Values for Advent 1: Longing

Each year, Advent puts a question to us.  It asks us what our values truly are.  This is because at no other time of year does liturgical time seem so dislocated from secular time.  Even against the backdrop of political turmoil when the future is uncertain, this is not a time of year when reflection is easy.  The traditional Advent focus on the Last Things, death, judgment, hell and heaven sits uneasily alongside Christmas fayres and lights and shop windows.  We wish we could sustain for these brief weeks what Philip Larkin called the ‘hunger to be more serious’, for then what a joy Christmas Eve would be.  Will we achieve it this year?

It’s easy for preachers in Advent to rally to the cry against consumerism and the plea for a less materialist and a more charitable, frugal, spiritually aware way of celebrating Christmas.  But we need to be careful, because we are all implicated in the values of our society and its febrile, often superficial approach to this season that prefers frippery and feel-good to real depth of challenge and possibly some pain.  So without pretending that I have any easy answers about how to observe a good Advent, I should like in these coming weeks to suggest values that could focus on its deeper meaning for us as Christian people and help us on the path towards spiritual intelligence. 

My first value is longing.  Longing, hunger, desire, is basic to the human condition.  We would not be human if we did not long for what we do not have to enjoy.  I am not speaking of selfish gratification here – I trust we have moved beyond that.  Globally, we long for a safer, more peaceful world, an end to human cruelty and the kind of terror we have seen in India in recent days.  We want to see the endemic needs that diminish the lives of so many met in a lasting way: poverty, hunger, disease.  In our nation we long for wholesome communities where neighbours care for one another, where there is a more developed instinct for what is right and just in our midst.  More personally we long for fulfilled intimate relationships, satisfaction in our work, the healing of what is broken within us, the feeling that our lives make some kind of sense.  

We long for these things.  And when I say we ‘long’ for them, I mean more than that we merely wish for them or sigh for them.  True longing engages our passions and our wills.  It involves the commitment of our entire being.  It does this because we know that human life is marred and flawed without the things we long for.  More than that, our very longings themselves are signs that we still have the capacity to envisage a better future for others and for ourselves.  Not to long for a better tomorrow would mean to settle for the compromises and shortcomings of today.  

Advent presents us with the prospect of the future.  It is, as theologians say, eschatological.  Its thrust is tomorrow, what is coming upon us and upon the world, and how tomorrow influences and shapes how we think about today.  But ‘tomorrow’, for Christianity, is not what blindly evolves out of today as events unfold.  If we thought we were at the mercy of the relentless chain of causes and effects, we would be better not to dwell on the future too much, for we would be overwhelmed with hopelessness and possibly despair.  But to focus on God’s tomorrow is to ponder how he intends to shape the world and us with it in order to bring about his good purpose.  So Advent challenges our habit of thinking about the future as somehow inevitable, whether it is the march of progress towards an ideal utopian future as much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries assumed, or whether it is the collapse of civilisation into the dystopian abyss of anarchy and chaos.  The optimists and pessimists are both wrong: neither the best nor the worst will happen come what may.  Instead, the Bible gives us the vision of a re-imagined God-shaped future and invites us to begin to craft our present in the light of it.

When Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming that the kingdom of God was at hand, this is what he meant.  He believed, as his contemporaries did, that God would shortly bring history to an end and usher in the new era of righteousness and peace.  Some of you standing here will not taste death until you see the kingdom of God come’ he said.  So is our New Testament reading, Jesus finds a donkey and comes riding into Jerusalem on it, deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah that this is how Zion’s king would arrive in his city.  And the crowd’s hosannas, culled from an acclamation in one of the royal psalms, tell us that the people knew exactly what they were seeing and celebrating.  ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’.  The kingdom is upon us.  The old is about to be swept away and with it, all that depraves and corrupts human life.  Behold, the new is here.

