Homily for Christmas 2009

Merry Christmas.

When I was a small child my mother used to bribe us to go to Midnight Mass saying that if we were lucky we would see Santa and the reindeer gliding across the sky! I never did see him. But we gather at Christmas with just that kind of hope: A hope that something wonderful can and will happen to us, our families and our world with all the difficulties we face.

Do you remember the door to door Encyclopaedia salesmen? My parents were seduced into buying one of those very heavy 24 volume sets as an educational aid for us children. They paid it off over some years. The encyclopaedia was the definitive word on everything. I myself bought an encyclopaedia about ten years ago. The very same year it was announced to my horror that the encyclopaedia was dead! The Internet had overtaken it as a source of knowledge. Information on the Internet is far more flexible and more easily updated.

The written word was, and for a lot of things still is, the thing that guarantees the authenticity of something. We have given a reverence for the written word and books in our culture for over two millennia. We Christians hold our Bibles and Lectionaries with honour because they contain for us saving truths. But in our world today that attitude to the written word is fading. The fixed nature of the book is replaced by the fluidity, the evanescence, of SMS texts, emails, blogs and so on. The word now exists in hyperspace not so much on paper.

This phenomenon mirrors the very way many of us think these days. There is no fixed truth to seek. There is only the search for what satisfies me. Now to a Christian this may sound like really bad news. But it is, nevertheless, one of the signs of the times to which we who hold the word in such high esteem must respond. It is no use responding simply with a mindless condemnation of our age. Things ain't what they used to be! Rather, we have received a gift we can offer to the world. Because the Word that we reverence is not black symbols on a page but a person, Jesus Christ. Our relationship with Jesus as our Word of life has some of those very changing characteristics of our age. This Word of God cannot be contained on a page. No person can.

The key subject matter of most of the untold millions of SMS messages and emails, we are told, is precisely about relationships. Relationships grow and develop, diminish and fail, and sometimes end. They can be very fluid and hard to pin down. Our own relationship with Jesus can be the same. There are times when we feel very far in our faith from God and the Church. And there are also times when we do feel the need to pray seriously.

Christmas is one of those times when the question of our faith comes home to us keenly. The media is asking us everyday to give reasons for our hope in God. We have a choice between letting the season wash over us as we celebrate with family and friends or we can let the mystery of the Incarnation challenge us and our approach to life. The mystery is of God loving all creation so much that God would enter into, and be part of, our lives, to love and laugh, weep and die, like us. It sounds too good to be true. It may be safe to think that way because then I can treat people and all creation as simply a means to fulfil my own needs and wants. It does not make any demands of us then. Christmas, if we believe it, suggests that all of creation is to be reverenced. Every human being, particularly those who are powerless, are close to God's heart.

The birth at Bethlehem was not the triumphant entry of a conquering king into the world. But God's power revealed in loving compassion as Jesus emptied himself taking on our powerlessness as a child. If that is God's approach to life then it changes the way we look at our own lives and our world. We could just react to efforts to find justice and peace in the world with cynicism. We could take on a fatalism that sees life as a spark in the darkness that is very soon extinguished. Instead at Christmas we celebrate the beauty and goodness of all that is. The Christmas story is a story that offers a future. That story is told by the child in the manger in Bethlehem and indeed by every new born child.

So after Mass tonight I will go and send a Christmas message to all my "Facebook" friends! And I will still send some Christmas cards next year.

Fr Graham