Be Born in us Today

One of our wedding presents we still use is a leather-bound visitors’ book. It’s much battered now, after forty five years; but it is a precious record of guests whom we have welcomed into our home – family, friends, strangers, and who knows, perhaps even angels entertained unawares. The shifting patterns of our personal relationships are traced through its pages: people we have worked with; people we were once close to; people who have died; people we have grown to love increasingly over the years. 

In our book, there are four entries from 1977 to 1983.  Those guests couldn't write their own names, so we did it for them when they crossed our threshold for the first time, long expected and already much loved. I needn’t tell you that they are our four children. The book brings it all back: the long months of waiting, the careful preparations, the sense of expectancy - joyful, but tinged with anxiety in case things should not be exactly right, or we might not be good enough parents, or we might not have enough love to give to this infinitely fragile creature who will be so dependent on us. There is nothing you would not do to welcome a child. And if that child does not arrive, or the visit is cut short, the pain would be unbearable. There is no loss like the loss of a child.

Each year in our churches and homes we prepare the crib to receive its honoured guest. It is an act of love, for there is nothing you would not do for this Child who comes to visit us. And like the preparations you make for any birth in the family, it is not just that we want everything to be outwardly right, though that matters. We want everything to be inwardly right too. The crib becomes a picture of our own lives being put back together, made beautiful for Christ.  St Teresa of Avila talked of the Interior Castle of our lives; but she might have spoken of the Interior Crib, with the heart as the manger-throne to receive the King of kings. 

How do we prepare this inward crib of ours? I said that there is no loss in life like the loss of a child. Yet our society has, in a way, lost a child, and Christmas brings it home with particular force. Who is this child we have lost?  I think it’s the child within us capable of expectation and wonder, happiness and delight.  Once upon a time, those qualities were in full flower in us.  We call it innocence, which perhaps means the capacity to be open the world in all its beauty and generosity and see into the life of things.  It’s a capacity that in many of us grown-ups tends to unripen until it is has shrivelled to a bud.  

I think I know 

Where all children come from but the puzzle

To me is, as they grow up, where they go.

Love, wonder, marvellous hope. All these can wither

With crawling years like flowers on a stalk;

Or to some piper's tune vanish for ever

As creatures murdered on a morning walk.

This year I have felt it again, the way Christmas erodes to the tired, tinselled routine, a thousand miles away from the simplicity and mystery of this wonderful festival.  Perhaps only the very young, the very poor, the very lonely and the very hurt understand Christmas: they have nothing to get in the way.  So what does it mean to say that Christmas is a time for children.  How do we acknowledge that in us all is an infant crying for the light? Don’t we yearn for that child to emerge from the dark and start playing? Don’t we ache to feel what we feel as we gaze as if for the first time on the ox and ass and shepherds and Mary and Joseph and the baby?  

If someone said, on Christmas Eve

‘Come, see the oxen kneel

‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,’

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

 

We can hear this as nostalgia.  I see it more as a longing for meaning, the kind of meaning that children more easily grasp than adults.  Jesus says that unless we become like little children, we can never enter the kingdom of heaven.  And what is that but to rediscover not only the lost child in ourselves but the holy Child of Bethlehem.  If only we could find him again!  But Christmas says he is not far from any one of us, the one who brings truth and love into our world.  He comes as the stranger we do not recognise, yet he is the friend who cares about us.  He comes as the sovereign of the universe, yet he is the humblest of subjects.  He comes as the almighty creator, yet he is the slave who empties himself to be among us as one who serves. He is nearer to us than our own souls.  He asks for house-room in our crib.  He stands at the door and knocks, and waits to see what we will do with him.  

The fourteenth century mystical theologian Meister Eckhart said: “We must all become God’s mothers, for God desires to be born in each of us.” A poem a friend wrote a few years ago for her Christmas card captures beautifully the ‘how’, the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of Christmas, the three life-changing questions we put to the nativity and the nativity puts to us. 

How should I best prepare?  Coming at you

with a running jump I might easily

just miss you altogether; land instead

where earth’s turn must face me with a shadow.

What if I lose the way, arriving late

to bend my knee; will all the food be gone,

leaving scattered embers and camel dung?

Where shall a baby safely lay his head

and not be overlooked or trampled on?

‘Within the manger of your heart,’ he said.

********

The first text quoted is from Charles Causley’s poem ‘School at Four O'Clock’.  The second is from Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’.  The final poem is by Sheila Bryer, ‘Advent’ (© S Bryer 2007, used with permission).

