Fr David's Christmas Message 2013

The Nativity, by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915)

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

My dear friends:

One of the great early Christian leaders, St Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389), teaches that Christmas is a “festival of re-creation”, that in the birth of this Child the world has been recreated. It is the beginning of the renewal, sanctification and re-creation of the entire universe.

The same understanding of Christmas is echoed in the Orthodox Liturgy:

"Your coming, O Christ, 

has shed upon us a great light. 

O Light of Light, Radiance of the Father, 

you have illumined the entire creation!"

The birth of Jesus, the Word made flesh who dwelt among us (John 1:14), abolishes the boundaries between man and God, matter and spirit, secular and sacred, seen and unseen. The very world through which we stumble on our pilgrimage into God is now tinged with sacredness and glory.

It’s just as well, because there are times when we experience this world as a place of exile, a vale of tears, an environment of undeserved suffering, pain and confusion. It is for many a source, not of joy, but of unrelenting depression and despair.  (Those who are blessed with a confident faith, or who have never faced such agonies, or who have grown through them, are called to be gentle and sensitive towards others whose pain and inner anguish causes them to doubt even the existence of a loving God.)

For me the real magic of Christmas is not the “feel-good” stuff so much as the transcendent Lord of glory and love entering into the fulness of all that it means to be human, so as to redeem, renew and transfigure everything about life in this world, including the miserable bits, from the inside. (St Paul talks about that in Romans 8).

But I’m no Scrooge! There is nothing I would do to diminish the exuberant joy of Christmas, provided we remember that those God chose to participate in the first Christmas had a hard time of it. Mary and Joseph shunted from pillar to post, desperately looking for somewhere to stay. Jesus born in a smelly cave where the animals were kept. All those little boys slaughtered by the power crazy Herod, their mothers wailing and their blood running in the streets. The Holy Family living as refugees in Egypt until it was safe to return to their own land.

The Lord of glory and love entered into the fulness of what it means to be human, in the kind of circumstances in which most people have lived and died . . . violence, killing, exploitation, anguish, poverty and the despair we see all too often on the television and in our own streets. It is REAL human life to which God is now joined, and which is being transfigured bit by bit in him.

Love Divine invades our world to effect a union of the divine and human that can never be dissolved; a union in which God so freely and at such great cost gives himself to us as the Babe of Bethlehem, the Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of Calvary whose sacrifice of love brings us back to the Father, the Risen, Ascended Lord, AND the Food of eternal life in the Blessed Sacrament of Holy Communion we receive at Mass, in our parish Church which is OUR “Bethlehem”, OUR “House of Bread” (which is what the word “Bethlehem” means).

So, if you feel as if you’re hanging on to Jesus this Christmas just with naked faith, that’s OK. You have a place in the prayers of many others. Trust in the goodness and love of our Incarnate God and in his purposes, knowing that he is the King of Kings, your Lord, your loving Saviour, your wonderful Redeemer, your firm Rock, your Hiding Place, the one who wipes your tears away and heals you deep within. Remember that he who began a good work in you WILL bring it to completion (see Philippians 1:6).

One more thing . . .

The love of God is greater far

Than tongue or pen can ever tell;

It goes beyond the highest star

And reaches to the lowest hell!

That little poem is actually the beginning of a hymn about God’s love, written in 1917. In a moment I’m going to read the last verse, which had been found penciled on the wall of a cell in an American mental asylum by a man who had died there, having lived in that cell for many, many years.

Who knows the cruel torment of mind he suffered, as much from the treatment as from his illness! What we can say, however, - and this is so wonderful - is that although locked up and written off as insane according to the wisdom of the age, this man at least some of the time anchored deeply into a reality, an experience of God, that broke through the darkness, that flooded his soul and his prison cell, and that was far more real to him than all the darkness, all his torments and all his anguish put together.

This is what he wrote on the wall of his cell. These are the words they discovered when he died:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade,

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry.

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Though stretched from sky to sky.

Dear people, I want to encourage you, whatever your circumstances, your happiness, your blessing, your joy, or your pain and sorrow, to open up your hearts to the Lord Jesus afresh this Christmas day. Allow him in his own way to touch your life with the wonder and sacredness of his love.