I said that the people knew what they were caught up in.  The truth is that they did and they didn’t.  This is the critical point.  They thought that this messianic act was nothing less than the inauguration of the eschaton.  The last days had arrived, and with them, the overthrow of Roman political power and the reinstatement of Israel as the kingdom of the saints, ruled over by one like the Son of Man coming on the clouds in power and glory.  And when the man on the donkey wreaks havoc in the temple precinct, and goes on to speak about how not one stone of the temple would be left standing upon another, his messiahship seems assured.  How could anyone doubt that their ancient longings were about to be fulfilled before their very eyes?

But we know, as they did not, that less than a week later this messianic hero would be nailed to a tree.  And for those with eyes to see, this gave a wholly new meaning to words like ‘messiah’, ‘king’, ‘Son of Man’.  It radically re-defined what it meant to pray ‘thy kingdom come!’.  And if so, then it inevitably put a question against what the people had shouted for on the roadside into Jerusalem.  ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’ – indeed; but not like the great stone of the apocalyptic writings hurled from heaven to crush to dust the great world empires.  Rather, to confront humanity with the truth and for the sake of that truth to die.  The crowd thought it knew what wanted.  But the passion unfolded a more excellent way.  This was to do with altogether more profound hungers and desires, deeper than the crowd could ever glimpse or dream of.  It exposed the shallowness of what they shouted for.  The very fact that it took just days for the cry of hosanna to be poisoned into crucify tells us this.

I am saying that it is good to have longings and hungers, but by itself it is not enough.  We must educate our desires, learn to hunger accurately, so that they become aligned to God’s own longing for the world and the redemption of the human race.  It would take a Saint Augustine to explain what this means.  But we could meditate in Advent on his profound insight that all our desires are fundamentally desire for God.  It’s only that sin has twisted and distorted them so that they become focused not on the Creator but on the creature with all the self-absorbed disordering consequences that idolatry always leads to.  Advent, I think, comes as an invitation to look at what we really want out of life, and what we want for the world, and to set it alongside and allow it to be interpreted by what Christian faith tells us is the source of true and lasting joy.  Advent can help us not only to understand and befriend our desires, but to try once again to focus them on God and his good purposes.  

This is how we shall learn how to cry hosanna to the king and to welcome him when he comes.  This is how our hearts, so restless at this edgy time of year, will find their rest in him who is the hope of creation and the Desire of Nations.

Matthew 21.1-13

Keeping Hope Alive: an Advent sermon

Hope is the theme of Advent, and hope is the theme of tonight’s second lesson. St Paul begins by speaking of the word of God in Old Testament which was written, he says, ‘so that by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope’. He continues by referring to the promises made to the patriarchs, that in their seed all the families of the earth should find blessing. He recalls how the prophets looked for the day when all nations, gentile as well as Jew, would be included in the covenant God had made with his people. And he rises to a climax as he returns to the word with which he began: ‘may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit’.

How can we ‘abound in hope’ in a world that often feels hopeless?

We must recognise what underlies our need for hope. Put simply, it's our own deepest longings and desires, our knowledge that we are incomplete as people and as a society, that we look for something more than this emptiness we so often feel inside. There is a kind of restlessness about us human beings, an inward ennui or unease that we know only too well. We were made for more than this, is what our beings cry out, though we can barely glimpse how and why, and even then only in our best moments. The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard said: ‘Faith means just that blessed unrest, deep and strong, which so urges the believer onward that he cannot settle at ease in this world, and anyone who was quite at ease would cease to be a believer.  For a believer cannot sit still, as a man might sit still with a pilgrim's staff in his hand; a believer journeys on.’

Blessed unrest he calls it, because this kind of unease throws us on to the mercy of God, drives us into his arms like the lost son returning home from a far country with empty hands and an empty heart. Augustine speaks for every soul longing for home when he says: ‘O God, our hearts were restless until they found their rest in thee’. George Herbert's poem The Pulley pictures God as having a glass of blessings to give to the human race: beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure. The last blessing he keeps back. It is rest. For, says God, ‘let him be rich and weary, that at least, if goodness lead him not, yet weariness may toss him to my breast’.

