An Epiphany Sermon - Souls & Bodies: Journey to Bethlehem

This sermon was prepared for the Parish Eucharist at Croydon Minster, Epiphany 2019  but in the end not preached, as more (?Better) inspiration moved me to speak without notes...

‘Arise, shine for your light has come… And you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice’ (Isaiah 60)

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The Magi - wise seekers after truth - have come to their journey’s destination. They have followed the star and arrived in Bethlehem.

As a token of this we have placed their figures in our crib, and next Sunday in the evening, through scripture, prayer and music, we will reflect more deeply on the gifts they bring and on the wider themes of Epiphany.

To get to Bethlehem the Magi set aside time, money and effort to make a potentially perilous journey.

Gold represents the majesty of Christ, and, you could say, the cost of their journey; frankincense represents Christ’s divinity, and the spiritual dimension of their quest; myrrh foreshadows Christ’s death, as it is used for anointing dead bodies, and it tells us of the dangers the Magi went through to get to Bethlehem.

Their arrival in Bethlehem was an ending: they had reached their destination. But it was a beginning too. Things had changed; they went home, but by a different way, breaking new ground; life could never be the same again.

The Magi reflect the deep human propensity to want to seek out new things, to discover to explore. This impulse starts early: over Christmas we had niece and nephew aged 4 and 6 staying with us; say no more!

It continues into adulthood. The news over the last few days has been filled with human pursuits and searching: NASA’s ‘New Horizons’ interplanetary space probe; the Chinese landing on the far side of the moon.

Little children, the Magi, NASA, the Chinese space programme and all of us share the same impulse to explore, to gaze up into the heavens and see possibilities beyond what is immediately obvious or just there. (Of course for NASA and the Chinese there are other motivations too about power and domination).

This is of feature of the journey of faith.

‘The heavens are telling the glory of God’ (Psalm 19.1) says the psalmist. In the heavens the Magi saw, a star that would lead them to God’s glory, but not where they expected it.

Many people today identify with journey, with quest, with seeking. The metaphor of life as a journey is a very powerful one: after all, Jesus described himself in journeying terms, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’; the Church is often described as ‘God’s Pilgrim People; and Christianity was first known simply as the ‘Way’.

Many people today, though, journey after an imperceptible something, not even as tangible as the star, no longer trusting that they can ever find a place to rest and be renewed.

This is encapsulated in the phrase often heard, ‘I am spiritual but not religious’.

That phrase – which needs addressing - captures the zeitgeist of our times. ‘I am spiritual but not religious’: it says, I want to have a sense of something wonderful, but I don’t want to be pinned down; I know there’s more to this, but I can’t trust the answers that others have found to be true; I seek after truth, but can’t trust that there is even such a thing as truth.

It begins to reduce being human solely to what is thought to be a spiritual quest and wrenches that experience away from our bodies. It means that there is a difference between how I feel and what I do. And the body is less and less valued.

To reduce being human solely to an unembodied spiritual quest means that I don’t need anyone else, it becomes essentially most lonely and introspective. As Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests, spiritual death is when life is shut in on itself. This is a huge burden to place on ourselves.

The most perilous, fearsome journey known to man is the journey into the human heart and to be at home in our mortal bodies.

There is a great divorce in Western culture, emanating from the thought of Plato, which seeks to separate out body and soul. This hasn’t always been helped by some strands of Christian thought over the centuries which has been suspicious of the body and implied that the ‘spiritual’ is more pure. This leads to us getting tied up in knots about purity, sexuality and physicality.

In society this body/soul split has accelerated such that the body is perceived to be an encumbrance on the true ‘me’ inside. It’s the disembodied spiritual quest and yearning. This can led to all sorts of pain and a sense of being ill at ease with one’s own body and, at its extremes, to the tragedy of bodily self-harm let alone the ways human bodies are also cheapened by others through violence, torture and pornography.

To be human is to be body, mind and spirit all together and to be called into relationship with other people and with God, the source of our life and hope.

Religious faith seeks to locate the spiritual life in the body with practices that shape and are shaped by faith, faith in the truth that finds us before we find it. This is about life turned out from itself towards God and towards others, whilst cherishing the God-given body that we have.

