Christmas Morning - Getting Our Priorities Right

Preached on Christmas Day at Croydon Minster.  Readings, Isaiah 52.7-10; Psalm 98; Hebrews 1.1-4; John 1.1-14

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I wonder what your greatest priority is today? The turkey, the presents, the Queen’s speech, seeing family?

 

A few days ago the message from the Chief Medical Office was clear: this Christmas decide on your priorities. What a good question at Christmas!

 

So what’s your priority then?

 

Priorities are about what we put first. By being here today what we have put first is to come to worship God in Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh.

 

For Christians the number one priority at Christmas is Christ. We come to worship him now, as many did during the middle of the night too.

 

All other priorities flow from that. For it is God who created the world ‘in the beginning’, who gives us breath and life through his Holy Spirit, and who shows us the way to be the people he made us to be, sons and daughters of the Most High.

 

Our faith tells us that when all is stripped away we discover something deeply precious; this is what we call hope, the bedrock, the priority of our lives.

 

God’s priority at Christmas, is God’s priority every day: his priority is that we, his creatures, make him [God] our priority. The Church Fathers speak of this ‘Royal Exchange’: Christ humbled himself to share in our humanity, that we might share in his divinity.

 

The grandeur and majesty of God is revealed in a totally new way. God is made known in the child of Bethlehem.

 

Mary’s child, God’s child, is born like you and me, born naked into the world, vulnerable and entirely dependent on others; first of all his mother, Mary, and also his guardian, Joseph.

 

For now the naked child is wrapped in swaddling bands, and he starts calling, drawing and wrapping people around himself to become a community of willing response, obedience, love and adoration: his Church.

 

We gather today in the footsteps of shepherds and Magi, of countless men, women and children who have heard the call of the Child of Bethlehem, and made their response to that call their priority in life.

 

What Mary and Joseph gazed on was the fullness of God; the normal, expected trappings of divinity stripped away. They beheld the Word Made Flesh, and saw his glory. His glory would be seen again on the cross when all his garments are stripped away and we see his saving love.

 

Light shines out of darkness, hope and blessing abounds and, however gloomy things get, the darkness will not overcome it. As St Paul reminds again:

 

‘It is the God who said let light shine out of darkness”, who has shone in our hearts to give the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ (2 Corinthians 4.6)

 

As our top priority every day, let us direct our gaze back to the Christchild, the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ, for he is known as Emmanuel, meaning ‘God is with us’.

 

'A posture of expectation' an Advent Sunday sermon

A sermon preached at Croydon Minster at the Eucharist on Advent Sunday, 2nd December.The readings were Jeremiah 33.14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3.9-13 and Luke 21.25-36.

‘Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near’ (Luke 21.28)

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Most families have their own quirky phrases. One of the phrases in my family is addressed to someone who is slumping in their chair or not standing up straight: ‘posture police’.

In other words stand up straight, get your posture right!

The season of Advent is a season of watching and expectant waiting. If you are watching and waiting expectantly, you are on the lookout, so your posture has to be alert and upright.  

Advent is a season when we are called to adopt a posture of expectation. We need this posture throughout the year, of course, so that we are alert to Christ’s presence in the world, in word and sacrament day by day: watching and expectant waiting is for life; not just for Advent!

Our patron saint, John the Baptist, didn’t use the phrase ‘posture police’, but figuratively speaking, that’s what he was saying: ‘gird up your loins’; ‘be watchful’; ‘posture police’.

John the Baptist adopted the posture of expectation because he was watching and waiting expectantly for the coming of Christ day by day. That’s why he was ready to see, recognise and point out Jesus Christ in his midst.

There was John, out in the wilderness, baptising countless people yet he sees Jesus. John the Evangelist records it in a quite prosaic way, ‘the next day John saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Behold! Look! Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’ (John 1.29)

That is the posture of expectation. A life attuned to seeing Christ in our midst and proclaiming him to all.

That is why John has such a high profile in Advent.

Another aspect of our tradition that raises its profile in Advent, and actually should throughout the year, is the reading of the Old Testament. Most obviously at this time of year we can draw on the promise given to our ancestors in faith, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Deborah and Sarah - and the prophets – most notably Isaiah, Micah, Zephaniah.

But the Old Testament is not there simply to be appropriated when it suits us. Reading the Old Testament throughout the year is to read a collection of books that witness to the posture of expectation and God’s faithfulness, because read through Easter eyes they point us to Christ: incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended: Adam’s ‘no’ to God in the garden of Eden points to Christ’s ‘yes’ to God in Gethsemane; Noah’s deliverance from the flood prefigures baptism; Abraham’s abortive sacrifice of Isaac points us to the Lamb of God, the sacrifice God provides for his people; Hannah’s yearning and rejoicing in her child inspires Mary’s Magnificat, her song of praise to God; Jacob’s twelve sons become God’s people, Israel, the forerunners of the twelve apostles and God’s people the Church: the people yearn, expectantly for the coming Messiah of God.

Expectation and yearning, ‘O Come, O come Emmanuel’: come ‘God with us’.

Posture is important. It is said that over half of human communication is non-verbal, in other words, body language. A key component of body language is posture, and you can read it all too well.