Some great quotes for Christmas Day

Let's go

". . . down to that littleness, down to all that

Crying and hunger, all that tiny flesh

And flickering spirit - down the great stars fall,

Here the huge kings bow.

Here the farmer sees his fragile lambs,

Here the wise man throws his books away.

"This manger is the universe's cradle,

This singing mother has the words of truth.

Here the ox and ass and sparrow stop,

Here the hopeless man breaks into trust.

God, you have made a victory for the lost.

Give us this daily Bread, this little Host."

- Elizabeth Jennings (1926 - 2001)

"The King of Angels

and Lord of heaven and earth

who in marvellous humility

and astounding poverty

lies in a manger."

- St Clare of Assisi (1194 – 1253)

"The Word in the bliss of the Godhead remains,

yet in flesh comes to suffer the keenest of pains;

he is that he was and for ever shall be,

but becomes that he was not, for you and for me."

- H. R. Bramley (1833-1917)

"The Word became Flesh and dwelt among us,

and we beheld his glory."

- St John the Apostle, in John 1:14

"Something that has existed from the beginning,

that we have heard,

and that we have seen with our own eyes;

that we have watched

and touched with our own hands:

the Word, who is life - this is our subject.

That life was made visible:

we saw it and we are giving our testimony,

telling you of the eternal life

which was with the Father

and has been made visible to us."

- St John the Apostle in 1 John 1:1-2

"He is little and weak,

that you may be great and strong;

He is bound in swaddling clothes,

that you may be unbound from the fetters of death;

He is on earth,

that you may be in heaven."

- St Ambrose of Milan (337? – 397)

"The Word was made man

in order that we might be made divine."

and

". . . he deified what he put on; and more than that,

he bestowed this gift on the race of men."

- St Athanasius of Alexandria (296? - 373)

"For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,

that though he was rich,

yet for our sakes he became poor,

so that by his poverty

you might become rich."

- St Paul, in 2 Corinthians 8:9

"'Tis mystery all: th'Immortal dies:

Who can explore His strange design?

In vain the firstborn seraph tries

To sound the depths of love divine.

'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore,

Let angel minds inquire no more.

"He left His Father's throne above

So free, so infinite His grace -

Emptied Himself of all but love,

And bled for Adam's helpless race:

'Tis mercy all, immense and free,

For O my God, it found out me!"

- Charles Wesley (1707 – 1788)

". . . the great mystery of the Incarnation

is that true man is in the God

whom no suffering can touch,

and true God in the human flesh

that is subject to pain and sorrow.

By this wonderful exchange

man gains glory through shame,

immortality through chastisement,

life through death.

For unless the Word of God were so firmly joined to our flesh

that the two natures could not be parted even in death,

we mortals would never be able to return to life.

But when the Lord became man and died for our sake,

death lost its everlasting hold over us;

through the nature that was undying in Jesus Christ,

the nature that was mortal was raised to life."

- Pope St Leo the Great (391? – 461)

"I have come that you might have life, life in all its fulness."

- Jesus, in John 10:10

Do you know Him?

Whatever our particular tradition as Christians, it is so easy to reduce the Faith to a philosophy, a theology, a morality or a vague "spirituality." That's why we need evangelists; thats why we need "renewal."

No one understood this better than Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997). During Holy Week 1993 (on Lady Day, 25th March) Mother Teresa wrote to all the family of the Missionaries of Charity from Varanasi “Such a personal letter,” she said at the beginning, “that I wished to write it by hand.” In it, she says:

“I worry some of you still have not really met Jesus - one to one - you and Jesus alone. We may spend time in chapel - but have you seen with the eyes of your soul how He looks at you with love? Do you really know the living Jesus - not from books but from being with Him in your heart? Have you heard the loving words He speaks to you? . . . Never give up this every day intimate contact with Jesus as a real living person - not just as an idea.” [Read the whole letter HERE]

Later on, Mother Teresa wrote:

“Who is Jesus for me?

Jesus is the word to be spoken,

the Life to be lived,

the Love to be loved,

the Joy to be shared,

the Sacrifice to be offered,

the Peace to be given,

the Bread of life to be eaten”

(quoted in Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Fruitful Branch on the Vine, Jesus.)

