The Incarnation
1990 (Year B), 30 December /
Christmas 1
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
We’ve almost completed an amazingly momentous year. And, for one which promised so much freedom and hope, in southern Africa, in Eastern Europe. The release of hostages. It draws to close with foreboding and fear as men and women are called up to care for potential casualties in a Middle Eastern war. This time last year we were all on a high – bewildered at the fall of the Berlin Wall, today we are looking into the face of despair.
Our personal lives follow similar patterns, full of highs and lows – maybe you can recall some of them gently now. I guess if you do you’ll be surprised at the amount of things that have happened this year, not only in the world but to yourself and those you love. Only very occasionally does it seem that there has been any stability for us, and even there the bad threatens to swallow up the good. This Christmas has been decimated by the tragic death of one of the clergy in Hackney on Christmas Eve. I’ve felt very little joy this Christmas.
The good of course is supposed to overcome the evil – that’s the Good News – or at least not be overwhelmed by it – we are told that clearly in the Christmas gospel ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the darkness has not overcome it.’ That’s the theory at least – it’s just that it seldom feels like it. My feelings lead me in the opposite direction. They lead me to think that all will not be well, that no amount of tears shed for the priest who died last week will bring him back and the pain will just go on and on.
The Christmas story speaks of Glory and Light – these two are the precursors of the kingdom ushered quietly by the birth of the child at Bethlehem. Heaven and Earth are one. And we are made children, inheritors of this kingdom. Ours according to the story is a shared glory of the kingdom and tears are for the making of the citizens of that kingdom. For they melt the hardness of the human heart, and so change the lives of nations and the destinies of communities.
It is often takes the tragic spiral of outward political events lo bring us to our senses so that we see the way things are. It’s not until the tears come that we are able to realise that our lives are held together by an extremely fragile web. And it often takes an event totally beyond our control to bring this home. Think again of those things which have been so important to you this year.
Such an event was the incarnation. Totally outside our control, completely the gift of God, willed by him alone.
So why do we need the occasional thunderbolt? It seems that we are incurably forgetful and need a jolt from time to time to wake us up. Maybe even sin can turn to our good because it is the knowledge of the sin that releases the tears. Tears reveal vulnerability. They highlight the fragility of life and our relationships. They make us dependent on the care and support of others. Tears bring us close to God, for it is in the fragility of the family at the incarnation that God chose to reveal himself to us. It is in the dependence of a homeless child that God is present with us with us now.
The incarnation doesn’t make the death of my friend any easier to deal with and it certainly doesn’t take any of the pain away. It doesn’t bring him back. Nor does it doesn’t relieve any anxiety as we head towards war with Iraq. The birth of a saviour doesn’t do any of this, much as we would like it to.
And the birth of the saviour didn’t magically transform things two thousand years ago – turning bad into good. ‘He was in the world, and the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.’
What it does mean is that there is nowhere in this world we can go, no experience so desperate, no event so forlorn that it stands outside that birth at Bethlehem. It does mean that there is no event in the whole of creation which cannot be filled with the love and the grace of God. It is precisely at those points in our lives, when we are beyond any consolation, when we are vulnerable and dependent that the incarnation welcomes us and leads us home. AMEN