Try these. [Arms folded] this posture is defensive; [clenched fist] this one aggressive; [yawning, looking around] this one switched off, [eyes open hands outstretched] this one engaged.

Posture tells us what’s going on inside and helps us become something we are not yet.

I am not asleep! And I can’t go to sleep standing where I am. Bring me a duvet and pillows, let me lie down and I have adopted a posture for sleep, I will become a sleeper. Likewise prayer is more likely to bubble up in me if I adopt a prayerful posture, attending to my hands, considering whether I kneel or stand, breathing deeply and meditatively.

So the Advent posture is one of watching and expectant waiting: a posture of expectation.

When a church adopts a posture of expectation things happen. We don’t make them happen, God does, but our posture is ready for God to act, and, like John the Baptist, we see Christ, we proclaim Christ and others are attracted to Christ.

This Advent let’s shape our habits around expectation.

In Christian liturgy body language and posture are used and matter – over half our way of communication, remember. We stand, kneel and sit; we stretch out our hands to receive.

In many ways it is sad that the most expansive gestures and posture seen in churches are those of the priest: [open arms] ‘the Lord be with you’ [orans] ‘let us pray’[extended hands] ‘send your Holy Spirit’.

So this Advent in our worship let us be alert, upright, ready to see the Christ who comes to us as his word is opened up, as bread is broken, as he promises. In our prayer let us adopt a posture of expectation: not praying by clasping our sinuses, but by kneeling in our adoration; not by praying as if we are blinding ourselves, but joining our hands in supplication or stretching them out to receive; not by slumping into our pew but setting ourselves expectantly; not by sitting back for a performance of words and music, but expectantly engaging with the Lord who comes to us.

This is what the scriptures call us to: in Jeremiah’s words, ‘the days are surely coming says the LORD, when I fulfil the promise I made to Israel and the house of Judah’. This shapes us, as St Paul in the first letter to the Thessalonians says, that we may ‘abound more and more in love’.

The Lord is near. Now is the time to restore what is lacking in our faith. Now it is time to wake up, sit up and take notice. As Jesus says in the gospel: ‘Be alert at all times…’ (Luke 21.36)

The days are surely coming, so let us be watchful, expectantly waiting for the Lord who comes: ‘Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near’.

© Andrew Bishop, 2018

Searching for Wonderful Things: A University Carol Service

Address at the University of Surrey Carol Service, 2016.

Guildford Cathedral during the current works, December 2016 Photo Trish Lambert

Look around you: what do you see? At first glance this cathedral is full of disappointing, grey, dirty scaffolding, ugly red plastic barriers and warning tape. Not terribly Christmassy.

But if you try and look behind it you might start to see it a bit differently. Perhaps then you can see that the scaffolding represents work in progress, of restoration, renovation and transformation.

Of course if you’re a University of Surrey civil engineering student you’ll be fascinated by it. As I speak, you’re probably calculating the weight bearing capacity of the beams supporting the scaffolding way up in the heights.

As you gaze up what do you see? Being poetic for a moment you might look up into the dark voids and spaces and ponder the mystery of universe and world and your own place in it. You might engage with the final reading tonight which speaks of ‘The light [which] shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’ and proclaims, ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.*’

This enlightenment changes how we understand the world and being human. Universities rightly pride themselves on generating learning through accumulating information and building knowledge. Universities search out and re-search knowledge.

The great challenge in a rapidly changing world is to ask an ancient question, ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ The habits of thinking that we have from our own disciplines will give us different insights and prompt us to wonder.

At the heart of this is the question of why sound waves oscillating at different speeds become music; why the tiniest micrometres of silicon are images of captivating beauty; why the stars, that have always prompted humanity to wonder, poetry and art, also contain clues and codes to understanding the depths of the story of the universe in which we exist. Wonderful things.

Where’s this all going? Where’s Christmas gone? Well, it’s right here. I just wonder if you had been a shepherd, called by angels, or one of the Magi, guided by a star, and you arrived at the manger in Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth what you would have made of it.

The scene was most unlikely as a holy place, a bit like this cathedral at the moment. A stable or cave, where animals live, an exhausted woman who has just given birth, and scared man, anxious about the mother of the child lying in the feeding trough.

Into that unpromising scene is born a child who is declared to be ‘Emmanuel, God with us’. It is a most extraordinary claim.

This claim is encapsulated by St John, who we will hear in our final reading. God, all that has been, is and will be, is now to be found in one particular place at one particular time with global, cosmic impact. John connects the very beginning of all things with the lives we live now, because in Jesus Christ is life, transformation and hope. John connects human knowledge and learning with God’s deep wisdom of the art of being human in faith, hope and love.

Mary famously declared, ‘my soul magnifies the Lord’. To magnify is, at the same time, to enlarge and make more intense. A magnifying glass can expand our vision, and can intensify the sun’s rays to burn. This Christmas look beyond: look beyond the obvious, the tinsel, mince pies and glitter, search and re-search what magnifying the Lord means for you.

Over that unpromising scene in Bethlehem, a messy stable, a man and woman and baby, sang choirs of angels because in Him the fullness of God is pleased to dwell: and you know, looking at that, I’m sure they sang, ‘wonderful things happen here’.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016