Christianity is nothing if not about our souls, our minds and our bodies. We draw this directly from the great Christmas gospel of the first chapter of St John’s gospel, ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’: God’s truth, Jesus Christ, finds us before we find him.

Jesus Christ inhabits a human body; is a human body. The Magi’s spiritual quest is met in the reality of a human body that can be seen, touched and held. And in this body dwells the full presence of God. The glory of the Creator and the wonder of creation are here, in Jesus Christ.

The star led the Magi to something, someone, very specific, tangible and embodied: God in Christ. This is what our faith leads us to this morning as we come on our spiritual and religious journey to meet him afresh in his Word and in his Body.

We come to worship and to adore and to offer not gold, frankincense and myrrh but ourselves in his service.

‘Arise, shine for your light has come… And you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice’ (Isaiah 60)

Let us go to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place' Midnight Mass 2018

First preached as a sermon at Midnight Mass at Croydon Minster, Christmas 2018. Luke 1.1-20.

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“The shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us!’”

So where is Bethlehem? And how do we get there?

As is pretty well known, Bethlehem is a town located in the central West Bank just over the border from Israel in the Palestinian Authority. You may need your Satnav to know that’s it’s just over 6 miles south of Jerusalem.

And how do we get there?

Mary and Joseph got to Bethlehem travelling from Nazareth, some 100 miles to the north. There because of the census being taken, with Mary about to go into labour, and finding no room or shelter, except a place for animals to feed in.

The shepherds got there from the fields somewhere in the region around Bethlehem, called by the angels.

Later on Magi from the East, probably some 700 miles away if they were coming from modern Iraq, as we might imagine; they were led by a star.

Well, unlike Mary and Joseph, unlike the shepherds, unlike the Magi, we’re not going to get to the real Bethlehem tonight. And even if we drove down the M23 to Gatwick, flew into Jerusalem and got a taxi to Bethlehem we would find it hard to get into the City of David because of the security wall that separates it from Israel: a sign that humanity has not yet accepted the angels’ proclamation of the birth of the Prince of Peace.

That’s not our journey tonight. Tonight we make a different sort of journey altogether, what might be better called a pilgrimage. It’s a journey you began as you left your house this evening.

Our journey, our pilgrimage tonight is, like all good pilgrimages, both physical and spiritual and its destination is to a place of encounter where we may meet the Living God.

The heart of the Christmas proclamation is that in Jesus Christ we meet both true God and true human being, the fullness of God the fullness of humanity: Son of God, son of Mary.

We will say in the creed shortly, ‘For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man’.

These are words so profound and at the heart of things that ancient practice is to bow or bend the knee when speaking them, such is their weight.

Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, is not simply a great teacher or a prophet from a distant era, but is God: yesterday, today and for ever.

So we make our pilgrimage to Bethlehem in the company Mary and Joseph, shepherds, Magi and countless pilgrims over the ages: but we’re not on the next El Al flight, rather, we are here in the ancient heart of Croydon.

Croydon? Bethlehem? Where would you rather be?

Before you answer, there is another thing worth knowing about Bethlehem. The name of the town literally means ‘House of Bread’. Bethlehem is the House of Bread.

Every church is a House of Bread, because its heart is the celebration of the Mass, in which bread is offered, broken and shared. Here in Croydon is the House of the Bread of Heaven, Jesus Christ.

“The shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us!’”

We might say to one another, ‘Let us go to the House of Bread to see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us’.

We’re here tonight, not summonsed by a census and quite possibly not even by a choir of angels, yet something has called you and me this House of Bread, this Bethlehem, as pilgrims to encounter the Living God.

This bread is for life, not just for Christmas!

May we always be eager like the shepherds, preserving like the Magi, devoted like Joseph and Mary in our pursuit of an encounter with Jesus Christ the Bread of Life, born in Bethlehem, the House of Bread.

Tonight, draw near, dear fellow pilgrims, in this House of Bread receive, in Holy Communion, the Bread of Heaven.

In that way we will all have travelled to Bethlehem, like shepherds and Magi who have gone before us, with countless faithful souls through the ages, let us fall down at the feet of Jesus Christ, the bread of Life the beginning and the end of our journey.

Amen.

© Andrew Bishop, 2018