Diocesan News28 Dec 08

Christmas Day Sermon from Bishop of Clork, Cloyne & Ross

Christmas begins. We have prepared and blessed our crib here. A few years ago, as in most primary schools, my wife – a teacher - was putting plans in place for a crib in her classroom. She asked a young lad who lived on a farm to help out by bringing in some straw. His face lit up – he would be delighted.

A few moments later he came back with a serious question: ‘Miss, do you want clean straw or dirty straw?’

Clean straw or dirty straw? An excellent question!

No matter how hard we try not to every year, most of us, in our Christmas celebrations, manage to swaddle the Christmas Gospel of the Word made flesh in a manger of sanitised clean straw – a sugar coated world of cinnamon and tinselled candy, Turkish delight and chocolate Santas – clean straw.

Even the words of the Gospel itself, uttered amidst the candle?lit warmth of our Christmas carol services, can dangerously lose the harshness of their reality. ‘And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.’ Rather than disturb and challenge us profoundly these words can seduce us into a Christmas card world that is only one place along the mantelpiece from a red?breasted Robin on a snowy twig. This is the world of clean straw.

The baby in the manger was born into the dirty straw world of messy lives: a pregnant teenager; having a baby away from home; in dire and inhospitable conditions; in an occupied and dangerous land; with the threat of persecution and death hanging over her child; a bewildered partner in Joseph; with, at first, only the outsiders of society there for support – the shepherds; and, in order to survive, having no choice but to move on as refugees, to seek asylum in Egypt. Dirty straw!

Most of us do not live in worlds of clean straw. As Christians we do not have the luxury, nor are we given the space usually, to work out our discipleship in a cosy, clean world remote from the harsh realities of the world around us. Most of us, in our own lives, find ourselves forking our way through piles of dirty straw – faith has to be worked through and lived out in the midst of reality.

If you think back over the year since last Christmas, and ask yourself what sort of stable you have lived your life in as a Christian you will, no doubt, find that that there have been clean straw times, but that a lot of it too has been dirty straw – the realities from within our own humanity, as well as the things that life around us has dealt us. I sometimes think that I envy people who appear to have clean and tidy lives which appear to afford them the luxury of being able to make pronouncements on those whose lives are messier. Some seem content to live within the boundaries of the naïveté of remoteness.

As I think over my last year and my work as Bishop I can see mounds and mounds of dirty straw that have, quite rightly in the nature of things, engaged my ministry and attention in other people’s lives: the struggles of people with vocation; managing charities at a chaotic economic time when they have less income and more demands on their resources; working with the Board of Saint Luke’s Home to support the care of the elderly and
Alzheimer’s sufferers; the challenges faced by our schools and by the chairpersons I have appointed to Boards of Management; the ever?present menace of legal and compliance issues affecting the voluntary work of schools and church work; supporting the sick, the bereaved and those whose
lives have gone off the rails; marital breakdown; a teenage drug dealer; parents who lost a child ... all that is before I get round to living my own life, and my list could go on and on, and so could yours. Some of you, in the not playful, but hostile rough and tumble of life have had your own very real challenges. Compressed in this way we realise that perhaps there were even days that felt as if all of these things were goi\ng on all at once.

Not only in our personal lives, but the dirty straw of the world – in politics, commercial life, economics, world development, striving for justice, security and freedom, bridge?building – these are places where, as Christians, we are supposed to be and where we are supposed to meddle, in God’s name.

The dirty straw of the stable speaks to us of the reality that is the Christmas Gospel – the straw in which the Irish poet, Robert Farren, earths his version of Christmas in his poem Stable Straw

Straw and figures of moulded clay
the white?knitted hands of the men that pray,
when Christian men make a holiday
for a child, a man and a lady.

The pith of her life, the ground of our all
The meat and the marrow of all our laws
Symbol in clay and in stable straw
for a child, a man and a lady.
...

And then the Clerk - the parish priest – is exhorted to lead us in a celebration of Christmas, worship, which at one and the same time leads us to a vision of heaven and announces the Christmas Gospel of the incarnation:

Clerk! Deck hall and kindle light
and beat the bell in the tower’s height.
Priests are vesting in clothes of white
for God who was born a baby.

‘The word was made flesh and lived among us ...’ ‘Made flesh’, ‘lived among us’ – this roots the incarnation in the dirty straw of our experience, our human journey and our lives. This is God’s solidarity with us. This, as someone said, is where God ‘gets real.’

Last year at The Palace we bought a new posh crib. The figures are beautiful, carefully sculpted and hand?painted. At last after several decades of marriage my wife and I found a crib we both like. That said – it is more artistic that real. It is emblematic rather than earthy. It is a sideboard crib rather than a wooden box crib. There is no straw. However, set up, as it is, on the large table in our entrance hallway it has been a problem over the last month. In our hallway, as in most people’s, everything gets dumped on that hall table – keys, invitations, post, a clerical collar just taken out, a bill to be paid, a message delivered or waiting to be collected, a bag of cough drops, a prescription for the pharmacy – I think I have seen everything there thrown into that crib over the course of Advent, even a hockey stick and a dirty rugby boot! Our instinct at first was to keep tidying it; to protect the crib from the junk, the comings and goings of our Advent busyness.

But then we realised that the mess was an appropriate one. It spoke to us. The stuff of our lives was dumped into the middle of our Christmas crib. ‘The word was made flesh and lived among us ...’ God is tangled up in the mess of our living.

You come here today and you bring the things of your own life in the last year – your present – and your concerns and hopes for tomorrow ? to Church at this Christmas time. We are all invited to bring this – our whole selves – to God. In this place, where we have prepared a crib to remember his coming among us, we are invited to bring all our dirty straw, and to approach the altar of God’s presence with it in our hearts, minds and prayers, even to dump it here.

This is where God lifts our hearts and souls and gives us a glimpse of his glory, his grace and his truth; this is where we are assured that God is with us.

‘Miss, do you want clean straw or dirty straw?’ Friends, as you can tell, this Christmas sermon was inspired by the words of a child. That is nothing new. God himself used a child to reveal himself to us, to show his glory, to assure us of his presence and solidarity with us and to promise that he is alongside us in whatever lies ahead:

Priests are vesting in clothes of white
for God who was born a baby.

‘The word was made flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.’