inspired people in the most impossible and insurmountable of human tragedies, as well as giving source and scope for human thanksgiving; power and passion for human endeavour; strength and resource for human compassion. As well as having to do with gift–giving, they have to do with risk–taking and with respect–sharing.
QUESTIONS OF OUR DAY
For those of us who live and work in relative comfort, our times are times when we ought not, indeed must not, go off the boil in making the connection that incarnation gives us with those who witness in ways that are extraordinary and that we are not called upon to do, nor would we be capable of doing. Because the language of salvation is an embarrassment to us at this stage of our sophistication, we seem to have less and less grasp of the grammar or the narrative of salvation either for ourselves or for others. Our relationship with those who witness to incarnation and salvation in terrible times spurs on our own energy to seek out pathways of compassion, a roadmap of response and a manger of care. There will always be ways in which we can witness as confidently and as unashamedly as are the questions the author of Discovering Genesis asks of the first book of the Bible. Looking these questions in the eye is what The Paris Summit asks us to do.
Incarnation takes us to the heart of an historical context: obstetrics in a lean–to animal shelter on the outskirts of a little–known village beyond Jerusalem. Incarnation takes us to the heart of historical culture: not only Judaism and its rich spiritual pragmatism but also the politics of Graeco–Roman occupation and the quest for compromise and security in a world which has become too dangerous for any other way of doing business. Incarnation takes us to the heart of historical climate: heat and cold, sand and cornfields and the living water that flows from the person of Jesus Christ. It also takes us right to the heart of that wonderful, forlorn, arid word: desertification, given contemporary application by Pope Francis as he speaks to the inescapable link of the earth beneath our feet and the human condition of our souls, whoever we are, whatever we believe. Incarnation takes us to the heart of historical compassion: an innkeeper who bends and twists and breaks the rules in a good direction for a woman in the throes of labour and a man in the incapacity of distress. Incarnation takes us to the heart of historical commissioning: as the Father sent John the Baptizer so the Father sends me; as the Father sent me so I send you; and you are to go and meet those who are my disciples and my Father’s children.
St John 1.15: John bore witness to him … before I was born, he already was.