Diocesan News
Sermon preached by the Rt Revd Paul Colton in St Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork on Christmas Day 2006
I look around and I see many of you who made it home for Christmas. No doubt, like me, a good number of you spent some hours wondering whether or not you would get home due to the weather. I started writing this Christmas Sermon during my 13 hours sitting around Heathrow Airport last Wednesday: fogbound. There, that day, and, according to news reports, in the days since, it seemed that the whole world was on the move ? or not on the move as the case may be due to delayed and cancelled flights.
Every nationality, every race and culture, every style of dress and many manifestations of religious allegiance and personal expression appeared to walk past in those hours of waiting.
This was an uncomfortable, contemporary, mid-winter journey towards home.
The poet Emily Dickinson said ?Where thou art, that is Home.? In all our own family wanderings this is something that we, ourselves, have discovered to be true: where we are - is home: otherwise you never settle in. Dickinson?s is a better line than the cynicism of George Bernard Shaw who said that ?The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life!?
Christmas is a time for going home. It was ever thus.
?In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 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.? (Luke 2)
They were heading home - home to the ancestral city of Joseph. Yet it was not their home place ? they lived in the town of Nazareth. That experience could be that of so many of you today: home for Christmas; yet home is there ? it?s somewhere else ? as well.
At a deeper philosophical level going home, finding our own place, and rooting ourselves is a religious and spiritual quest ? a pilgrimage. Making home and finding home is deeply instinctive: physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Today there is a restlessness about so much of our living, some of it inevitable and more of it the product of our times. Many people are increasingly dislocated from the things of faith; their spiritual home. I have a sense that in the very good economic times and all the infrastructural improvements of our day our society also is restlessly searching for a new spiritual equilibrium. We see this in recent debates about the age of consent; about care for the elderly; about the infrastructure of our health service and so much more. The new religiously diverse Ireland will present its own challenges that are gestating among us and which we have not yet begun adequately to address. Underlying these issues are philosophical, spiritual and moral dilemmas. And these complex concerns require dialogue, engagement and mature reflection in a pluralist Ireland.
This process will not be assisted, on the one hand, by a naïve demonisation of popular culture or, on the other, by an equally naïve call to retreat to the religiosity of a bygone era. Our Irish Constitution expresses the view that we are a religious people; a perspective borne out by the last census. What the current one will show remains to be seen. Either way, religion in the modern Ireland has to engage with contemporary realities rationally, thoughtfully, openly and compassionately ? modelled on the outpouring of love, incarnate in that manger on that first Christmas.
Much as we would like it to be otherwise, there is an unavoidable relativism and subjectivity about so much of our living and in our facing of dilemmas.
But it does seem to me also that an existential angst which flits and wanders between choice, freedom, anxiety and dread is no resting place for us as individuals or for our society. Of course there is an absurdity, chaos, uncertainty and inconsistency about much that is inescapably human and indeed about the deal we get. The Christmas and the Christian message is that there is more: home is somewhere.
The restless, spiritual homelessness I?m speaking about was always there. It?s nothing new. As Saint John said so poetically in today?s timeless Christmas Gospel: ?[The light] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.?
So the question remains for us as much this Christmas as ever: where is home?
Where is home for you or for our society in the midst of our own wanderings and searchings?
When the pendulums in our life or our times stop swinging vigorously where do they come to rest spiritually and philosophically for us?
When the whims and oscillations of the day stop driving us and swaying us, where do we find balance and a new equilibrium?
To what and to whom do we turn when we turn for home?
To where do we look for our reference points and landmarks for that journey?
For us as Christians we turn to God who, as Saint John said
- is the beginning
- the Word ? the logos - the soul of the universe
- the light of the world
- a light no darkness can put out
- the one who gives us power to become children of God
- the one who, for a while, came where we are, entering the world of life and struggle
- the one who is grace ? the one who gives us joy
- the one who is truth - reliability
This is where we as Christians find home; and this is what we celebrate. And it?s not easy because for all of us ? young and old ? there are many attractions masquerading as bright stars on the horizon tantalising us into following them and hoping that we will commit to their trajectory.
Christmas, however, invites us to follow the one bright star who leads us home to himself: Jesus, the baby in the manger, Emmanuel, God with us.
Therefore, home for us as Christians is
- on our knees at the crib ? the incarnation.
- standing staring up at his body on the cross.
- the joy of the resurrection.
- knowing God?s on-going presence with us.
Home is on our knees at this altar where he feeds and nourishes us with his own life for our journey onwards and homewards