Our Rich Liturgical Heritage
Christmas
The Rt Revd Dr Peter Brain
Christmas celebrations easily excite or exasperate. They seemingly hold a vicelike grip making us feel like party poopers if we aren’t excited even for financial or other constraints. Fydor Dostoevsky’s challenge; ‘Every ant knows the formula of its anthill every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know in their way, not ours. Only humankind does not know its formula!’, gives us reason to ponder, our formula.
The Christmas events affirm our formula each time we say: ‘who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, suffered under Pontius Pilate’ or ‘For us and our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary and became truly human’. What ants and bees know by instinct we must learn by instruction. This is the way God has made us. Sadly, Adam and Eve ignored God’s gracious instructions, plunging our race into rebellious disobedience. But God in his sheer mercy moved toward them and came amongst us as one of us, in order to save us from instinct-based disobedience, for obedience to his caring instructions. Here is our formula.
The incarnation is a truth that has been revealed by God out of his mercy for our good. We need a Saviour. Our natural instincts are to fashion a God of our own image, who, like Santa, makes few demands upon us. That we like is the idea of imagining what God is like, is a rehearsal of our original sin, a wilful act of rebellion and human pride.
It is fashionable to ignore God’s self-revelation of himself in favour of what is imagined, and even considered more authentic as it comes from our own feelings and ideas of God. But of course, this is a pipe dream since it is a projection of our own weaknesses and thoughts. It is folly because we imagine God will be pleased. Folly akin to ‘the man who spits into the wind spits at himself’. This arrogance runs in the face of God’s most amazing kindness where, God the Son took our humanity, whilst maintaining his divinity, identifying with us, in order to rescue us from the fruits of rebellion. By contrast ‘Jesus makes known the unknowable’ and in a song written by a local hymn writer brings ‘a miraculous salvation that pursues the lost’.
The only person in human history who could have chosen where he would be born, chose a messy animal stable in a backwater of the Roman Empire! There is no humility so telling and impressive as this, save the fact that 30 years after the cradle, he willingly chose the cross of shame and suffering, making salvation possible for repentant sinners. In these twin initiatives we find our formula. He came to be received not rejected and be given wholehearted adoration and service.
With captivated hearts we heed Jesus’ instructions to turn around and begin to trust him. Freed from selfishness we are given strength to emulate his initiative by humbly serving others. We are freed to enjoy the reality that the world revolves around him, not us. Our petty agendas and desires give way to his grand and ennobling agenda. It is a mark of our nobility and integrity, to enthrone Jesus as our Lord and make it our primary business to learn, and then habitually follow his stretching instructions. Following his conversion
Charles Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship, set forth the wisdom of obedience to Scripture in his pithy saying: ‘unless we live by the word of God, we are consigned to live by the whim of the moment’.
The babe of Bethlehem was and remains the Lord of glory who sustains the whole universe by his word of power. This sublime truth, set forth in the Book of Common Prayer Gospel and Epistle (John 1 and Hebrews 1), makes scientific research possible and should be enough to help us joyfully test and prove the validity of our formula. The adventure begins when we humble ourselves and continues as we proclaim CHRIST My Almighty Saviour.