Has Christmas been hijacked?
Whilst we are in the Christmas season liturgically, the main busyness of Christmas is over. Presents accept been bought and given; Christmas cards and messages take been written and read; and services have been planned and executed.
But in terms of Christian ministry building, I have been struck this twelvemonth one time over again by the oddness of the flavor. As about of us accept been aware, equally either congregation members or leaders, this has been the fourth dimension of greatest omnipresence at public services of worship. But, equally the statistics for mission keep reminding the states, even when attendances at Christmas are up, overall attendance is downwardly, and there does not appear to be much of a connection betwixt the 2. And the net result (as my clergy friends remind me) is that we are all exhausted!
So why do we put so much energy into something that doesn't appear to bear that much fruit? And what is the reason for the disconnect betwixt Christmas and discipleship? (It is nifty to hear stories of people coming to Christmas services, and then finding religion—but overall this is non the about common story.)
This year more any other, I have been struck past the dominant narrative of Christmas, at to the lowest degree as it has been portrayed in the media and public discourse, in comments from national church leaders, and in broadcast services. Christmas is about the dignity of humanity, about God coming to be with united states of america, and in particular coming to the poor and the marginalised. Information technology offers a vision for the promise of social transformation. Justin Welby was interviewed by Gareth Malone in a BBC programmeBritain's Christmas Story, and he offers a powerful testimony of the meaning of Christmas, connected with his ain experience of Christmas in the past and present.
In that location is such a sense of excitement that God came to live amongst us—not in triumph and glory, but as a baby in a manger, totally vulnerable, totally unknown to most people…Something ultimately miraculous happens with Christmas. The first people involved with it are the shepherds, the outcasts, the 'bad guys', and they're the people to whom the angels come. Information technology'southward a story of miracle and maxim 'God reaches out to everyone'…
Jesus does not come to the glory and the pomp and the comfort. He comes to the excluded and the lost and the forgotten and brings peace and promise and light.
Ane of the fascinating things is Gareth Malone's reaction.
It's a story that people tin can relate to. I had baby earlier…well my wife had a baby earlier this twelvemonth, and it'southward such a powerful feel. You feel as though something miraculous has happened.
It is really worth pausing to reverberate on what is going on here. The birth narratives in Luke and Matthew include a mighty angel actualization to Mary, telling her that she will have a kid even though she is a virgin. A priest in the temple also encounters an affections and is struck dumb. Joseph has a serial of angelic visions in dreams, and every bit a result makes drastic decisions most what to do and where to go. Strangers come to the house where Jesus was born to be amazed, and some time later exotic philosophers bring and expensive gifts. In the concurrently, in the temple, aged prophets pronounce exciting merely threatening prophecies nigh what this child will be. If this is a story that people find it like shooting fish in a barrel to relate to, then they are either living a rather exceptional life—or this is not the story of Christmas that they are being told.
The idea that God is, in Jesus' birth, coming to those on the marginsis present in the nativity stories; in final Sunday's Radio 4 Morning Service, Malcolm Guite of Girton College, Cambridge, makes the point well, that Bethlehem is on the margins of the Empire, and Luke's location of the nativity in the fourth dimension of particular Roman rulers reveals sharply where real power lies, and true significance. In the Magnificat, Mary has already sung almost God coming to the lowly, and the mighty being 'scattered in the imagination of their hearts'. But information technology is not very prominent, and it is not actually present in the places that most people read information technology.
In his all-encompassing nativity narrative, Luke makes clear what he tells us elsewhere in his gospel, that God comesboth to the poorand to the rich, both to those on the margins and to those at the heart. Far from proverb that the gospel is for those who are not respectable and religious, he begins the story with those who are indeed pious, even involved at the centre of temple worship. The Magnificat itself is profoundly theological, and steeped in biblical allusions. That suggests either that Luke composed it and put it on the lips of the 'simple peasant daughter' Mary—or that Mary was in fact pious and devoted, and knowledgeable of the OT and expectant to come across its promises fulfilled.
Every bit I proceed pointing out, Jesus was not 'built-in in a stable', and the significance of existence laid in a feeding trough is that he was at the middle of the life of the domicile,not out somewhere on the margins. (Some have argued that the swaddling and the feeding trough would have signified to the shepherds that this was an unblemished lamb ready for Passover sacrifice, and others that the wrapping and laying of Jesus at his birth paralleled and foreshadowed his wrapping and laying in a tomb at his death. I am not nevertheless fully persuaded of either, but they are both worth considering.)
