Press Releases
BISHOP'S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
The Diocese of Down and Dromore
The Rt Revd Harold Miller
BISHOP'S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
People often say "Christmas is a time for children," and from a Christian point of view their instinct is not totally misplaced. The Christmas story centres around a child: the everlasting God who became a foetus in the womb of Mary. He went through the normal processes of human birth, experienced the helplessness of a baby and grew up as a child in Nazareth. If we could only experience the impact of hearing this story for the first time we would find it too amazing to comprehend.
The Incarnation - God becoming a baby - says to us that Jesus Christ has redeemed the early stages of human life. God the Holy Spirit is at work in the earliest moments of our lives that we cannot even remember, and yet which are so vital to the development of every aspect of our personalities. Do you remember what happens in the Christmas story when the pregnant Mary visits her pregnant cousin Elizabeth? Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and recognises that there is something special about the baby in Mary's womb. As the Holy Spirit touches Elizabeth so her unborn child responds to the power of God and leaps within her.
Our Christmas celebrations and cribs focus around the smallest of the characters in the story; the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in the manger. He utters nothing apart from a few cries. He feeds from his mother's breast, he is weak and dependent, and yet he is the One about whom the story is told. He goes on then, as our 'childhood pattern', in those unwritten pages of the Gospel story, to grow in knowledge and in favour with God and humanity.
My Christmas message for 1998 is that God cares about life at every stage; before and after birth. Christians must always be about the task of protecting those first years of life, both before and after birth. Those are the years in which we are weakest; those are the years in which we cannot defend ourselves. But even those earliest years are made holy by the Christmas story.
We can never be happy with the termination of the life of a foetus when we realise that Christ has made the womb a sacred place. We must resist any widening of legislation in this area. We cannot countenance babies and children being beaten and abused at the age of their greatest weakness when we think of the baby Jesus growing up into childhood. A Christian society must be a society that protects its children - by its laws and by its behaviour - because, as our Lord himself said "of such as these is the Kingdom of heaven."
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