Of course, this is a huge venture of faith. Kierkegaard talked of religious faith as treading water at 70000 fathoms. I once read of a young curate who was asked why on earth he wanted to do something as foolish as throw up a promising career in business to be ordained. ‘I wanted to do a job where my feet wouldn't touch the bottom’ he said. To stake everything we are on this faith is, as St Paul says in his letters to the Corinthians, nothing short of folly. By most people’s standards it is absurd. And yet, if I speak only for myself, it is this hunger inside me that will not go away, this emptiness that wants so badly to be filled; this longing that looks for some other to speak a word of peace from across the void and say ‘I am here; I am life; I am eternal life’.

That is what makes life without faith and without hope impossible to contemplate. ‘Truly thou art a God that hidest thyself’ cries the prophet in despair. Luther said that until we cry out to this hidden God like that, until we are at the end of our rope, there is nothing he can do for us. So the beginning of hope is to feel the absence of the one who alone can make a difference. If you have ever felt the ache of longing for someone so badly that you think your heart will break, then you will understand what I am talking about. ‘Give me a lover, he will feel that of which I speak; give me one who longs, who hungers, who is a thirsty pilgrim in this wilderness, sighing for the springs of his eternal homeland; give me such a man: he will know what I mean’ said Augustine. Is the poet Par Lagerkvist writing about God when he says:

                        My friend is a stranger, someone I do not know.
                        A stranger far, far away.
                        For his sake my heart is full of disquiet
                        because he is not with me:
                        because, perhaps, after all he does not exist?
                        Who are you who so fill my heart with your absence?
                        Who fill the entire world with your absence?

The prayer of longing runs right through Advent. You can't miss the urgency behind a prayer like the majestic collect from the Sarum rite that we know as the collect of the last Sunday in Advent: Excita, quaesumus, Domine: O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us. It is there in the Great O Antiphons of Advent that we know best as the hymn ‘O come O come Emmanuel'.

But our longings won’t go away on Christmas Day. They are there in the prayers we pray throughout the year as well. The liturgy is always realistic about our human condition. It knows the way we are made. We don't have to be afraid of acknowledging to God and to one another that we long to be made whole. It puts on our lips every morning and evening the cry for help: ‘O God, make speed to save us; O lord, make haste to help us’. It give us psalms of longing like tonight's: Expectans expectavi: ‘I waited patiently for the Lord;....Make no long tarrying O my God'. It gives us prayers like the opening prayer at the eucharist, the collect for purity. ‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid....’ Kierkegaard said that ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’. If we can see our desires as deeply connected with our God-given desire for God, we will not be far from willing the one thing the prayer asks, that ‘we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy name’, not only in the liturgy but also in life.

So restlessness, longing, desire are basic to hope. They pull us into God's future, make us pray and struggle for what is ultimately worth hoping for, what the scriptures call the new heaven and the new earth. If I can learn to desire God from the depths of myself, if I can come to want him with every fibre of my being and not in my usual half-hearted way, if I can harness my energies to that one profound desire, then I discover that there can be transformation here and now. Things that looked hopeless start to emerge from the shadows. They begin to be lit up in a new and wonderful way. The deep desire I hardly perceived breaks through the wants that can see. I recognise it as the only thing I ever wanted. I glimpse what it is to hope, what it is to believe in St Paul's God of hope.

What does incarnation mean, if not that hope has made its home among us, ‘now in the time of this mortal life’ as the Advent collect says, ‘in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility’. That is what unlocks the gateway from fear to hope: our conviction in the most important truth in the world, that in the child of Bethlehem is Emmanuel, God with us. So in Advent, and in all of life, we wait for the day when travelling days are done and it is time to come home, when restless longings are satisfied and hungers met, when hope is emptied in delight, and God is as present to us as we have all along been to him; and we see, and enjoy, and praise, and rest, and know as we have never known before, that he is God of love and truth and beauty, world without end.

Romans 15: 4-13

Christmas Truce

A hundred years ago this Tuesday, the German navy stole up on the coast of North East England and assaulted Hartlepool. Over 100 people died, most of them civilians. Missiles also fell on Whitby and Scarborough. If the rest of England was deluded into thinking that the war would be over by Christmas, I suspect that up here they knew better. In 5 months the British had already suffered 90000 casualties. But in 1914, the nation tried to celebrate Christmas as usual. In Belgium and France every member of the British Expeditionary Force received cards from the King and Queen, and from Princess Mary a brass tobacco box, tobacco and cigarettes.

