Christmas Eve: Words and Flesh | Download PDF
Date: 24th December 2011
Bible Reading: John 1.1 – 14
2011 has been a year for words. Private words obtained by stealth and deception from the phone calls of celebrities and families of murder victims; revolutionary words spread through Facebook and social networks in the Arab World, telling people to come and join the demonstrations; inciting words, calling young people across our cities to join a riot. Though maybe we should remember most of all the words of forgiveness spoken by a father whose son had been killed, and perhaps was more instrumental than anyone in bringing peace to the situation. Dictators have discovered that they cannot crush words with bullets and military crackdowns; newspapers have been vilified for taking private words and publishing them as public truth; and through this summer in this country, we wondered how to control words to prevent riots and looting. But words have been too strong. Words have conquered all.
And we in the church have had our own celebration of words this year. Four hundred years of shaping the English language have not gone unnoticed this year, as celebrations for the King James Version of the Bible have punctuated the year. I was rebuked last Sunday at our Service of Nine Lessons and Carols for not using the King James Version of the Bible for the Bible readings, and I thought it was probably a fair cop – if any year deserved those readings it was this one. Extraordinary that evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens have lined up to add their paeons of praise to the King James Version and all it means to our culture – once you have got rid of the nasty religious bits of course!
But maybe that is the problem with the church leaping on the bandwagon too much in this celebration of the King James Version. Our faith is not simply about reshaping culture or assisting in the development of language. You cannot get rid of the nasty religious bits of the Bible and expect it to make any sense: it is there not to change language, but to change lives. And words on their own will not do that.
Indeed, Christianity has been much mocked for being all about language – think of E.M. Forster’s scathing words in A Passage to India about ‘poor, little talkative Christianity’. We have imagined that our good words are heard as good deeds and that they will suffice in our witness to the world. But it will not – and often, what the world craves is silence. And we have given them no answer for that.
Of all readings read over the Christmas period, it is our gospel reading which is best known – and it too seems to focus on words. In the beginning was the Word, the Evangelist says – and we have thought we have justification enough for all our words. But the focus is not on the Word on its own – it is on the Word made flesh, which came as a light to the world and shines in the darkness. And it is only when we have understood in the church what it is to be flesh and light to our communities that we will have understood our role in the world.
I think one of the reasons why the church has got so excited about the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible this year is because it has been reminded that it still has significance in our nation. We are reminded so often that the church is a dwindling and dying organisation that any story that tells us that our institutions still have significance today is bound to get us a little bit excited.
But that is to miss so much that the church gets on and does in our society unnoticed. In 2006, a woman named Josie Razell was made homeless and found herself sleeping rough in the streets of High Wycombe. On Christmas Day that year, she was found dead in a stairwell in Easton Street Car park. As a result of her story, two church leaders got together determined that the church should do something in response. The High Wycombe Night Shelter was born in response to Josie Razell’s story and is now Wycombe Homeless Connection. Perhaps it is too tempting to think that such problems are not on our doorstep – surely in an affluent area such as this one, we need not worry about the plight of the homeless.
But all the words in the world would not have saved Josie Razell: she needed humans to do something – or words with flesh on them, as the former bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, used to say.
And we need to keep asking ourselves the questions: where do we need to be to provide the words with flesh on them? It was humbling to attend the 20th anniversary celebrations of Careers Springboard in Gerrards Cross earlier this year and hear how a group of local Christians, including members of this congregation, had started this initiative in 1991 in a small way, and how it has gone from strength to strength. And if ever there was a time when we needed an organisation to help those out of work find confidence to return to the job market, it is now.
The Beaconsfield Advisory Centre, Bradbury House, many founder members of the Iain Rennie Hospice at Home – and this year also, the establishment of GradNet to help young graduates find space in the employment market. All of these are examples of Christian people looking to make a difference to our community. Yes, we are told constantly that church membership is on the decline and every year fewer people are members of churches – but let us be thankful that the difference that that group of fewer and fewer people make to their community continues to be immense.
But we need to keep asking the question. How can we be words with flesh on them to our community here in Beaconsfield? To the lonely, those who are housebound, those who live without hope. Because all our words will not be enough: we must put those words into action if the church is not to be increasingly marginalised. And this will happen when we act as individuals as well as when we get together and act as a group.
Every week I get an email from the Bible Society with the religious stories of the week. Most of the time these stories are fairly depressing about how we are fighting amongst ourselves or being thought of as ridiculous in various ways. But scattered in among each bulletin are examples of Christians getting on and being the word made flesh to their community. Like the story of the Christian couple returning from mass, who discovered Stephen Lawrence dying by the roadside after being stabbed all those years ago, and cradled him and prayed with him so he did not die alone. Or the young man who helped out at a homeless shelter and realised how cold it got at this time of year, so set up a scarf sales business whereby you bought two scarves for a fiver, but one of the scarves went to someone sleeping rough.
These are small stories and you may be inclined to ask, cynically, what difference it will make to our world? But people will have asked what difference a northern carpenter from an obscure part of the Roman Empire could have made to his community. But we have found that by the Word becoming flesh, the world was changed.
The Word become flesh might be seen as hidden in the world – and indeed, there are many times when our role in the church is to be exactly that. Not seeking glory or honour, but just getting on and making a difference. Working with others who seek to make a difference to our community, even if our motivation is our faith in God and theirs something else. That is why we met in June in the church this year, with so many other community groups and asked how we could make the Big Society something of a reality in our town.
But there are times when what are world needs is more than that. There are times when we must stand out and shine in the darkness. St John says that what came into the world was life and the life was the light of all people. The image of Christ as light is one that is familiar – as any child who has ever held a christingle orange with the candle in the middle of it will tell you. But Jesus tells us that we, his followers are also the light of the world and we must shine as that light.
I love the story that comes from the period of time that Terry Waite was held in captivity in Lebanon. Many of you will remember that he was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy to the Middle East and had played a key role in negotiating the release of hostages before he himself was captured in Beirut in the early 1990s. A lady from Bedford sent him a postcard with a picture of John Bunyan from his prison cell on the front. It is an extraordinary act of faith to send a postcard to a hostage, held by extremist terrorists, as much as anything because they don’t tend to list their addresses in the phone book! So she just put on the postcard, ‘Terry Waite, Beirut’. Clearly the postmen of Lebanon are resourceful chaps because one day, Terry Waite was awoken by his guards to be handed this postcard. The picture of Bunyan seated at a window with light from the Celestial City coming through was enough to sustain Waite in his remaining years in prison. Light indeed breaking into his darkness.
And what of us this Christmas time? Christmas can be a rotten time of the year because we are all so convinced of it being a time of jollity and family fun, and for many it is a time of loneliness and a reminder of their own pain. Or perhaps because tragedy will hit when it will, we come to Christmas aware more of our own grief, than everyone else’s joy. The darkness seems too hard this Christmastime.
So for all those who fear that the darkness will overcome them, this verse from John is a reminder of the light that can never be extinguished by the dark: the light that shines from the Celestial City into our lives. And for those of us who know the warmth and glow of that light for ourselves, what will we do to ensure that the light we know so well will be shared with those who are in darkness? That is the challenge of this Christmas time.
The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us and we have seen his glory. That is the truth at the heart of Christmas. The challenge of Christmas is that we too must become flesh and dwell amongst our neighbours and let the light of Christ shine through us to light up their darkness. May God give us courage and faith so to live.
AMEN