to thine own true self, be
to thine own true self, be
Can we trust this story??
Christmas Eve 2012
Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris, France
The Rt. Rev. Pierre Whalon
Those of us who grew up Roman Catholic before Vatican II’s sweeping liturgical changes may remember that this evening’s passage from John’s Gospel — “In principio erat Verbum” — “in the beginning was the Word” — was always read at the end of each Mass. At the words, “Et Verbum caro factum est” — “and the Word was made flesh” — we were supposed to genuflect along with the priest.
We altar boys were always happiest when we served with the priest who could read it the fastest…
This practice highlighted the importance of this particular text. Whereas Matthew and Luke spin out tales of Jesus’ birth, John isn’t interested. He wants to go back all the way to the beginning, like the first verse of the whole Bible — “in the beginning, God…” So while Matthew and Luke are locating the appearance of Jesus in the traditions of Israel, each in his own way, one writing for Jewish Christians, the other for the Gentile Christians that most of us here tonight are, John is addressing the whole of the human race.
Three very different takes. The basic outline agrees, of course; Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, and Jesus, of whom John says obliquely, “not born of the will of a human father.”
Can we trust these texts? Can we trust this story as our liturgy tells it? It’s not just that some of us trip over the virginal conception, it’s the whole shebang that’s in question these days. It can be no fun being a Christian these days. For me personally, I keep finding some new declaration by some “religious authority” that is deeply embarrassing. Here in France, it’s the reaction to the Socialist government’s clumsy attempts to keep election promises about “marriage for everyone” and “death with dignity.” In America it’s idiotic comments like “If only we hadn’t taken prayer out of school, God would not have allowed those children in Connecticut to die.” In our own church, we have the Church of England stopped from ordaining women bishops by six votes. Six lay delegates, I might add. And in the Episcopal Church, we have the Diocese of South Carolina going off by itself because it is “sovereign.” The last time South Carolinians used the word “sovereign” was when they started the Civil War…
If all this dismays me, a Christian Bishop, I can only imagine how others might feel. Polls in the United States are finding significant drops in the number of people identifying themselves with Christianity. To my mind, the Religious Right has made Christianity just plain silly. Not to say that the Left hadn’t already made Christianity innocuous…
The very idea of religion itself is also more problematic. Christians in the biblical lands are being driven out or killed. Elsewhere too. Not by atheists like in the 20th century, but by a new version of Islam. It isn’t the Islam that gave us glorious art and soaring architecture, that taught us our numbers, developed algebra, and rescued Aristotle from oblivion. This newfangled Islam purports to go back to the purity of the religion of the seventh century. It tells you what to do, and not to think. Don’t think at all.
No wonder so many people now say they are “spiritual but not religious…”
Now the reason I am rehearsing all these gloomy developments on Christmas Eve is to return to the question in all its urgency: Can we trust this story that we are telling tonight? Because it’s really not about cute angels and sweet babies, and men in vaguely Oriental costumes riding camels. It’s about life and death. Jesus was born into the real world, the world we live in. How many babies are coming into this world this night, poor, ill-nourished, to parents without hope, people like the hired shepherds in the fields? How many people will die this night, not of old age but by violence? Massacres of the innocent happen all the time, as we’ve been reminded again recently.
How many of us here tonight find Christmas reviving old grief? Are we worried about finances? Do we worry about what life our children will have, when we are no longer here?
Once you get past all the sugar coating, the Christmas story is about taking all that seriously, but also that we do not have to stay frozen in fear, weighed down by grief, tormented by doubt. We do not have to conclude that life is, on the whole, absurd. The story of Jesus’ birth is about God’s intention. He wasn’t just the product of random procreation. He was very ordinary, and yet utterly unique. He lived a lonely life, misunderstood, despised even in his town, and he died an even lonelier death.
But that’s not the end of his story, but the beginning. And what Christmas is saying to you and me is that this is not how your story goes, either. You did not start life as an accident in your parents’ bedroom (though they might have thought so at the time). You are unique, too, even if — especially if — you are poor. And if life is hard tonight, if you feel discouraged or sad or fearful, that was also how Jesus experienced life among us. And yes, we die too.
And yet… And yet, there is always more, much more. The promise of Christmas is Easter. Or in John’s words tonight, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The darkness of this world continues to try to snuff out the light, in your life and mine, and yet the light continues to shine.
The light that shines in this story is not a fantasy. There is far too much darkness in it for that. No, this story is part of a greater whole that concerns not only Jesus of Nazareth but you and me. Because Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and he will be with us not matter what the future holds, until we share what happened to him at Easter.
In the beginning, God created all that is. In the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became human — literally, the Word of God pitched a tent among us. And this Jesus, this God with us, is God for us, God for you.
The promise is that no matter what burdens you tonight, it shall not crush you. There is a future for you and those you love, a good future, an unimaginably good future. No matter whom you’ve lost, you will find them again. There is reason to hope, to dream, to live.
And if you haven’t guessed it yet, I am wildly optimistic about the future of Christianity. As for the Church, well, as my predecessor Bishop Jeffrey Rowthorn likes to say, we will always be running after the Holy Spirit.
In the beginning, was the Word. The beginning, for Jesus, was Christmas. The beginning for you and me is still just beginning. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis’ ending of his book The Last Battle, “all your life in this world and all your adventures have only been the cover and the title page: now at last you are beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
And so we can truly say —
“Merry Christmas.”
26 décembre 2012/ St. Stephen, Deacon and Protomartyr