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St Paul said: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

Philippians 3:8

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In 2004, Cardinal Ratzinger made the same point:

“Many people perceive Christianity as something institutional rather than as an encounter with Christ, which explains why they don’t see it as a source of joy. If we stay with this impression, we do not live the essence of Christianity, which is an ever new encounter, an event thanks to which we can encounter the God who speaks to us, who approaches us, who befriends us. It is critical to come to this fundamental point of a personal encounter with God, who also today makes himself present, and who is contemporary. If one finds this essential centre, one also understands all the other things. But if this encounter is not realized, which touches the heart, all the rest remains like a weight, almost like something absurd. We need to understand Christianity in a personal way, from the point of view of an encounterwith Christ.”

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And this is the testimony of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (1914-2003):

I met Christ as a Person at a moment when I needed him in order to live, and at a moment when I was not in search of him. I was found; I did not find him. I was a teenager then. Life had been difficult in the early years and now it had of a sudden become easier. All the years when life had been hard I had found it natural, if not easy, to fight; but when life became easy and happy I was faced quite unexpectedly with a problem: I could not accept aimless happiness. Hardships and suffering had to be overcome, there was something beyond them. Happiness seemed to be stale if it had no further meaning. As it often happens when you are young and when you act with passion, bent to possess either everything or nothing, I decided that I would give myself a year to see whether life had a meaning, and if I discovered it had none I would not live beyond the year.

Months passed and no meaning appeared on the horizon. One day, it was during Lent, and I was then a member of one of the Russian youth organizations in Paris, one of our leaders came up to me and said, 'We have invited a priest to talk to you, come'. I answered with violent indignation that I would not. I had no use for Church. I did not believe in God. I did not want to waste any of my time. Then my leader explained to me that everyone who belonged to my group had reacted in exactly the same way, and if no one came we would all be put to shame because the priest had come and we would be disgraced if no one attended his talk. My leader was a wise man. He did not try to convince me that I should listen attentively to his words so that I might perhaps find truth in them: 'Don't listen,' he said. 'I don't care, but sit and be a physical presence'. That much loyalty I was prepared to give to my youth organization and that much indifference I was prepared to offer to God and to his minister. So I sat through the lecture, but it was with increasing indignation and distaste. The man who spoke to us, as I discovered later, was a great man, but I was then not capable of perceiving his greatness. I saw only a vision of Christ and of Christianity that was profoundly repulsive to me. When the lecture was over I hurried home in order to check the truth of what he had been saying. I asked my mother whether she had a book of the Gospel, because I wanted to know whether the Gospel would support the monstrous impression I had derived from this talk. I expected nothing good from my reading, so I counted the chapters of the four Gospels to be sure that I read the shortest, not to waste time unnecessarily. And thus it was the Gospel according to St Mark which I began to read.

I do not know how to tell you of what happened. I will put it quite simply and those of you who have gone through a similar experience will know what came to pass. While I was reading the beginning of St Mark's gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a presence. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was no hallucination. It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there and that I was in the presence of him whose life I had begun to read with such revulsion and such ill-will,

This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord. From then I knew that Christ did exist. I knew that he was thou, in other words that he was the Risen Christ. [Read MORE]

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Charles Wesley (1707-1788), in one of his best loved hymns puts it like this:

Jesus! the Name high over all,

In hell or earth or sky;

Angels and men before it fall,

And devils fear and fly.

Jesus! the Name to sinners dear,

The Name to sinners given;

It scatters all their guilty fear,

It turns their hell to heaven.

Jesus! the prisoner’s fetters breaks,

And bruises Satan’s head;

Power into strengthless souls it speaks,

And life into the dead.

O that the world might taste and see

The riches of his grace!

The arms of love that compass me

Would all the world embrace.

His only righteousness I show,

His saving grace proclaim;

’Tis all my business here below

To cry “Behold the Lamb!”

Happy, if with my latest breath

I may but gasp his Name,

Preach him to all and cry in death,

“Behold, behold the Lamb!”

If you are just starting out on your faith journey and don't have anyone you can speak to about it, send me an email, and I will make a few suggestions to help you along the way.