Christmas Day 2010
I want to start this morning not with a quotation from the stories of the nativity but with a quotation from St Paul. It comes from the end of that beautiful passage in 1 Corinthians sometimes known as the great hymn about love. Towards the end of it St Paul says
Now we see through a glass darkly but then we will see face to face.
Paul is saying something very important here. He is saying all that we see, all that we believe and say is like viewing that truth through smoky glass or as a mirror image... our vision is not clear.
The whole concept of God is beyond our imagining...and certainly the language we use of him is deeply flawed...flawed not by intent but because we are limited by it, limited by our own evolutionary state. God is bigger than my mind can imagine and most certainly bigger than any language I have can express.
We cannot help this but it does mean that every generation has to explore its faith in new ways utilizing its new insights as well as retaining those it finds useful from the past..and for those things it believes has an eternal truth...finding new ways of expressing them.
Oddly I think three groups of people can best do this...first there are the scientists who are well used to pushing the bounds of their knowledge, well used to discovering that absolutes often turn out not to be so...they have a sense of awe and wonder through which they see the world.
The other group are those who are deeply creative, the artists and novelists, the sculptors and dramatists...for they are unafraid to use picture, images and symbols to express the truths they see.
The third group may be less familiar to you...they are those who know how to withdraw into themselves and find the God who is within...the God who is waiting for us in the silence, in the stillness rather than in the noise, the God with whom we can be in relationship... these people come from many traditions and cultures and many varieties of faith ...for the God within is the one God at the heart of all life...
all these three groups have an eye that can sometimes pierce the smoky glass and glimpse the truth ...
But even they are limited by the very fact of our human frailty and limitations.
The gospels writers have something of these qualities. They want us to see through the stories often called the birth narratives and see the truths which lie beyond.
These stories are not histories but rather myths (in the true meaning of the word...conveyors of truth). They beg us not to look at them for answers but to look through them and see the truths that lie beyond...rather as I look at you now through my specs...I look not at the glass but use it as a means to see more clearly what you are like.
You don't have to be a theological scholar to recognise the problems that the different nativity stories pose if you simply look at them rather than through them...rather than use them as a focus for your reflection and prayer.
Think about them...
Matthew has wise men, Luke has shepherds and Mark and John have neither.
Matthew seems to think Mary and Joseph came from Bethlehem and only ended up in Nazareth after they had returned from being refugees in Egypt and he knows nothing about any shepherds.
Luke thinks Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth and only went to Bethlehem because of a census. He knows nothing about Egypt, and nothing about wise men.
Mark and John don't have any nativity story. John has that wonderful bit of theological poetry about Jesus as the eternal Word...which we have just heard. Mark's story begins when Jesus is 30.
Let me try and explain what I think is happening here, and why it's important this Christmas Day 2010 → to put the narratives on as glasses.
For then we will see what the various authors want us to understand...
Without doing this we are making that glass through which we see darkly... obscure the truth.
The stories want to show something of how the life of Jesus or how the life of God in the man Jesus as they see it affects us in the everyday world which can only see God partially.
The writers want us to contemplate mystery.
You don't put a mystery under the microscope. You simply gaze in wonder. And in the wonder, you are enriched and nourished to live your life with greater dignity, power and strength.
That is why artists are so good at this
You could almost define an artist as someone who enables human beings to see the world differently.
Music, poetry, story-telling, photography, painting, theatre, film, sculpture - all of these things depict the reality of our existence in such a way as to stretch our understanding about why we are here and what it all means. We look through the lens of a work of art and see the world in a new way.
I wonder if you are familiar with icons...
Iconography is very 2-dimensional, to the modern eye... it is almost cartoon-like in its qualities, because the point of an icon is not that we are looking at it but it is looking at us. We are the ones being observed, and to meditate in front of an icon is to submit ourselves to divine observation, and to be changed as a result.
There is something of the icon about the nativity story, in this very fundamental respect - it is not so much that we are looking at it, but that it is looking at us.
The nativity story then is a work of art. And it's not so much the words of the nativity story that are important, not the detail, it's what it means - different authors reflecting in different ways on the mystery of God being born into our world. We call this the incarnation, the en-fleshing of God.
And quite simply, if we can bring ourselves to look through it rather than at it, it is a mystery that makes sense of so much that we experience in life. It is certainly at the very heart of the Christian experience
So what is it saying to us?
God is not distant but close,
not absent but wonderfully present,
not invisible but humanized before our eyes,
not immune from suffering but deeply etched with suffering himself,
not on the side of the rich and powerful but the poor and powerless,
Not outside my experience but deep within it.
Not separate from my relationship with you but there in your eyes as I meet them, there in your tears, in your smile, in your happiness and in all that gives you pain...
...And in all homes where there is tragedy...in the refugees...in the victims of cruelty and persecution...there he is found...
The name 'Jesus' is a work of art in itself, because it means 'saviour'. I recently heard salvation defined as 'releasing people from a trap' - I like that. The birth of Christ is all part of God's great plan to release us from the things that imprison us...to free us from all that inhibits.
To say God is incarnate in Jesus is to say God is in every part of your and my experience as human beings...it is so easy to sanitise it in language that sounds like cold doctrine when it is about that love within us which transforms us.
Some of you may have seen Anish Kapoor's extraordinary exhibition at the Royal Academy . One of his exhibits was 'Shooting into the Corner', It was an enormous cannon that fired 1 kg of blood-red wax through a doorway onto a gallery wall opposite...
Every 20 minutes.
Some condemned this as self-indulgence, an artist too full of his own self-importance. I don't know what I think about that but my art class which is keen on abstraction sees more.
They say that the contrast between the precision engineering of the cannon and the visceral, raw, elemental wax tells a story that resonates with so many of the contrasts familiar to us within our human existence:
The mechanical and the organic
Speed and slowness
Strength and weakness
Violence and passivity
Time and space
In telling this story every 20 minutes by way of an action we might call a birth (the firing of the wax against the wall), 'shooting into the corner' became a sort of nativity story.
Are we meant to look at the cannon and the wax? No. we are meant to see through them to things that are eternal and universal.
It is the same with Christmas. To know that God is close, that he has a human face, and experiences everything we do, from within our human skin, that he has come to rescue us, that he will not leave the world to its fate, however long it takes, that he constantly offers us a new beginning -
The knowledge of these things transforms life for each and every one of us.
Look through it, not at it. And see the difference it makes...
Then even our imperfect understanding will shed a light on the reality of the God I find deep inside myself.
That is the reality that we experience week by week through symbol and poetry, sacrament and praise. If we give ourselves to it... It will enable us to be drawn ever closer to that reality which is beyond our understanding and which we call God...that is the God I see when I look into my heart and the God I see when I look into your eyes...and yes the God I see shining through a manger at Bethlehem.
Rev Canon Ann Philp