And something happened that no-one who was there would ever forget. I have an illustrated book of reminiscences written in 1915 by an army padre called Douglas Winnifrith. This is what he says about it: ‘The opposing forces left their trenches and fraternised on the intervening ground, exchanging gifts and good wishes!...For his enemy individually “Tommy” has no hatred. He is goodness itself to German wounded and prisoners to whom I have seen him give the last of his precious Woodbines’. To him, the trenches were an extension of the rugby pitches of Charterhouse and Eton. Sportsmanship was everything, playing the man. So ‘one was not surprised to find him prepared to shake hands with his foe on Christmas Day’.

The following Christmas things were very different. The high command of both sides were determined that there should be no more truces. Anyway, soldiers were no longer in the mood for it. There had been too much suffering. The Manchester Guardian, in its Christmas leader, spoke about ‘a Europe fast bound in misery and iron’, this ‘great disaster to civilisation’, the ‘bitter irony’ of the contrast between the conduct of the war and the spirit of Christmas. It looked back to 1914 across a brutalising year of civilian air raids that had begun on Christmas Day itself, mechanised warfare, the misery of the trenches and poison gas. It spoke about ‘the strange and pathetic episodes of temporary friendship men who were seeking each other’s lives…. We seem to be “dug in” against the essential meaning of Christmas with a thoroughness that leaves nothing to be desired.’ It warned against moralising, saying that ‘the conflict has grown ever vaster and more impersonal, and we should treat it like a terrible earthquake where we know what duty and compassion require of us without being able to answer the question why?’.

The Sainsbury’s TV Christmas Truce advert has been criticised for its sentimentality, ‘smearing chocolate’ over the stench of death that permeated the trenches. I didn’t see it that way: 1914 was early enough for men still to believe that reaching out across no man’s land could betoken a future they all longed for. Far too soon it would seem like a broken dream. The Battle of the Somme 18 months later must have felt like the ultimate mockery of those fraternal carols and football games, as if they were a bizarre aberration in the history of war. But that is what makes it poignant. For it asks the questions: what happens when beautiful dreams break up under the weight of catastrophe, cruelty and darkness that are too heavy to bear? Was it just a child’s fantasy that was best forgotten? Or did those lads glimpse a better future that Christmas day as they played at being a world free of threat and foreboding, healed, reconciled, filled with friendship and delight? If so, it was important to remember it.

I expect many a preacher this year is drawing a message out of this centenary of the Christmas truce. The symbolism is powerful as we have seen in the touching memorial unveiled last week in the National Arboretum and designed by a 10 year old from Tyneside: those precious hours of shared humanity in which enemies were drawn together by the Christ Child. Even the terrible attrition that followed did not undo the significance of that moment. It was like a sacrament, presenting combatants with the possibility of a better world in which swords would be turned into ploughshares. That day it felt near enough to be grasped. How wonderful it must have seemed. And if it laid down somewhere in the combatants’ souls a memory of peace-seeking, the realisation that the enemy we are commanded to love is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, well, that is the purpose of every good dream.

And so it should be at this Christmas time 2014. No-one pretends that the message of ‘peace on earth, good will to all people’ is the truth of things today; like those later Great War Christmasses, it seems further off than ever. Violence, terror and hatred seem ‘dug-in’ in ways that we did not imagine even a year ago. And the worst of it is that so much of it is fuelled by the furies and hatreds of radical practitioners of religion. I mean Islam, that noble religion of dignity, truth-seeking and peace. It is terrible to think that faith can be so debased by atrocities perpetrated in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful. And if that were not enough, we now have more refugees and asylum seekers on the move than at any time since the last war. Then we have Ebola, and unending revelations about child abuse, and the plight of the hungry in our own midst, something that took even the Archbishop of Canterbury – who has seen many dreadful things – by surprise. Meanwhile there is scant progress among leaders trying to address climate change, and isolationist politics are pulling us apart from our neighbours precisely when we need one another most. As 2015 dawns the prospect of a better world is bleak.