St Paul: a tribute

Today, the 25 January, we celebrate the conversion of St Paul.  Caravaggio painted the scene and caught its sound and fury.  Paul is spread eagled on the ground, as if toppled by a seismic cataclysm, staring upwards out of his blinded eyes.  Above him rears a vast horse, rider-less, the one he has just fallen from.  Somehow that enormous horse overshadowing the man symbolises the immensity of what has trampled on his world, like the stage play Equus for the 1^st century: it’s as if only heaven itself can tame Saul’s huge animal energies.  Caravaggio’s biographer Helen Langdon says of this painting, ‘with its jagged shapes and irrational light which licks out details for their dramatic impact, it creates a sense of crisis and dislocation [in which] Christ disrupts the mundane world’. Such a man, if he ever recovered from this epiphany, would not be a comfortable conversation-partner or bed-fellow.  ‘Great men are meteors that consume themselves to light the earth’ said Thomas Hardy.  Struck by a thunderbolt from Jesus, Saul of Tarsus had no choice but to become one himself. 

 

Perhaps I was over-exposed to Paul in adolescence.  The Christianity that retrieved me from my lazy teenage agnosticism was thoroughly Pauline – or thought it was.  Paul was regarded as the early church’s theological organiser who laid down the definitive systematic template over the New Testament.  If you wanted to know what Christianity taught about sin, grace, atonement, faith, money, sex or power, you went first to Paul.  There is a logic to this, though not the one I was taught.  It is that the earliest documents of the New Testament are not the four gospels but Paul’s letters.  There is a case for reading the New Testament in the order in which it was written, overhearing how the early church evolved over the first two generations.  But this was not how I learned Paul.  To us students the Bible was more like a jigsaw puzzle whose disparate texts in the Old Testament, gospels and Acts had to be sorted and fitted into their allotted places so that a coherent picture emerged.  The bits you began with, the ones with straight edges that framed the image and determined where the others would go were the Pauline pieces.  

 

If I came fresh to St Paul now, what would I make of him?  Here are three aspects of his career that would strike me as reasons to celebrate Paul’s conversion today. 

 

First, there is St Paul the evangelist.  He was one of the great travellers of the ancient world bringing the Christian gospel to the known world. You know the roll-call of places from Sunday School when you learned to trace Paul’s missionary journeys: Asia Minor, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Malta, Rome.  He would have gone to Gaul and Spain if he could, and who knows, even to this cold, rainy far-flung corner of the Roman Empire.  It required energy and courage, for he endured all kinds of hardship and opposition.  But his real achievement lay in the sense of purpose with which he set about his travels.  He preached in the towns and cities where influence mattered, along the great trade routes that were the communication lines of his age.  He stayed long enough in each place both to make sure that people were able to absorb the message and also to ‘grow’ local indigenous Christian leaders who would settle his young churches securely.  We should learn from this.  A book written a century ago by Roland Allen, Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? would help purge us of some of the nonsense that goes by the name of evangelism.  Paul can help us establish sound principles of faith-sharing and the nurture of Christian communities even in an era so different from his. Our church plants and ‘fresh expressions’ need to pay attention to the sound mission principles St Paul worked to. They have never been bettered.

 

Then there is Paul the theologian.  One of greatest minds in antiquity, for him risk-taking was not only a matter of persecution or physical danger but also of the intellect.  Conversion was not just a matter of heart and soul and strength, but also of the mind. In the ancient world of mystery religion, pagan cults and moralism, Christianity came like those shafts of sunshine in the painting, as enlightenment, an invitation to intellectual freedom, to think in wholly new ways about God, the world and our human lives. I mean proclaiming the gospel in a way that could be heard by the cultured Greek and Roman world beyond Judea, promoting ‘intelligent’ and ‘intelligible’ Christianity, we could say.  This meant, courageously, doing away with the age-old divisions of the human race and stating unequivocally that Christ was for all humanity and all creation. The idea that the gospel embraced gentiles was deeply subversive and large parts of the New Testament show how fiercely it was contested.  Paul’s greatness lies in that he understood how Christianity is truly universal.  The grace of God through faith in Christ is offered without condition to all people, whatever their race, gender, status or culture.  This lies at the heart of his truly radical vision of the church – and Paul is the New Testament’s great theologian of the church.  Our unity in Christ underlies this Week of Prayer for Christian unity. 

