Sermon: Christmas Day 2010

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Saturday 25th December 2010
Service:: Eucharist

The Middle East is a blood-stained place and journeys there are hard. As Jonathan Frost discovered, just before his Consecration as a Bishop, when spending some time in the Holy Land, you queue to get through the Israeli wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and many are turned back. Hamas rules, and terrorism is on the Hamas agenda – that’s on the Bethlehem side. And on the other, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament rules – reactive, afraid, vindictive, still building illegally in the Occupied Territories, unwilling to listen to Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama. And encircling this blood-stained land, this Holy Land, are states committed to the annihilation of Israel, like Iran, with terrorism on its agenda and nuclear weapons in its arsenal.

The Middle East has always been a dangerous place and journeys are hard, and some, impossible, as in T S Eliot’s oft-quoted in Christmas sermons Journey of the Magi:

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'

But the world that gave us the Holy Scriptures and saw the birth in the world as it is, of the God who reveals Himself as He is, has always been a hard place. In 524 AD, in the turmoil and power struggle of the late Roman Empire, Boethius, the philosopher, was executed. Was his Consolation of Philosophy, the work we know best from his pen, a consolation then? He wrote this: ‘To see Thee is the end and the beginning. Thou carryest me and Thou goest before. Thou art the journey and the journey’s end’. Michael Mayne, former Dean of Westminster, had those words written around the Abbot’s pew, the Dean’s private chapel, high up in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Dean Mayne had those words of Boethius painted on the wall, and in retirement they came to his mind when he wrote his remarkable study of terminal cancer, The Enduring Melody. It’s a book that’s very difficult to read, so honest, courageous and disturbing it is. ‘Thou carryest me and Thou goest before’. Advent has brought this Dean that book, for some time on a shelf, but till now not properly read; a book Alan Bennett described as ‘heroic, humbling and inspiring’.

As well as The Enduring Melody, there was the funeral, also in Advent, of the Dean of Southwark, Colin Slee, a man of remarkable energy and courage. How humbling and inspiring it was to take part in that hero’s funeral, the coffin carried out bearing the laurel wreath of victory.

Not only is the Middle East a blood-stained and hard place, but the wall of division between Israeli and Palestinian symbolizes the deep division in the human heart, the difficulty of the journey for each of us from where we are to where God would have us be. Because this is so hard, God, we believe in our religion, initiates the movement. He undertakes the journey, He, in the poetry, ‘came down from heaven’. Why? To take us by the hand and lead us there. As on Holy Saturday, He harrows hell.

On Christmas morning the shadow of the Cross falls back upon the manger, for the New Testament is written backwards from the Resurrection and the horror of the Crucifixion that precedes it, dwelling then on the teachings of the Saviour, and wondering finally at the miracle of an unlikely and untimely birth. Right here, where Hamas and the Israeli government are locked in conflict, here, where Palestinian Christians are dispossessed of their ancestral land; land that’s been theirs long before Islam came, and long indeed before the present Israeli state claimed that land. ‘He came down from heaven’, not in some safe and secure Surrey village, but in the crucible of the power politics of the Roman Empire in an oppressed and marginalized colony, in a place where humankind has suffered and still suffers unimaginable agonies.

‘To see Thee is the end and the beginning’, thus Boethius, the philosopher, encapsulates the teaching of Scripture, from the garden of Eden to the City of God. ‘Thou carryest me and Thou goest before’. Boethius paraphrases the Gospel thus: ‘Trust in God always, trust also in me. There are many dwelling places in my Father’s house. If it were not so, I should have told you, for I am going there on purpose to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I shall come again and receive you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also’. … ‘Thou carryest me and Thou goest before’.

The Christian year moves between two great points of light. First, the light that John sees, streaming from the Cross, where Christ lifted up in agony is also lifted up in glory, drawing, if the world will make the journey, the whole world to himself. That glory streams back on the place of the first journey, the coming down from heaven, the starlight that illuminates Bethlehem. So, the Dean of Southwark’s death after four short weeks of cancer, and the more meditative, thought-out, observed journey of dying in Michael Maine’s Enduring Melody are both illuminated by the Christ who comes, where we, for our sinfulness and fear, stand rooted to the spot, unable of our own volition to help ourselves.

So much glory on Christmas morning, so much encouragement for the journey, so much inspiration for the new Bishop, Jonathan, who stood each morning in Bethlehem, our own Jonathan, joining the workers from Bethlehem, waiting to pass through the wall of separation. So much in Michael Maine’s Enduring Melody that is heroic, humbling and inspiring. So much glory as Colin Slee’s coffin was carried out of Southwark Cathedral, crowned with those laurels of victory. So much to be thankful for, as we open ourselves once again to the story of the God who comes to save us.

So, Boethius: ‘To see Thee is the end and the beginning. Thou carryest me and Thou goest before. Thou art the journey and the journey’s end’. Or, as the Christ of St John’s Gospel puts it on the end and purpose of Christmas: ‘Courage, the Victory is mind; I have conquered the world’.