A Christmas Sermon

Several people asked me for the text of my sermon at Midnight Mass last night. I had not recorded it, so here is the written text. What I actually said may have been a little different. . .

Twenty years ago tonight I was doing much the same thing as I am doing here. But it was in a church in Jordan, and among the congregation were twenty deaf children from the finest deaf school in the Middle East. Most were Palestinian, several from Gaza. At the end of the service they sang in sign language ‘Away in a manger.’ It moved people that these little Muslim kids, cared for in a Christian school, should so joyfully sing our carol. No one mentioned my sermon that Christmas; they remembered the words becoming flesh.

The following morning I set off for Damascus to take the Christmas service there, and then on to Aleppo. Today those cities are racked by civil war. Churches, mosques, hospitals have been destroyed, and evil men are trying to divide Arab against Kurd, Muslim against Christian or Druze, Shia against Sunni. For those of us who have lived in Syria this is almost inexpressibly horrendous.

And it is because of this that we must celebrate this Christmas with a special joy. For God comes among us not as a male, not as a Judean, not as a speaker of Aramaic: St John insists that the Word was made flesh. This common substance which unites us all, deaf and hearing, black and white, men and women, gay and straight and even, it must be said, Welsh and English.

While the Church has got itself excited about women bishops I have thought about the people I loved in Syria when I spent 5 years among them, Christian, Muslim, Druze, men and women. For God isn’t too interested in church politics. He is concerned with the world, he is concerned with all people. With every one of us here, and with all those outside who never bring their faces into a church building.

And God shares in our common human experience. As St John puts it, ‘The Word became flesh.’ His Reason, usually translated as Word, becomes human and lives among us. Actually, that really means to pitch one’s tent. God comes and pitches his tent among us, just like the tent of the presence of God went around with the Israelites in their wanderings, so God in the person of Jesus pitches his tent and journeys with us.

He journeyed with me 20 years ago through Jordan and Syria; and he is still journeying with people their in their suffering.  

And he is journeying with you.

In the choir there is a wall-painting of Mary, Joseph and Jesus travelling. It is not clear where they are going. They might be refugees fleeing violence. Oddly, they don’t look like the hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing the civil war. I did wander if they are just on the way to the family for Christmas.

For all the difficult travelling that people have at Christmas, to be with the people who matter to them, there has been no greater journey than the invisible, unknowable God becoming flesh in order to travel with us.

God with us. Not a static god stuck in a Temple, but a God who travels along with you and me, knowing what it is like to be you and me, and hoping that we will discover what it is to be God,

Gay Marriage, Women Bishops and the Church of England

I have not been very excited about the idea of gay marriage. Being in a civil partnership, I always think of it as being a same-sex form of marriage, but without the historical, cultural and legal baggage. After all, when I interview people who want to get married I need to know if they are already in a civil partnership, because if they are, I cannot proceed with the marriage. On top of that, there is a mass of case law connected with annulment due to non-consummation which is meaningless in terms of civil partnerships.
What I would like is for the church to have the ability to bless relationships, to encourage love and faithfulness and to support the mutual society, help and comfort found in good relationships.

I know many members of the Church of England, and many who have an affection for the church of the people, who would like the church to bless civil partnerships, and many who would like marriage to be between people of the same sex, as well as between a man and a woman. I think the legislation could be complicated, but it would give the church a wonderful opportunity if this latter were to come to pass.

Once again the conservative evangelicals have pushed us all around. They pressurise the bishops, because the middle of the road majority just want to get on with things. These biblical troglodytes once again have cherry-picked verses from the scriptures to pretend that there is ONE biblical view of marriage. Which one, I would like to ask: is Abraham our ideal, or Solomon? Or should we listen to Jesus when he tells us to leave the family behind in following him? So they invent Christian Marriage out of a failure to read the Scriptures seriously and then lead us into darkness.

So the government, aware of the Orks lurking, but wanting to be seen as modern, create a situation in which the law of marriage for the first time in English history will be different in church from the rest of the state. This is saying to the Church of England, 'You no longer matter. You are an irrelevance, and you are to be cut out of the opportunity to pour grace into relationships which long for it.'

And who can blame the Government? They have seen this outrage in which the Dark Lord sent his minions into the Synod deliberately to prevent the will of the vast majority, the expressed will of the General Synod and of forty Diocesan Synods out of forty-two, to prevent its will, which surely is the will of the Holy Spirit, being done.

Who do these literalist flat-earthers think they are? Often well-funded organisations with money from the USA's fundamentalists, they have a confidence to push and bully. And the will of God is not done. The God who sees no difference between Male and Female is being thwarted by these book-worshippers, these people who treat the Bible as though it is the Qur'an.

Our Bishops must stop accepting such as ordinands, to spread the bigotry in churches. The Jesus whom we love and adore is the one whose arms are spread out in love to all people, but these want his hands bound, for him to stagger out of his tomb wrapped tightly in words and laws. But the wrappings were not there to bind him any longer and the resurrection is about overcoming these powers of darkness, of unloosing the chains of fundamentalism, and allowing the Holy Spirit to breathe her love across the world.