 

And thirdly, there is Paul the writer.  The letters of Paul are among the most cherished pieces of writing from the first days of the Church: 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest New Testament document of all.  The Letters to the Romans and Galatians, setting out the meaning of faith in Christ; the Letters to the Corinthians cajoling a wayward church into living together as a community, the Letter to the Philippians with Paul’s acknowledgment of what the Christian journey has meant to him personally – what would the New Testament be without them?  These are remarkable documents with their skilful blend of theology, spiritual insight, pastoral sensitivity, honesty, humour (yes! or at least heavy irony), passion and well-grounded common sense.  They give us an unrivalled picture of the life of the early church and, as I have said, suggest principles by which we may order our own lives and that of our churches.  How impoverished we would be without these beautiful letters. In them, we hear the early church celebrating the joys and wrestling with the struggles of living together in these small fragile human communities that the gospel had given birth to. They are like a mirror held up to us as we try to live authentic Christian lives today. What we see is our own selves, in the complexity and mess of our unredeemed state, but also in the beauty of lives that Jesus Christ has touched and re-fashioned through his grace. We hear Paul challenging us to look at how we understand what it means to be human, inviting us to judge ourselves against the virtues that are his touchstone of authentic Christianity as he lists them in one of his letters: faith, hope and love.  

 

What do we do with St Paul today?  We need to recognise that he lived in his own times and spoke to his own contemporaries in the places he wrote to. But that voice from a distant past speaks eloquently into the present, our present. We should learn from the way he set about the vocation to Christian life that without warning confronted him on the Damascus Road, knocked him off that horse, pinned him to the ground, shut his eyes to the pain and persecution he had instigated and opened them to the gospel life that would shape his life from that day onward and launch him his extraordinary career as an apostle.  If only we could be as courageous and hope-filled! 

 

And our vision of the church should not be less universal than his, embracing people of all races, cultures and backgrounds. Today marks the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I do not myself think that trying to achieve a structural convergence between the historic denominations is at the heart of this nowadays, though we should welcome it when it happens. I think we are far better at recognising the heritage each of our Christian traditions brings to the whole church as gifts to enrich it. What is harder is to create churches that are genuinely united communities of faith and hope and love. When St Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians, that passionate, powerful statement of the non-negotiable values that lie at the heart of his gospel, he says: that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor gentile, slave nor free, but we are all one in Christ Jesus. My own community of Anglicans in this country has only just got round to opening up an equal space for women alongside men in the senior leadership of the Church of England, though it has been on this journey for the entire 40 years of my ministry. You were there decades before us; others are not even close to it. 

 

And that is only one of his criteria for a genuinely inclusive community of faith. We can add to his some of our own which are surely in the spirit of his letter: young and old, gay and straight, wealthy and disadvantaged, indigenous and incomer, conservative and liberal…. You see what a mountain we still have to climb. But it matters. It matters hugely. The human family is as bitterly divided in our day as it has ever been. We are in despair about the cruelties and hatreds inflicted by one group of human beings on another, and it is always the weak, the voiceless, those with no power or influence who are the victims. Radicalised Islamists behind massacres in Pakistan, Nigeria and Paris are in all our minds; yet they are only the latest symptoms of the cancers that eat away at the human soul. On Holocaust Memorial Day this week, we shall keep the memory of genocide alive and hold its victims in our prayers. In the light of man’s inhumanity to men, it is vital that we create communities of openness and trust, of friendship and care, communities that work away at the patient task of healing us of these fatal diseases.  This is the vision that lies behind the way St Paul speaks about the church. For him it’s a new creation, a new humanity in Christ, his cherished body, a place of reconciliation and wholeness and peace. Because of this, the church is something beautiful, good and even glorious. 

 

It will be costly to bear witness to the gospel as he did, having the courage to do away with discrimination and division; being communities of graciousness and generosity that show the love of God poured into our hearts.  But this is how we shall become churches of whom Paul would say, as he does in his letters, that he gives thanks constantly for us, rejoices in our faithfulness and bears us on his heart.  And in that, flawed yet always mighty, his heart will have spoken to ours. 

 

Waddington Street United Reformed Church, Durham

25 January 2015

For the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul

Acts 9.1-22

Nativity - 2014 Style

Many of you will have been to a school nativity play this Christmas. I wonder what you found? The answer isn’t as obvious as it should be. Some schools have changed ‘Christmas’ to ‘winter festival’ (like the illuminated sign on our town hall – once upon a time it used to say Happy Christmas too, but despite my best efforts, it’s now Seasons Greetings – without even so much as an apostrophe!). In most nativities, Mary and Joseph are still there, because the appeal of childbirth is universal. But instead of angels, shepherds and wise men, you may well find other characters crowding the stage: aliens from Star Wars, punk fairies, football celebrities, drunken spacemen, a lobster. And where the infant Christ should be, some more modern messiah such as Elvis Presley. 

