United Dioceses of Dublin & Glendalough

Sermon on Christmas Day December 25th 2019

Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

St John 1.14: So the Word became flesh; he made his home among us, and we saw his glory, such glory as befits the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.

INTRODUCTION: THE BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST WAS LIKE THIS …

Holy Scripture gives us Four Gospels. St Mark’s Gospel makes no mention of the birth of Jesus Christ but plunges us right into the earthly work of Jesus. St Matthew and St Luke tell us of the birth of Jesus on earth, with a range of detail in common and a series of insights and pictures specific to each of them separately. Shepherds, Wise Men and angels – and even King Herod – become part of our living imagination – as do Simeon and Anna daily in The Temple. St John paints a cosmic picture of The Christ who was in the beginning. All of this brings us back to the very start of something that matters to millions of Christians worldwide and has the respect of millions of people of Other Faiths.

… IN ITS INFANCY …

From time to time, we speak of something being … in its infancy … and we understandably think of infancy of being the beginning and the start of something new. Because of the ways our lives are structured, and because of the images and the influences that come to bear on us all the time, we really have no option but to think chronologically, in linear time, with things following on, the one from the other. But linear succession does not always point to cause and effect, as it is made to do and as we are conditioned to understand. The timeframe of God is one in which the future comes to meet us rather than the past returning to haunt us. It does not work in a predictable linear way and in many ways is more attuned to our human and personal rhythm: the timeframe of God is what is called eschatology and salvation and these are words to which we are now quite unaccustomed. Eschatology concerns our relationship with the horizon; salvation concerns how we get there. Chronological thinking can only be linear and it is always hunting for progress. Therefore, we tend to invest our institutions with ideas of growth and maturity, achievement and permanence. Often this has an effect different from our intention because while we seek development, we get predictability; while we seek outcome, we get disappointment, if not failure. This negative cycle of opposition where one has to lose for another to win is not good for us. The institution begins to eat up our energy and our emotional strength and our imagination – most alarmingly perhaps of all our imagination.

OUR ECCLESIASTICAL INFANCY

It is no harm to cast our eyes back to our ecclesiastical infancy, when the church saw itself as primarily a community of response and interaction with all comers. It was after all in those days that it spoke of there being neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female in Christ. This was the time when members of the church held all things in common. Of course, this way of being the church is a great deal more work, a lot more experimental, a lot more idealistic and a lot more untidy than the institution we have made the church to be – but it is equally and differently enriching and it showed fewer signs of inertia than we observe today. It is important today because it connects imaginatively with the hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland today who simply do not know what or who churches are. It does so because it speaks from and to authenticity in a very immediate way. There is no encrusted institutional firewall. Of course there is no need to be modern for modern’s sake; nor is there any point in being antique for antique’s sake; this simply is not authentic. This cathedral, for example, attests to the undying and compelling attractiveness of good liturgy, good preaching and good music. This is a timeless formula of Christian authenticity in its own right. If we in the Church of Ireland want to run with our strapline for Disestablishment 150: free to shape our future … we should in this year 2019–2020 open ourselves up to looking at aspects of infancy as well as maturity together and right across the island of Ireland as we build the Church of Ireland as a partnership within and without for the future. We should take stock and use both infancy and maturity imaginatively and authentically as we find ourselves anew in our Disestablished freedom.  

In 1869, and still to a significant extent in 1969, education and healthcare were very much the lifeblood of the Church of Ireland’s social witness. The Welfare State resolved these matters in a particular way in Northern Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, things are different and there is still to this day direct involvement by churches in education and to a lesser extent in healthcare. What we hold in common in both parts of Ireland is that Church of Ireland people live in comprehensively secular states. A Disestablished Church of Ireland needs to engage energetically with both of the secular societies in which and among whom its members find themselves living – and with attentive listening on both sides. What we need right now is a new sense of courage and compassion towards a secularism that is in difficulty today. It safeguards the human rights of which we are all beneficiaries and it is under increasing pressure from what we ominously call: The Right.

The Right brings with it an exclusionary interpretation of society along with the ugly fist of racism. Across Europe it is all too attractive. We need to move out of a cosy paralysis of stand off. Religions who have had power and control for a long time have been slow to relinquish it and humility does not appeal. Secularism responds to religion with a negativity that does not make dialogue easy; and to its visible decline with an entitlement of philosophical superiority. It sees religion as formerly a magnet for the sort of identity that fuels people with passion and clearly no longer wants this type of identity to be the case. This is partly fed by the belief that religion is dead and that science and technology are the new certainty. While Faith Communities might rightly decry the religious illiteracy of policy makers, the same policy makers might justifiably decry the scientific ignorance and fear of people of faith. The one thing that can and must bring both sides together is climate change and the environment. It is surely amazing that the prophetic mouthpieces of this agenda are Greta Thunberg and Pope Francis, one thoroughly secular, one thoroughly religious. The time has come when the two sides need one another. Dialogue, mature dialogue of friendship, and not the dialogue of the unlistening is required urgently.       

WHAT MIGHT INCARNATION LOOK LIKE TODAY?

We are frequently caught between infancy and maturity. This is what life is like and this is what we are like. Christmas forces those of us who are adult to grapple once again with the inter–relation of these two ways of being ourselves. It is not without reason that the Sunday next before Advent is now established as Christ the King Sunday. To be faced with the maturity of crucifixion, resurrection and ascension ahead of the excitement of our preparations for Christ the Infant King is no harm. Politics and their cruelty are part of our adult life and they affect children and young people – through trafficking, through mutilation, through poverty and through homelessness; we cannot unsee what we see. But increasingly hatred and racism, and a creeping anti–Semitism, are part of our total and globalized world. All of this is part of the early life of Christ the Infant King. And we cannot unhear these things either. While prophecy is fulfilled for Christians world wide in the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, prophecy in its own right, irrespective of its religious origin, remains unfulfilled in every generation. As I have said, we see prophecy come together in our day in Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg, an unlikely pairing, and in countless people of every race and faith worldwide. Part of what Christ the Infant King did was to rattle and to terrify those in power. This we cannot unknow. 

We have no idea of the religious affiliation, if any, of the anonymous innkeeper – and so many of the most helpful and graceful people in The New Testament are anonymous. What is more, they were not in fact Christian, nor could they have been. Jesus Christ was born into a secular and a multi–faith world. As we in the Church of Ireland set out to chart a course in the One Hundred and Fiftieth Year of Disestablishment and as we seek confidence to be free to shape our future, we can build only through partnership with those whom we know and with those whom we do not yet know. And we need to get to know them in their difference and in their distinction. And the best way in which we can do this is to understand ourselves in Christ and in the world.

St John 1.1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.