Advent: 8 December 2022
Good morning,
on Thursday 8 December, which means that behind our Advent Calendar window we find the letter I. I is, of course, for the place Jesus wasn’t born – the inn, in which there was no room. Instead he was born where the animals were kept, and laid in one of their feeding-toughs. Most of us will spend Christmas at home, some in halls of residence, a few will be on holiday or in hospital. But there will be others in a prison cell. During the Second World War, the brilliant pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and subsequently executed by the Nazis for his opposition to the regime. In his posthumously published Letters and Papers from Prison, we read this:
For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell. I daresay it will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast is its name. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt look very different to the eyes of God from what they do to man, that God should come down to the very place which men usually abhor, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn – these are things which a prisoner can understand better than anyone else. For him the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense… For the first time, perhaps, many will learn the true meaning of Christmas.
The stable-birth is for Bonhoeffer a part of the fundamental meaning of the incarnation (our second I of the day). Incarnation is the technical term used to mean God’s becoming human in the person of Jesus. Here are some further quotations exploring aspects of what the incarnation means.
Carl Jung, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, wrote in Answer to Job:
One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means nothing less than a world-shaking transformation of God.
The 17th Century English writer of Centuries of Meditations, Thomas Traherne, explored the paradoxes this transformation of God entails:
God never shewed Himself more a God than when He appeared man; never gained more glory than when He lost all glory: was never more sensible of our sad estate, than when He was bereaved of all sense.
A final quotation from the late Scottish theologian Elizabeth Templeton (whom we encountered on 1 December) argues that the incarnation doesn’t only transform God, it shows how we should change the world:
It is the outrageous, extravagant claim of Christianity that the cosmos needs transformation and is, in the light of Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection, capable of it…. I suspect that it is a primary evangelical and apologetic task for the Church at this point in the twenty-first century to rekindle the desire not to accept the universe.
There are countless traditional images of the nativity, when Christians believe the human God was born. But contemporary settings are rarer, depicting the equivalent today of the stable, there being no room in our comfortable, warm homes of safety. Here is one from 2014 depicting Mary as a homeless mother resting in a bus shelter with their possessions close at hand in a shopping cart.
Finally, it was lovely to meet so many alumni at last night’s Carol Service in London. Our preacher Scott Rennie referred to his favourite Christmas poem, which was read in the service, Inside Out? by Peter Trow. So – I thought you may be glad of the chance to read it in full. Inside Out? is our final I in the calendar:
Christmas is outside in!
The characters in the familiar
nativity scene all come
in from the outside.
Shepherds come,
from outside the city,
despised by the righteous people
because their work keeps them outside
the religious in-crowd;
outsiders spending their nights vulnerable
with their flocks,
no one to watch over them.
Wise men come,
wealthy and learned,
but outsiders too.
Strangers in a strange land,
foreigners in odd clothes,
treated with suspicion;
‘not really like us’.
Mary and Joseph come,
Galileans, outsiders,
‘nothing good comes from there you know!’ –
travellers with no package tour,
no hotel reservations.
Are they refused room
because they speak with strange accents?
because they are poor?
because she is pregnant?
Jesus comes,
born an outsider,
living with outsiders,
touching outsiders,
lepers and gentiles,
sinners and prostitutes:
dying as he is born,
outside the city,
on the rubbish dump.
Christmas is for the outsiders:
the ones who need God with them
because they have no one else;
because people fear them
shun them, and shut them outside.
Are we outsiders?
If we recognise our need,
put aside our self-sufficient pride,
and admit
that when the darkest night
surrounds us
and we feel the cold draughts
of hatred or indifference
we are afraid, and cannot find
the candle flame within us
to light our path to safety,
then we have
prepared a place of welcome
for the Light that comes,
the Word that speaks our hope and peace,
the One who opens the door,
bringing outsiders in
to warm themselves
at the fire of God’s passionate love –
and Christmas is for us.
Yours,
Donald.