Yet Advent and Christmas speak into the state we are in just as they did in 1914. Our seasonal stories touch us because they are always fresh and new; they invite us to rediscover innocence. It is like looking at an old master painting: exquisite, beautiful, filled with adoration and joy. But peer into the dark places and shadows on the canvas. Sometimes you can trace a broken world in there: a poor family crying out for bread, the crippled and diseased longing to be healed. Often they conceal a frozen river or skeletal trees, metaphors of deadness. Or the shadows may just be dark, symbolising human hearts breaking under the weight of fear or grief, guilt or worry or pain, waiting for the illumination the birth of Jesus brings. ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.’ That is what we love about Christmas. It holds out the possibility that we can find hope, and life can begin again.

Other than the medicine of the gospel, I don’t have any cure for our ills. If I did, you wouldn’t believe me. But the voice of the prophet in our first reading heralds good news for victims, freedom for captives, release for prisoners, comfort for the sad, gladness for a people who wait with longing and who keep hope and faith alive. It’s the advent of the Lord’s great jubilee. So we must never give up on God and his love for the world he made and will always cherish. We must never despair. This precious Infant in the manger is for life, not just for Christmas. He will know soon enough the bitterness of dark and pain; a sword will pierce his mother’s heart. But by embracing evil and making it his own, he draws the sting out of death and hell. He gives us back our broken selves, our future, our freedom, our happiness, our life. He inspires us to believe that transformation can happen in our world, in our human family, in ourselves.

Was this what those soldiers glimpsed, however partially, in the trenches a hundred years ago, that the true light that enlightens all people was coming into the world? Like Advent, it was a moment of awakened longing for something better. Far off, yet coming one day: a truce that lasts forever, an eternal reconciliation and peace, a healing of the world’s pain, a love that is without limit and without end. We have a reason for the hope that is within us.

Durham Cathedral, Advent 3 2014 (Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-end; John 1.6-8, 19-28)

Winter Light at Easter

It's a wintry Easter we are celebrating this year, for all of us cold and for some, very white. It’s no comfort to be told that a March Easter is more likely to be white than Christmas Day. The psychological and emotional effect of this equinoctial cold is all the more potent because we do not expect it and were not prepared for it when the days became longer than the nights. Fierce has this unseasonal winter’s grip been in upland Britain which begins not 20 miles west of here. Ask the elderly. Ask the farmers.

Lent is an old English word for spring. We have ached for spring, for its luminous duck-egg skies, its birdsong, its fresh colours and flowers. We would love to see cumulus bubble up again borne on a southerly zephyr letting loose sharp showers to wash the landscape. We would love to feel the gentle warmth of the strengthening sun as it climbs towards the zenith. When spring comes, it will never be more welcomed. 

Of course whether it is white or green, Easter is always a bursting forth of light and colour and life. In this Cathedral and in every church in the land, and in the hearts of all who feel the slightest pull of spiritual reality, it is springtime today. Rise heart, thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delays.

I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.                             
(George Herbert, 'Easter')

But perhaps this prolonged winter brings a gift with it: to help us to enter into an aspect of the Easter story that we might not have felt in quite this way before. I mean the complex emotions of those who loved Jesus and who on Good Friday experienced the most terrible sense of bafflement, confusion and loss. For them, the aftermath of Golgotha would have been nothing less than a winter of the soul

           when a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.
(R.S. Thomas, 'The Belfry')

In her cycle of radio plays about gospel story, The Man Born to be King, Dorothy Sayers has John discover a pair of old sandals that Jesus had worn. He hides them from Peter because of what memories charged with sight and feel and smell would do to him ‘like a sick animal that has crawled home to die. He can’t eat. He can’t sleep.' One of the normal symptoms of bereavement is aching for the presence of the loved-one, and an instinct to search that will not go away. Who is to say what brought the women to the garden at dawn on Easter morning? They went to anoint a body with spices, but what else drove them there? Surely the need to see him again, feel the tender skin, remember his voice, his touch, his scent. Perhaps this year we have glimpsed this in an attenuated way by our sense of the cold, our own wintry longing for Easter, for springtime, for warmth. 

