Diocesan News26 Dec 09

"The Descent of Love" - the Bishop of Meath's Christmas Sermon

A sermon preached at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral Trim on Christmas Day 2009 by Bishop Richard Clarke, Bishop of Meath and Kildare.

One of my favourite nineteenth century poets is the English Victorian, Christina Rossetti. Not that she was a typical Victorian, other than chronologically. And, although born in London in 1830, she was not particularly English either, being in fact three-quarters Italian. Her poetry is immensely varied but some of it is almost shocking in its cool detached stoicism. One of her poems begins with the startling lines, “When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me..” The verse concludes with the distinctly unemotional proposition “And if thou wilt, remember / And if though wilt, forget.” One of her most famous lines is one with which we might well not be able to agree, but it is certainly arresting, “Better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad”. 

So, when we think of Christina Rossetti, we are definitely not talking sentimental Victorian gush; not at all ‘Christmassy’ stuff, we might think. It is perhaps then rather surprising that two of our favourite Christmas hymns should come from Christina Rossetti’s pen - “In the bleak mid-winter”, and another that we perhaps think of as almost childishly naïve, in its apparent simplicity, “Love came down at Christmas.” (Please click here for full text). It is this second hymn I want us to think about for a few minutes. It is far from being a simple children’s hymn. Simple in expression it certainly is, but it is also devastating in its concise articulation of a superb theology of the Incarnation, and hence of Christmas itself.

“Love being born at Christmas” is the reminder to each one of us, even two thousand years later, that love in its perfection is not a natural human attribute. I very much dislike having to agree - even marginally - with Richard Dawkins, the Oxford scientist who has made his life’s work the belligerent denunciation of all religious belief, but where I believe he has a perfectly valid point is in suggesting that even actions that we humans may see as true unselfishness or altruistic love may at heart be self-interest, if not the self-interest of an individual, then the genetic self-interest of the species for its continuing survival. Purely human love is indeed flawed. It loves, but almost certainly in the hope of a return on its love, however subconscious the demand for that return may be. It can withdraw its love when it feels rejected, betrayed or demeaned. Even the purest and deepest of human loves - parental love - can at times prove more fragile than society likes to imagine. We are certainly living in strange times, when it seems that the response to any hurt - great or small - is not to seek for understanding, reconciliation or a restoration of the relationship, but rather to achieve retribution and the humiliation of another person. Christina Rossetti’s theology is to remind us that absolute love can only begin with God and our response to the love of God shown to us in Jesus Christ.

This is a love which can love not only the loveable but also the singularly unlovable.

It is a love that (in the words of another great hymn) will not let us go, will not let go of us, and therefore demands of us that we will not let go of others – not the derelict sleeping rough, nor the tiresome and self-obsessed but essentially lonely neighbour, nor the starving AIDS-infected infant in Malawi, nor even the smug and self-centred business associate who has never shown the slightest concern for us..

But how can we do it? How can we show a real love, when we don’t much feel like it? Well, no matter how hard I try, I can never improve on that well-worn advice of C S Lewis (although you will have to excuse his non-inclusive language!) -  "Do not waste your time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor.  Act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less." It all sounds very pragmatic and not particularly “spiritual”, but it is of course deeply embedded in the teaching of Christ himself. If we behave towards others with love, God’s love begins to flow through our actions and we may indeed become loving children of God.

And so, as that deceptively simple hymn moves towards its final lines, Christina Rossetti throws down the real challenge of a true Christmas. Yes, we worship God on a Christmas morning, we worship Jesus Christ as Eternal Love made human, but where does it take us? Into action. Love for God and all humanity, and to the final line of the little hymn that is in fact saying a huge amount – Love for plea and gift and sign.

Love for plea. Love is the only thing we can ever offer back to God – love for Him and love for those around us. We have nothing else to give back to God as a plea for mercy. Those words of Saint John of the Cross which I have used so often are the only thing that can give us hope and direction – “At the evening of our life, it is on love alone that we will be judged..” Not on human achievement, not on human wealth, not on human popularity or respectability, but on whether our lives were lives that radiated love.

Love for gift. Love can never be anything but “gift”. Love is God’s gift to us – Christ coming into the world, our creation as individuals, the redemption of humankind in the Cross and resurrection of Christ, and for each of us, “the means of grace and the hope of glory”. It is given freely and, like every genuine gift, it is not given in such a way that it may ever be taken back. So also, when we give love to others –those of no material “use” to us just as much as those to whom we are bound by kinship or through human love – it can only be a love that seeks no return as a right. It is to be love as a gift freely given, without the demand that we receive anything useful in return for the gift.

Love for sign. Our love for the world is to be the sign that our Christian discipleship means what it says it means. In Our Lord’s own words to his disciples, recorded in John’s Gospel: ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another’. We are living in a country where the Church – and I do mean the whole Church – has little credibility, if any, in the eyes of most people. And, because the Church’s credibility has been shredded, the validity of the Gospel itself has also been undermined. This is to our enormous dishonour, and it is our greatest challenge. Only when the men, women and children of this island can see in the loving behaviour of Christians something different, and something of which they would wish to be a part, will we be able to face the future with a fearless confidence and an intrepid trust.

But let the last word be with Christina Rossetti. As together we now move to our Christmas Eucharist, in humble faith and with renewed commitment to the Christ who loves us and who gives himself to us in this sacrament, there is another though little-known Christmas poem of Rossetti which sets this eucharistic scene for us in its final verse,
Lo, new-born Jesus,
loving great and small,
Love’s free sacrifice,
opening arms and eyes,
to one and all.

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love divine;
Love was born at Christmas:
star and angels gave the sign.

Worship we the Godhead,
Love incarnate, Love divine;
worship we our Jesus,
but wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token;
Love be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and all men,
Love for plea and gift and sign.
Christina Rossetti