You don’t believe me? I’m afraid it’s true. Welcome to Nativity 2014-style. It seems we are losing confidence in the festivals our country has observed for centuries. Many of our friends of other religious faiths tell us not to lose confidence. They want us not to forget Britain’s deep Christian roots. Some Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, join in out of respect for our native culture, or because they honour Jesus as prophet of a great world faith. But I read a news item recently telling us that in some schools, teachers are afraid of causing offence by talking to children about Jesus’ birth. ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ asks the song. Apparently not: a worrying proportion of youngsters, when asked, could not name the child in the manger or his parents.

You haven’t come to church on Christmas Eve to hear a rant from the pulpit. You’ve come for the same reason that the shepherds left their flocks and the wise men travelled so far: to see what it means, this good news of great joy for all people. And if there’s one thing that strikes us in the Christmas stories, it’s how good news brings not just happiness but a new confidence,  because life has meaning again, there is a purpose in things and it’s worth being alive after all. ‘The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.’ They were changed by what they had experienced.

We mustn’t be sentimental about the nativity. When Jesus was born, the world was as troubled and insecure as it is today. Nations were in turmoil like they are now. Life was cheap. No-one cared too much about this or any other humble family on a pointless journey. ‘The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ this Infant would say when he grew up. Mary and Joseph had plenty to worry about on Christmas night, for who would give house-room to a mother about to give birth far from home? They were not quite like today’s homeless or asylum keepers yet the story gives us a feeling for them as people who were dependent on the kindness of strangers. 

The shepherds, too, were men without security or future, for in their time they were little regarded, a kind of underclass of the ancient world. So in a way, the Christmas story is a gathering of nobodies. The child, the parents, these first witnesses – none of them belonged to places where important people notice and pay attention. Yes, others more rich and powerful would come in time to worship this King, but not yet and not here in this lowly cave. That is St Matthew’s story, not Luke’s. 

This is why it’s decidedly odd to fill the nativity scene with celebrities and stars. It just misreads the story. I’ve nothing against Elvis and his blue suede shoes – I wear them myself sometimes - but they don’t belong in a crude manger with ox and ass and swaddling clothes. The stars belong not there but in the night sky where the angels sing ‘glory to God in the highest’. It’s the nameless and ignored to whom the Son of God is first made known. No wonder that the shepherds walk tall as they go back to the fields, for who else in the history of the world has ever seen what they have just seen?

If only we could recapture that nativity! In his poem ‘The Oxen’, Thomas Hardy goes in his imagination to the crib at midnight on Christmas Eve, ‘hoping it might be so’. I think that rings true for many people. Some come to church at Christmas out of childhood nostalgia. But I want to take our motives more seriously than that. I believe there are many who are touched by Christmas, stirred by this story of a new beginning, genuinely longing for the message to be true and for it to make a difference to the world and to our own lives. ‘Hoping it might be so.’

Perhaps the secret is to see ourselves like Mary, Joseph and the shepherds: as ordinary men and women, yes and children too, who have been given the extraordinary privilege of glimpsing a miracle. It takes humility and courage to admit it. If you go to the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, you have to bend low to go down the rough steps and enter the place where by tradition Jesus was born. And the less we think we can bring to that place, the more open we are to what we find there, the more likely we are to see it for what it is: God reaching out to us wanting us to recognise him in the person of the Infant Jesus, welcoming us home. 

But glimpse that miracle, surrender your life to it, discover the difference it makes and life is utterly changed. That’s when our hearts are stirred and we begin to walk tall when that great light Isaiah spoke about floods into the darkness because of the one who is born: our Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, the Saviour who is Christ the Lord. Born for us today – for the world whether it cares or doesn’t care, for each of us whether we know it or not, asking that we say yes to him and give him a home in our hearts. 

Perhaps it’s those with nothing to lose who see best into the heart of Christmas: what it means, how it changes everything, how it gives us back our hope. All we have to bring is our simplicity, our hands open and stretched out towards the heart of Love. Let’s give it a go this year. That's Christmas. That's true Nativity 2014-style.

For if this Holy Child can’t touch us this Christmas, what else can? 

Durham Cathedral, Christmas Eve 2014. Isaiah 9.2,6,7; Luke 2.8-20.