Diocesan News30 Dec 09

The Bishop of Cork's Christmas Sermon 2009

Christmas Day 2009
Sermon preached by the Rt Revd Paul Colton, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork

In my childhood Christmas was often spent at my grandfather’s. I remember well a tattered red box. It was held together with string, parts of one side were missing. It was a well-worn compendium of games. In it there seemed to be everything to keep a family content for the 12 days of Christmas: Ludo, snakes and ladders, draughts, chess, card games (most of them now out of fashion) and, my favourite, a dice game with race horses. That set of games had been around for several generations. It certainly pre-dated the popularisation of what are now household names – Monopoly and Scrabble. In those 1960s Playstations and X-Boxes were not yet even in a pre-existent state – unheard of!

As in bygone years, this Christmas there will, no doubt, be hosts of new boxed games wrapped as presents under trees. Children, and some adults too, will sit at consoles, connected to the internet, engaging people all over the world, in riveting  - but television-hogging – challenges such as Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City or Halo Wars – and no that last one wasn’t about a tiff between angels in the angelic host as they appeared to the shepherds at that first Christmas.

Yes, it was to shepherds and farmers that the Angels appeared. Like any farmer I had work to do on my farm today, even though it is Christmas Day. My farm, however, was comfortably on my computer. I refer, of course, to that new 2009 game which has become an online phenomenon - Farmville. Like a lot of modern inventions it is only an old idea - a good one - updated. Farmville is a mutation of a type of Monopoly. Except it’s a farm. The game is based around the market: seeds, trees, animals, buildings, vehicles and decorations can be bought for the farm and sold. Money is earned by growing crops and harvesting them. Into the mix are thrown experience points so you can go up to new levels. The Farmville phenomenon was only invented last June and already it has 73 million active players each month – mostly over 35s - who generate 1.6 billion messages a day. To put that in perspective, it has taken since 1938 for Scrabble, a household name, to have 150 million sets sold worldwide.

Farmville is an idyllic, addictive world. I don’t have to dream of a white Christmas – 1000 Farmville coins and the click of a computer mouse and I can give my Farmville world a picturesque blanket of safe snow, so safe it poses no threat to seasonal travellers. Farmville, like some people’s idea of Christmas, or of life even, is, about, perfection, a hardly menacing idyll. The farm is a perfect square. Neighbours are industrious and helpful. Crops do always grow within a specific time frame. It never rains. Elephants co-exist with reindeer, pigs and sheep.  Trees and crops from different climate systems happily grow and produce alongside each other. Ducks waddle and chickens peck the ground in harmony. It never rains and your dairy herd is not vulnerable to the milk price. The player is the Farmville God and the Farmville world is exactly how he or she wants it to be.

As I say, Farmville is a happy families’ world where things never go wrong. Modern computer games may be like that, but our lives, and the world are not. We cannot celebrate Christmas either on those terms. If we do, we gut the Christmas Gospel of its reality and ours and we substitute for them an unreal and unreasonable world.

Gutting the Christmas Gospel is one thing: others have filleted the Gospel out of Christmas altogether. I was pleased, therefore, to see one Christmas card which challenged: ‘Put the anger back in Christmas!’  ‘Anger’ is, of course, a too strong word. But I knew what the card meant. We need to light the litmus of reality from the Christmas gospel and bring it to the reality of our lives. We all have vulnerabilities, uncertainties and darkness in our lives that we want that light to shine in. We long for the darkness never to put that light – the light of Christ - out. 

We live our ragged lives in a ragged world – dark places that crave the light of Christ’s presence, healing, solidarity and strength. As it was in the prophet Isaiah’s day, this is still a world: where ‘… the people sit in deep darkness’; where many ‘… carry the yoke of their burden and the bar across their shoulders’ and where we long for the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood to be burned as fuel in the fire.  And there are warriors waging wars of many types out there. We find ourselves caught up in those struggles in our own lives.

Most people do not wage real wars – some do - but we all wrestle with figurative ones: the young man I know, 29 years old, with a wife and a child born in recent months, and now wrestling with a brain tumour; the couple who long for a child but have come to the end of the IVF road; increasing numbers of people in our city and country losing their jobs; the uncertainty of nearly everyone’s financial situation; an internationally famous rugby player or a GAA star who, from the cauldron of torment, fear, and, in case of the former, near suicide, tells the world that he is gay; the young person, like them, still struggling to discover the equilibrium of his or her sexuality; gay people in Uganda threatened with legislation that will lay down for them, because of their sexuality, the death penalty; decent Christians whose faith in their Church has been decimated in recent days, weeks and years; those whose lives have been wrecked by the abuse of some within the Church; those whose homes or businesses or both have been capsized by flooding; those whose relationships are in turmoil; many in society still struggling for equality, those who are bereaved … I am almost breathless and still the list is endless. And everyone is on it: are we not all on it somewhere?

Thank God, that’s where the Christmas story meets us and embraces us. It’s a story about a pregnant teenager, confused and uncertain; and about her fiancée tortured by wanting to do the decent thing, in a hostile world, in the midst of political upheaval and power struggles, where they have to go to sign on, because a new tax regime is planned – sound familiar?  The Inn is thronging with revellers and a landlord is trying to make a quick buck – there is no room for the most needy: they are left outside or put around the back.  The baby is born – and who knows what lies ahead for him in these days. The shepherds are rough men, unwashed and smelly, given no place in respectable society. And it is to those shepherds that the angels – the messengers of God come – and they say ‘Do not be afraid – go to Bethlehem.’ Through the chilly Christmas air across the centuries of Christmases their message wings its way to us in our untidy lives: ‘Do not be afraid.’

And all that happened, as Saint Luke tells us - ‘[in] those days’ (‘[at] that time’) – at a particular moment and place in history. God still stands alongside us in our particular time and history. The Christmas gospel is rooted in the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of all of life’s situations - of struggling lives; God is in the midst of the muck of our particular manger, with us.  It is to our own very vulnerable raggedness that Christmas brings its anger, its edge of reality – its relevance. Because God has appeared bringing salvation to all, we are reminded in Saint Paul’s letter to Titus that we have no option but to live out our Christianity ‘in this present age.’

After the Christmas Carol Services here, I hesitated even to use the words ‘Happy Christmas’ at the door of the Cathedral knowing so much of what is going on in people’s lives. But history shows us that, even in the most dastardly of times and situations, our forebears managed to celebrate Christmas. Perhaps it was because of the darkness and dastardliness of the times that the celebration of Christmas struck a chord – and the reality of the Christmas Gospel crept through.

So much is, indeed different this year for many people. But in another sense, in the Christmas sense, nothing has changed. It is in this world that we have seen a great light. A child is born to us. As the Psalm we sang invites, we can, indeed, sing a new song. The incarnate God is the same. The Christmas message is the same: God is with us. In all that we are going through – Emmanuel - God is with us. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out.   

This Christmas, and in what are horrid and menacing days for many, I invite you to give a lead in becoming dealers – dealers in hope – to become mirrors of the light of Christ, reflecting Christ’s hope, Christ’s love and Christ’s peace to the world around us.

As a start, rooted in the light of the Christmas Gospel, in the message of the angels to us, as to the shepherds, not to be afraid, let us, start by being confident in wishing one another, even in this difficult year, a Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas!

ENDS