Easter answers our longings and desires. It does this by both changing how things were, and transforming our view of them. We would not be here if we didn’t believe that something infinitely life-changing took place on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the grave space empty. There is no getting away from this singularity in history. ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here’ say the two men in the garden. A real absence, indeed, but a vacuum that gives the women what they most need: to dare to entertain the possibility that all was not as it seemed, that they were in the presence of the most profound of mysteries that nevertheless had the capacity to turn round despair. ‘He is risen. Remember how he told you.’ Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope. The women begin to see reality differently. We begin to. The world is a different place. The garden has flowers. There is blue sky above our heads. The earth begins to warm. At last it is spring. Everything changes.

Of course, all this is to collapse a long disclosure and its realisation into a few moments. Luke himself keeps us in suspense here: the disciples did not believe the women at first. The two who walked the Emmaus Road with the unknown stranger did not recognise him: there was a journey to make, not simply along a dusty cratered near-eastern cart track but an inward journey of the soul to bring springtime to their bleakness, coax their frozen spirits back into life. The important thing is: there is disclosure. There is recognition. There is a new world. Winter has fled, and with it its gloomy shadows and oppressive captivity. He is risen. 

St Augustine has a beautiful passage in a commentary on the feeding of the crowd where he speaks about our human longings and hungers. ‘Give me a lover: a lover will feel what I am speaking of; give me one who longs, who hungers, who is a thirsty pilgrim in this wilderness, sighing for the springs of his eternal homeland; give me such a person, for they will know what I mean.’ He might have added: give me one who is longing for spring, yearning to be rid of burdens, tired of this endless Narnian winter, weary in themselves, weary for our globe that strives to find some hope as it struggles under the weight of unhealed conflict, sorrow and pain.

If this echoes your experience, then come to the risen Lord today. Sit down at his Easter feast. Eat bread and drink wine. Find your healing and refreshment in him; be glad that he is among us as our beloved brother who was lost in his death but found in his resurrection, who opens up the way home for all people and welcomes us to celebrate here in his Father’s house. For here, at least, the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, and the time of singing has come. Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.

Michael Sadgrove
Durham Cathedral, Easter Day, 2013
Luke 24. 1-12

At Bethlehem in the House of Bread

‘Let us go now even to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us. So they went with haste to find Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.’  I went to Bethlehem a decade ago.  Here is what I wrote about it in my journal, before my camera days.

We drive to Bethlehem passing Rachel’s Tomb on the way.  Before coming here, the Church of the Nativity was one of the places I was saying I would have been content not to visit. It’s too obviously part of the Holy Land theme park. I am proved wrong. Justinian’s noble basilica is one of the few buildings here to have survived intact from early Christian times.  It stands on the foundations of Constantine’s double-aisled church. You have to stoop to get in through the main door whose portal, it is said, carries both Muslim and Christian inscriptions. The grotto of the Nativity stands beneath the Orthodox sanctuary. It is moving to queue to go down into this tiny cave where pilgrims have come for centuries.  More humility is called for in bending low to touch the bedrock of the cave where, reputedly, Jesus was born. I have heard this alluded to in many sermons about the nativity but the effect is powerful: if you don’t bend down low, you can’t touch the mystery. Opposite is the place where the manger stood. At my suggestion, we sing Away in a manger.

 

Bethlehem is a Palestinian Christian town a few miles from Jerusalem. Today, many Christian families have left, partly because of the occupation of the West Bank and the high concrete wall that now cuts it off from Jerusalem. At tense times it retreats into its ancient somnolence: ‘how still we see thee lie’ but in an uneasy calm that could be shattered by sounds of gunfire.  Yet visitors still come in large numbers to throng Manger Square especially at Christmas. The chairman of the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce says: ‘we are living in a big prison but we still hope things will change’. Perhaps that will be helped by its becoming a World Heritage Site, and by the United Nation’s first steps towards recognising the Palestinian state.