And information technology is pretty clear that shepherds were non the despised outcasts we take them to be. The evidence for this is either Greek or Roman, or subsequently Jewish texts which might have been written every bit a criticism of the importance of shepherds in the early Jesus sect. In the Old Attestation, shepherds announced to exist respected; in a social context where sheep were an important measure of wealth, you would not trust your wealth to the untrustworthy; and in the Bethlehem area, the shepherds had a vital function in serving the temple system by providing animals for sacrifice.
It seems that the popular narrative of the nascence is functioning like a bizarre fairground mirror, where things that are nowadays simply not prominent, or not even present at all, have been magnified and now take eye stage, and the large and important things take been minimised and marginalised (ironically!) so that they are hardly heard.
So what is at the middle of the nativity story? The proclamation of the angels to the shepherds in the field is not a bad place to look:
Do not be afraid. I bring y'all skillful news of keen joy that will be for all the people.Today in the town of David a Saviour has been built-in to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. (Luke 2.10–11)
There are a number of key things to note hither, which are axiomatic all through the narratives in both Luke and Matthew, and this argument offers a helpful summary of the stories.
Commencement, this is the fulfilment of God's promises to Israel. Read in context, the joy is 'for all the people' of Israel; just later does this extend to other peoples. In Luke, the Benedictus is repeatedly focussed on the coming of Jesus equally a fulfilment of God'southward promise to 'Abraham and his descendants'; it is he that will allow his people again to worship God without fear. Luke emphasises that this happens 'in the town of David', whilst Matthew goes to great lengths to demonstrate that Jesus is from the line of the Davidic king through his complex genealogy. The fact that he is the 'Messiah', theChristos, tin can (once more, read in narrative context) only mean one affair: the i to be born is the All-powerful leader, long awaited, who will bring in the merely dominion and reign of God over his aboriginal people.
Secondly, he is to exist a saviour of his people. But relieve them from what? Although ane of the keen gimmicky questions (hinted at throughout the narratives) is the need for political liberation, in fact the primary focus here is saving people from their sins. Zechariah anticipates that his son, John the Baptist, will 'requite [God's] people the knowledge of conservancy through the forgiveness of their sins' (Luke i.77), and Matthew'south explanation of Jesus' name is exactly 'because he will salve his people from their sins' (Matt 1.21). The prologue to the Fourth Gospel as well adds in the themes of light coming into darkness, and life overcoming death, then we might include these themes within our understanding of what Jesus the saviour does for the states.
Thirdly, all the narratives have a strong Christological accent: this is no ordinary human birth, but is the means by which the very presence of God comes amid his people, expressed here in the language of 'Christthe Lord'. All the style through the exchanges and chat, particularly with the angels, the people of God become the people of Jesus, and Jesus will enact the salvation that comes from God alone.
Fourthly, it is not surprising, in the low-cal of all this, that the message demands a response. The stories in both gospels are total of startling news nigh something that God has done, and in response people get up and do things. The stories are full of activity, whether that involves Mary and Joseph getting up and moving, or Herod inflicting violence, or the magi setting out on their journey, or the shepherds going and sharing the news—the one affair that you cannot do in the narrative is stay as y'all are!
All these cardinal things appear to have been either downplayed, displaced or entirely absent-minded in the Christmas preaching I take heard this year. I Christmas talk centred around the thought that 'Immanuel' meant 'God is with you wherever yous are'. Well, if that is the case, why do I need bother to come to church once more, if God is with me in my daily life just as I am? Why not continue to be a member of the 'C and Eastward', attending but at Christmas and Easter. The bully irony of this is that the term Immanuel in Isaiah seven, from which Matthew borrows it, is related to God's dramatic intervention to rescue the people from an impending threat, the very reverse of 'life conveying on every bit usual'!
Then what is going on here, and why the disconnect? I take decided that the key result is the way the nativity stories are being read. All too often, we are focussing on the man characters, and what they feel, how they reply, and what they practise, rather than focussing on the grapheme who is actually the primary actor in the drama, God himself. We are reading anthropocentrically, with people at the centre, rather than theocentrically. This is a problem in all preaching, merely it particularly problematic here. We want to make human connections between the stories we read and the people we are speaking to, but we end up pushing God'southward activeness to the margins.
