21.12.2015
Go to the Root of Your Faith – Archbishop Tells Service for the International Community
Dublin’s diverse culture was represented at the annual Discovery Carol Service for the International Community in St George and St Thomas’s Church, Cathal Brugha Street, last weekend. The service was led by the Rector and Chaplain to the International Community, the Revd Obinna Ulogwara, and Archbishop Michael Jackson delivered his Christmas message to the international community.
The service featured music from the Zamar Ecumenical Choir and St George’s Brass Band and the lessons were read in Irish, French, Malawian, Igbo, Ukrainian, Malayalam (India), Italian, Filipino and English.
In his Christmas message, the Archbishop observed that young people are motivated by friendship, ecology and justice and suggested that adults could find motivation in the same three areas.
He said that the Son of God and the Son of Man came to be a friend to strangers and to make friends of enemies. Creation mattered to Him and he came to bring Good News to the poor.
The Archbishop said Christmas would not be complete without Mary. He described her as being radical – a woman who went to the root of human life as understood theologically from the perspective of God’s engagement with earth and its inhabitants.
“The word: radical has become almost unusable in 2015. What word will be next? The real challenge for Christmas 2015 and the New Year 2016 is surely this: How do people of good faith and people of World Faiths recognise hope and reject hatred; replace hatred with hope in a world of darkness and light? The answer is: be radical, go to the root of the faith you receive as did Mary,” he concluded.
Photo Captions:
Above: Zamar Ecumenical Choir performing at the Discovery Carol Service for the International Community in St George and St Thomas’s Church.
Below: The Revd Obinna Ulogwara and Archbishop Michael Jackson with members of St George’s Brass Band at the Discovery Carol Service for the International Community in St George and St Thomas’s Church.
The Archbishop’s sermon is reproduced in full below:
St George and St Thomas: Christmas Message: MARY THE RADICAL
Sunday December 13th 2015 Advent iii
St John 1.10: He was in the world; but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him.
INTRODUCTION
It would indeed have been delightful had I been able, in this wonderful international service that draws together people of so many languages and nationalities, to speak on another part of the first chapter of the Gospel of John. But I think that, in light of events far away and near to hand over the past weeks, in Paris, in Mali, over the Sinai Desert and in Syria and everywhere else where people have suffered and caused suffering, we as Christian people need to keep these chilling words of The Beloved Disciple before us as Christmas approaches and as 2015 draws to its close:
He was in the world; but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him.
The world is a cavernous place; the world is also an accessible place; most of all it is an intimate place and a claustrophobic place when we humans throw our significant weight around the planet with insufficient respect for the violence we do to the world and its teeming inhabitants. Violence takes many forms: ecological, gender, human, structural.
These words tell us something we are slow to hear and it is this. The scope for recognition and for rejection is always there in the world that is ours and everyone else’s. They come together and they meet, inevitably, even if they then decide to turn their faces away from each other and to part company until the next time. And there is always a danger in turning away; there is usually a greater difficulty in turning back again to meet and to face The Other. It gets harder. Young people today are motivated, as I listen to them and hear them, by three things in particular: friendship, ecology and justice. I suggest that it might be an equally good thing were adults to look for motivation in these three areas also and to think about these three things as we approach Christmas 2015.
THE CHRIST
Friendship, ecology and justice are also a trinity of love and power, as the hymn expresses it, specific to the One we come to honour and to worship, whose Advent forms the core and the content of our praise and thanksgiving today in this church that is, in and of itself, a place of friendship and of meeting. The Son of God and the Son of Man came to be a friend of strangers and to make friends of enemies; the Son of God and the Son of Man is the Firstborn of Creation and was The Word in the beginning with God – creation in all its totality and diversity matters to the Child of Bethlehem as the One who was and is and is to come and without whom no created thing came into being. The Son of God and the Son of Man came to bring Good News to the poor and at that stage in history there was no such entity as the church, so this definition is a very wide definition of inclusion.
MARY THE MOTHER OF GOD
Christmas would not be complete without: Mother and Child. Mary, in the description of the Orthodox Churches in particular, is The Mother of God. She carries him, she bears him, she accompanies him often with worried incomprehension throughout his life and work, she is stalwart at the Foot of the Cross. In the world of 2015 and going forward into 2016, and at this precious and glorious time of Advent and Christmas, Mary stands with and stands for those who are exploited and degraded and destroyed by human trafficking, by unjust structures and by climate violence. Mary stands undefeated alongside the defeated. Mary holds in her arms those who can no longer hold themselves up and can no longer hold in their arms those they want and strive to hold. Mary’s soul magnifies the Lord and her spirit rejoices in God her Saviour. And the magnification, the rejoicing and the salvation are an expression of care for others: lifting up the lowly, the humble and the meek and literally giving to them a seat of honour in the place of the proud. Mary is part and parcel of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany and Lent and Easter and Ascension and Pentecost along with her Son: born, living, dying, risen, ascended, glorified.
WORDS AND THE WORD
One of the features of modern life is that words move in and out of meaning and they move through different meanings and emphases as things change around us. As Christian people we need to connect what we say with who we are: Word and word together. At one stage it would have been unexceptional to describe Mary as radical. She personifies a woman who goes to the root of human life understood theologically, that is from the perspective of God’s engagement with the earth and its inhabitants. She personifies also someone whose rootedness in giving birth and in suffering loss is iconic. She is the crucible of recognition in opposition to rejection, of other–ness rather than self–ness, of obedience to God as a way of life as her Son is The Way of Life. This enables her to give glory to God and to give to us hope in a world of hatred. The word: radical has become almost unusable in 2015. What word will be next? The real challenge for Christmas 2015 and the New Year 2016 is surely this: How do people of good faith and people of World Faiths recognize hope and reject hatred; replace hatred with hope in a world of darkness and light? The answer is: be radical, go to the root of the faith you receive as did Mary.
St John 1.5:
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it.