Christ Church Cathedral

Christ Church Cathedral

Christmas - at Midnight

December 24, 2010

Tonight we are all slouching towards Bethlehem. We join with the motley crowd that over the centuries has made the trip. No matter what generation to which they have belonged the puzzle remains - how are we to fathom the mystery of God with us, indeed as very part of our being. Let's begin with the New Testament record. We celebrate on this evening the stories which are found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In their written form they date from a generation or two after the event itself - but remember here the issue of his birth is not in dispute or even the date within a year or two. Our fascination is with the fact that the life of a particular person, one Jesus of Nazareth generated these magnificent stories - the music of which still rings forth in our worship this evening. Recent scholarship has uncovered a remarkable similarity in the structure of Jesus birth stories with those which circulated about the same time telling of the remarkable conception and birth of the Emperor Augustus. However no music was ever heard then or since that can attest to the depth of the mystery involved in his origin.

More fascinating possibly is the fact that the traditional reading for midnight mass (which were read this evening) have never contained the birth story but two remarkable meditations upon presence of God in human life and history. Interestingly, the unknown writers of the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews represent two quite different cultures which in their anonymous way suggest something of the extent to which the event of Jesus birth determined the way in which Christians began to think and still are thinking about a faith which is demanding in its efforts to transform real things in a real world.

This is why the slog toward Bethlehem has over the millennia has picked up so much baggage. There is to begin with, the multi-cultural presence on the road ending in a 6th century Church of the Nativity which is jointly and very acrimoniously maintained by Roman Catholic (Franciscan), Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic authority as well as being a holy place for Muslims. The key element here is not the presence of a shrine, this is a common occurrence in many religious traditions, but the struggle to transform the stuff from which buildings are made into a living symbol of Divine presence in the things of this world. In the 21st century this effort has to meet considerable challenge if it is to avoid a label of magic. This is why perhaps in our own day art, architecture and music are able to command a more universal acceptance. So within our lifetime it is easy to point to Antonio Gauda's La Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, Dali's Last Supper or Olivier Messiaen's organ work La Nativite Seigneur. There is also the poetry of W.B. Yeats which provided theme and spirit of this sermon and its words will provide the background chorus for what follows.¹ While there are those who would dismiss these efforts as empty of content, the witness of time suggests this effort is part of an historical train that is an essential part of human experience.

Admittedly the going gets a bit tougher when it comes to more direct application of words to capture the role of divine presence in human life. Clearly there is more than one way of understanding both the content and the behavior involved. Life and human relationships are more often than not quite messy or at best filled with ambiguity.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Unfortunately the Christian Church as never been at loss for words and over time has proposed definitions for which it has no claim of special privilege. This may be acceptable for those who accept its authority but make its claim to take the real world seriously somewhat suspect. This stance requires the Church to proclaim it has sole custody of a particular way of life which is inseparable from what Jesus was and did. Both the Roman Catholic and Anglican communions have come adrift of this challenge in the last few weeks. Pope Benedict XVI has been striving to uncover a doctrinally acceptable way of acknowledging the dire situation produced by the HIV epidemic particularly in Africa.

Generally speaking, there is no one solution to the problem but rather a series of steps which taken together offer some hope of managing the medical and social problems generated. In this mix, there is a role for condoms. Alas, sex, babies and HIV produce an unholy trinity equally turgid and inseparable as the more generally recognized one. Making the use of condoms permissible disturbs all previous Vatican directives on sexual relations and despite the help of numerous Vatican spin doctors sometimes called theologians, the explanation is as turgid and obtuse as those of the Holy Trinity. Pope Benedict is maintaining spiritual authority only at the cost of losing his credibility.

Meanwhile the Anglican Bishops in Africa with the exception of those in South Africa have insisted that "the unchangeable standard Christian marriage between one man and one women is the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family" and have made it a condition for their participation in the Anglican communion. What is particularly ironic about this stance is that the original introduction of family structure with one father and one mother was introduced by the 19th century missionaries as a way of raising the status of women who were, it was believed, trapped in the inferior status produced by polygamy. Now the church is attempting to use this liberating activity as a means of sidetracking pressures to extend women's rights to become priests and bishops. At the same time this proclamation offers a convenient way of not responding to the needs of the gay and lesbian Christians.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

While the church frequently claims sole custody of particular words and phrases framed in statements of so-called doctrine with all the accompanying quibbles, ambiguities and righteous claims, fortunately they are not the last word. There remains those moments when the void they seek to overcome is bridged by acts of reconciliation in which the word is made flesh. Richard Hollingsworth, Bishop of Ohio in his Christmas message records such an event:²

The principal speaker was Agnes, a genocide survivor. She, a Hutu, was married to a Tutsi, a member of the minority ruling tribe whose power was originally established by German colonists and sustained by the Belgians. In the genocidal revolution of 1994, Agnes's own aunt orchestrated the mutilation and murder of Agnes's husband, by Agnes' brother, in a manner too horrific to describe here. As well, they slaughtered four of Agnes' five children. Even though Agnes was Hutu, because her husband was Tutsi and she had born Tutsi offspring, she was beaten, passed around to be sexually abused by a series of men, infected with HIV, and left for dead. Taken to the hospital by a compassionate soul, she was nursed back to some semblance of physical health, only to be rejected by her Tutsi in-laws because it was not only her tribe but her family who had murdered their son. She has no home, no community, and understandably no ability to open her heart to anyone.

Some years later she was invited to participate in a group of genocide widows and the wives of imprisoned "genocidaires" (the perpetrators of these killings), convened by a Ruwandan priest with an irrational confidence that God's love can be born in even the most desolate of places. In the beginning, as Agnes tells it, she could not look at these other women, let alone speak to them. But over time, as they cautiously shared their stories with one another (and later with the murderers themselves as they completed their prison terms and were returned to the community), she began to experience the fidelity of God through a renewed sense of self-worth and hope that could only have come to life from somewhere deep and divine. She who was despised and abandoned by all, whose heart was rendered seemingly impenetrable by the unimaginable loses and abuses she had suffered, who had lost not only the lives of those she most loved, but really her own life as well, was not abandoned by the God who created her in love. In the fidelity of God's love, she was quite literally brought back to life...

...(We remember) Agnes and (her) companions who have become models of active waiting for Immanuel, God to be with us, born anew in the most desolate and desperate places of our lives, those places within our souls where goodness and peace may have become unimaginable.

So for us as well we seem to have also finally Slouched our way towards Bethlehem.

Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand
............
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

We find the end of our journey is really the beginning of another. This is the moment when we are there, all alone, wherein in the manger of our hearts we must fashion a quiet chamber kept for that Holy Child.³

¹. The theme of this sermon is taken from his poem "The Second Coming" and quotations from it are indicated in italics in this text.

². "A Christmas Message from the Bishop of Ohio". The complete text is available here.

³. This is my paraphrase of a verse from Martin Luther's hymn FROM HEAVEN HIGH from a translation by Roland Bainton.