Today’s Bethlehem is conflicted, but this is nothing new. When Jesus was born, it lay in territory ruled over by Herod: not a safe place to grow up in, as Matthew’s story of the massacre of the innocents makes clear. But at its heart the nativity story is not a piece of gritty, social comment on homelessness or poverty. ‘No room at the inn’ is more likely to mean ‘there was no space in the lodging or guest-room’. The houses in the vicinity of Manger Square had caves behind where animals were stabled. We can imagine Joseph, a native of the town like Mary, taking her to his parents’ or friend’s home whose cave was a quieter, safer place in which to give birth. When the old masters painted the nativity, they cleaned the stable and beautified the messy realities of childbearing, but they understood the tender image of the holy family sharing in wonder and love and great joy at this mystery, this so much longed-for coming. In the church, I felt I was touching this ancient story. The Persians would have razed it to the ground in the 6^th century had it not been for the Magi in Persian dress depicted on the west front: they spared it for the sake of that image. And because Muslims were allowed to use the south transept for prayer since the 7^th century, they too spared the church in later times when so much else was lost. It is as if the memory of the Nativity has shed a redeeming light on Bethlehem across the centuries to keep it safe. In the Shepherds’ Fields they say: here it is always Christmas.

Bethlehem means ‘House of bread’. That may not have been its original meaning, but it’s how it is remembered. I have often meditated on that name.  It suggests a place of goodness and plenty, perhaps prompted by the Bible story of Ruth garnering in its golden fields at harvest time.  Her life was changed by her decision to linger at the House of Bread. Or great David, the beloved king whose city this was and whose memory in time became elevated into the hope of an Anointed One who would come. ‘You, Bethlehem Ephrathah…from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel’ says the prophet. This long-expected Messiah: he is Bethlehem’s gift, Bethlehem’s food, Bethlehem’s bread.  He is the one whom we have crossed this lowly threshold to see, this marvellous Child in whom a new dawn is breaking, Jesus the living Bread who feeds the hungry and fills them with good things.

The door of the House of Bread is always open.  We come as we are, lost, lonely, hopeless, hungry and poor: nothing in our hands we bring. We push tentatively, even a trifle foolishly, at that open door that the Key of David has opened and no-one can shut. Perhaps it always is when we go there, and are willing and humble enough to step down into the cave of nativity and take the gift held out to us. And we find as we find nowhere else that this little tiny Child bids us welcome, invites us in, sits us down and asks us taste his meat. Love’s work: that is what we understand when we feast in the House of Bread, and our eyes are opened, and we recognise him. Young children often have the power to invite us to rediscover kindness and pity, gentleness and hope.  This makes the awfulness of the slaughtered children of Newtown and the child-refugees of Syria all the more cruel. But this child does more. He draws our wonder and our love because of all that he has to give.  In the House of Bread our lives are given back to us once more, their broken fragments gathered up like grain scattered on the hillsides so that in him we begin to live again.

Like all the best gifts, Bethlehem is not just for Christmas. The House of Bread is open all the year round for us to find a welcome and share a feast. For here is promised everything that belongs to our redemption brought us by this holy child. The bread with which he will feed a hungry crowd as a sign of his generosity; the bread he will break at the last supper and give to his disciples; the command he will give that we go on sharing bread in his memory, broken bread for his body given for us all and for the life of the world; living bread for Easter when with burning heart we know him as the one who is risen from the dead. Bethlehem gives its name to all that belongs to Jesus and all that belongs to us.  He says to us and to all humanity, in our living and our loving, our suffering and our dying that in him all our hungers are satisfied.

So we go with the shepherds to Bethlehem on this Christmas Day. And as we enter the House of Bread we allow our hungers and longings to find a voice, knowing that the Holy Child welcomes us and hears us. What shall we ask of him? Perhaps on Christmas morning we echo the cries that come from the depths of every human heart. Give us happiness. Give us healing.  Give us purpose. Give us hope. Give us your kingdom. Give us love. And give us, we pray, our daily bread: today at Christmas and throughout this coming year. Amen Lord, give us this bread always!

Durham Cathedral, Christmas Day 2012 (Luke 2.8-20)