A good example of this anthropocentric reading of the narrative was offered in the Radio 4 Sunday service this week. Malcolm Guite, who offered the connecting talks between different elements, included some important themes of what Jesus came for, and what his death achieved. But overall the focus was very much on connecting our feel with the generalised experience of those in the Christmas narratives, and downplaying both the item context, and the salvific action of God—and this was extended to the reading from Paul'south letter to the Ephesians. Thus the 'dividing wall of hostility' between Jew and Gentile in Ephesians 2 becomes a symbol for all division between people; in the prayers the language of 'yous who were far off', specifically referring to the Gentiles without the law, becomes language for any kind of distance between unlike groups of people; and the plush peace between God and humanity that has been won by the atoning expiry of Jesus, turning us from God'due south enemies in our deathly life of sin, at present becomes a desire that we should all become along better. I think this is a highly problematic reading of Paul, eliminating particular divine action in favour of a generalised social plan. Paul'south clarification of the apocalyptic irruption of God into human life has become a humanistic agenda for social change in which noesis of God (the whole purpose of Paul'southward writing) has been erased from the agenda.
The section I found most problematic was the turning point of Malcolm's talk:
When that baby in the manger grew upwards, he carried a bulletin with the word Inclusion watermarked into every page. From the story of the Skillful Samaritan, to the unexpected welcome given to the thief on the cross, Jesus embodied God's welcome even to the people who most rejected him. And when he died for the world he loved, and rose again to bring humanity through the grave and gate of death and to make a identify for us in sky, he unleashed on the world a motion that carried the skillful news of this inclusion to the furthest corners of the earth.
The gospel appears now to have been subsumed into the politically loaded linguistic communication of 'inclusion', which has multiple problems. As Edward Dowler has pointed out virtually eloquently, the term itself is breathless, since it actually excludes those who do not accept its programme. The current narrative of inclusion only includes certain groups, as yesterday's row about public school funding highlighted: working class white boys, left backside past the pedagogy system, don't quite merit inclusion. And the style the narrative of 'including the marginalised' is communicated lacks coherence and credibility. I confess I found it hard to listen to a Baroness speaking about a Cambridge college equally an example of beingness 'marginalised'. It would be hard to recall of a context which was less marginalised in our culture! And I wonder what a strange dynamic is at work when an Eton and Cambridge educated church leader talks about the marginalised in a magnificent cathedral, rather than hearing the message from someone working in the bodily marginal places that the C of Eastward finds it virtually impossible to reach? I wonder how that message is received in those places? And what volition the response of the bulk of the population be? I need to assist the poor—but I am non the poor, and then this message is non really for me.
What might we do to accost this disconnect? We demand to read the stories more carefully, attending to what they are really saying, and in item noting the consistent theme of the divine initiative expressed in the action of God as the key character in the drama. I had an interesting correspondence with Malcolm Guite, following a slightly frustrated and interpret mail of mine on Facebook. Malcolm comments that his aim in working with university students is to make the gospel relevant and credible, trying to 'remove the many scandals and stumbling blocks that lie in their style when they perceive Christianity to be narrow, judgemental, sectarian and intellectually shallow, an impression some public christians unfortunately give.' I think this is thoroughly commendable, simply I don't think that this is undermined by the approach I am offering.
In a day when the Jewish community feels less secure than ever, highlighting the Jewish context of the story, and especially its theme of fulfilment of God'southward promise to the Jews in sending a Jewish messiah, is no bad thing. The linguistic communication of 'saviour' might be thought of as religious and implausible—yet we use this linguistic communication all the time, whether it is in relation to a new manager of a football game club, or a new Prime Minister who will 'get Brexit washed'. The linguistic communication of 'sin' might lack credibility—just Francis Spufford has done a superb job (from a liberal perspective) of expressing this in the persuasive linguistic communication of the universal human tendency to mess things upward (or 'HPtFtU' as he calls information technology). Jesus didn't come to helop united states realise something that we knew deep down all along; he came to relieve united states, to practice for us something that we could non do for ourselves.
Next Christmas, I really expect forrard to Christian leaders in the public square telling united states virtually the good news of a Jewish saviour, in a story that is surprisinglyunlike our everyday experience—merely one that might merely change and transform information technology.
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