A Christmas Letter
Merry Christmas! Christmas means many things in today’s world. For some it is a difficult time. “Bah Humbug, ” say the Scrooges. It is too commercial. Hypocritical. You have to be nice to people you would not normally be nice to. The Christian has another attitude. LOVE should unite the world and Christmas shows that it can happen (Louise Otto) The Gospels proclaim: I bring you tidings of great joy. which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2:11) The sacred enters the ordinary world today. And the ordinary world has the potential to be transformed. We can be nice to people we would not ordinarily be nice to. We can eat together, share our lives, rejoice in our common humanity. ‘It is a time of peace to all persons of goodwill, and surely at this time we all try to be persons of goodwill, and it is remarkable how many succeed. It is a wonderful thing, this Christmas spirit, this real feeling of a human bond that is spread abroad on this day,’ CW Leadbeater has written. The day has its own energy, its on power to soften the human heart. May it be so and not just for today but for every day. May the blessings of Christmas be ours today followed by a Happy New Year! Blessings upon you all +Harry (+Harry Aveling) A Sermon for Christmas Merry Christmas! And thank you for your sharing in the work of the Inclusive Sacramental Church of Christ throughout 2022. It has not been an easy year for many of us but ‘We have come through! We have survived! Thanks be to God!’ As a community we have grown. We have a new bishop – Bishop David, with a profound commitment to this vision. And two new priests – the Reverends Vicki and Marion, learning their trade day by day. And a new Deacon in Anthony … and we almost had two extra Deacons John and Raymee, until COVID intervened and the service could not go on. What does Christmas mean to us as a community in the Liberal Catholic tradition? Many things. As participants in the Liberal Catholic tradition, we are free to have our own opinions, our own interpretation of the words and actions which we share in our Holy Communion. We can see this day in a literal way: the day of the birth of a man called Jesus of Nazareth, who lived a humble life, preached love and compassion for three years, before finally being punished by the leaders of the state for his challenge to their commitment to power and greed. The angels proclaim, Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour who is Christ the Lord …’ (Lk 2: 11). Jesus may be a unique individual or he may be one in a series of teachers down through the ages, who have encouraged us to live more loving, more compassionate lives. The Liberal Catholic tradition calls them ‘the World Teacher” – singular, the one person born again and again: now as Jesus, elsewhere and at other times as Rama, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad. As C.W. Leadbeater writes: ‘In one of the Indian scriptures, the World-Teacher is represented as saying that whenever the world falls into great sorrow and misery, whenever it seems that unbelief and evil are triumphant, then He comes to present the eternal truth in some new way ’ (The Inner Side of Christian Festivals, p. 23). He comes again and again, and today marks the beginning of a new era in religious life. We can see the day in a metaphorical way. At some point, maybe not on this day but surely on one particular day, the sacred will be confirmed in our lives in a special way. As. C W Leadbeater writes: ‘there is another aspect to the birth of the Christ – the coming within the heart of each individual, the development of the Christ-principle within us’ (CWL, 27). It is representative of the growth of each one of us into a new stage of our humanity – an initiation, as our tradition calls it, on the path of human evolution towards perfection. Remember that hymn we sing … “go on unto perfection”. Each of these understandings suggests that the sacred enters this secular world from the outside in, at some particular time in history. There is a way of understanding this differently, which forms part of the Prayer of Consecration in the Longer Form of the Eucharist (which our Presiding Bishop suggests we ought to celebrate at least occasionally). One for next year. That understanding builds on the beginning of the biblical book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep. And God said: Let there be light and there was light …’. The Prayer of Consecration says in part: ‘… Thou didst send forth Thine own divine life into the universe, yet Thou art unchangeable and ever abiding within Thyself. Through Thine eternal Sacrifice, Thou dost continually uphold all creation, dying in very truth that we might live. Thou didst offer Thyself as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’ The sacred does not come into the world at some time long after creation. It is part of the act of creation itself, there from the beginning. You all can remember how the Gospel of John commences … In the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word … was God. Our duty is to recognize this, to honour the already existing sacredness of all that is. The prayer links this with the symbolism of death and resurrection that is part of the Christian story and again emphasises that this ‘sacrifice’, which we celebrate in the Mass, is eternal too. In the slightly convoluted words of that other scripture to which CWL refers (the Bhagavad Gita 2:16-17): ’the unreal never is, the Real never is not’. I’ll say that again … the unreal never is; the real … never was not. What the writer is saying is reflected in John’s words … the un-real, the un-truth … never had a place in the reality of that which is real. The Spirit is forever ‘interwoven throughout all creation’, in the past, now and in the future. Christmas therefore can also teach us that sacredness exists in the world, and within each one of us, from the beginning. It is part of the way that things are. We are enriched when we recognize this and take responsibility for honouring that sacredness, wherever and whenever we see it. In the gospel story, we see this sacredness in the most unlikely of places: in a baby, born in a cowshed, in an obscure corner of the Roman world. It exists in our own lives too. It is, in fact, not an occasional thing at all but a constant presence on everything we do and everything we are. May the blessings of Christmas be ours, now and always. Amen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Web MasterOfficial Announcements and Church News Archives
August 2023
Categories |