Sermon preached by Canon Jeremy Davies in Salisbury Cathedral at the 10.00 Eucharist, 28 December 2003
I suppose it was in the interests of a laudable even-handedness that yesterday’s Guardian (Saturday 27 December) devoted its Saturday religious column Face to Faith to a highly distinguished academic Jew. “The Christians have had their few days of junketing” – I can hear the argument being put in the Guardian’s editorial office – “so today we’ll give the Jews a chance to put their case.” “After all” the editor concludes his decision with the coup de grace “After all, Jesus was a Jew”.
And so they asked Geza Vermes, former Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford, to write the article: what you might call a Jewish view of Christmas. Now Vermes happens to be a Jewish scholar who knows more about Christianity and the relationship of Christianity to Judaism than most Christian scholars. Christians don’t ignore what Vermes says about their faith if they’ve got any sense. It is always wise, cogent and well researched. But his article looked at the Christmas story with the eyes inevitably of the outsider. He looked at the evidence for the nativity of Jesus in the only two gospels that contain that particular narrative – Matthew and Luke – and asked whether the evidence stacks up, is it plausible, is it convincing, does it persuade the outsider.
One of the reasons that we Christians need to listen carefully and honestly to the sceptical comments of those who do not share our beliefs – particularly when the critique is voiced by a sympathetic scholar such as Professor Vermes – is that the Christian gospel has to make its way and make its converts in a world that is extremely hostile to the seeming fantasies and dogmatic certainties of religion in general and Christianity in particular. We have to listen not only to the ignorant and foolish and their cynical disregard to religious truths but also to those many who see the division and discord that religion has sown in the world and who have marshalled a formidable intellectual and moral case against the inhumanity of religious belief.
The signs are that Christians are not all that inclined to listen to the opposition, either because we have jumped to the conclusion that our opponents must be wrong (the Bible says so) or because we are afraid that their arguments will prove stronger than ours and we will be overcome by the false winds of strange doctrine (the Bible says that too). The result is that Christians are gathering together in ghettos of like-minded believers and restating old truths more stridently and singing new hymns more lustily as a way of keeping the devil out. We fail to see that we often sup with the devil. And so confident are we of our rightness that we have sold the long spoons which the old adage advises those who sup with the devil to use. St Benedict was wiser than we when he advised his monks to treat everyone who comes as Christ himself. Those who are outside may not be the devil at all but may be angels in disguise.
So we need to listen to the critique of the Professor Vermes’ of our world when he applies the detachment of scholarship to texts we hold sacred. He notes that two of the gospels (John and Mark) are silent on the subject of Jesus’ birth. He describes the account in Luke and Matthew as “pious Christian fictions” and that the date of Jesus’ birth on 25 December had more to do with countering a pagan festival of the sun than with historical accuracy. Equally unhistorical is the journey to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. The census actually took place in AD 6 and King Herod died ten years earlier. And in any case Matthew and Luke have different and indeed contradictory angles on the birth story. Contrary to Matthew’s story of the bloodletting of the slaughtered innocents and Magi travelling from afar, Luke “paints a peaceful homely scene. Jesus and his parents stay unperturbed in Bethlehem. The accounts of Matthew and Luke are patently irreconcilable”.
We need to listen to the critique of the outsider: the biblical case of the theologian and the alternative scenario provided by scientists who see that evolution and the genome provide all the necessary framework for our questions about human origins and their eventual answers. We need to hear the scepticism of the unbeliever angry about the bloodshed of the past and the Church’s collusion with injustice in the present. We need to take on board the incredulity of our contemporaries in the face of our resort to prayer to solve problems or our belief in miracles to sort our mess. We need to listen and learn and hear the voice of God speaking his word, even in the barbed comments and the derisive tone of Christianity’s most eloquent adversaries – difficult and painful as that may be. And we must develop our theology and recast our gospel and, more important, allow our lives to be re-fashioned as a means of telling God’s story anew.
But listen though we must, because God speaks through the events of history and our own time – which is why the gospel writers, however much their different stories are told in different ways, root their narrative in historical realities: the census, King Herod and Pontius Pilate and Tiberius. They all have their function in changing a delightful myth into historical fact. But we insiders have something else to offer to a sceptical world that no amount of outside scrutiny can of itself discover. Because intelligent and critical and just though we need to be about our faith (often with the help of the outsider), we don’t believe simply because the gospel stories get all the facts right, nor because the scriptures win the argument with the scientists about the origin of matter, nor because we feel we can justify bloody episodes in the Christian past. We believe because, as we kneel at a crib or come to the cross or meet in the silence with fellow worshippers, we catch a glimpse of a truth that no fact or piece of evidence or clinching intellectual argument can ever finally capture. We believe in the end, we insiders, not through some amazing effort of our own that gives us cause for pride or a sense of superiority: we believe because in the simplest possible way, undeserved, unexpected and unprepared for, God has come close to us. And nothing, but nothing, can shake our sense that God is, that God is love, that God loves us.
Once we have stepped from being an outsider to being an insider, because we have been grasped by that truth, then nothing is quite the same again. The scriptures, instead of being impersonal stories of two millennia or more ago, become new insights into the truth that has grasped us. And our lives, instead of simply conforming to the imperatives of the acquisitive and consuming society, have the opportunity to be re-fashioned in a more generous, more loving and less self-centred way. The outsider is looking at a facade and sees its flaws. The insider, though concerned about the cracks in the facade, knows that, even when the facade cracks, crumbles and decays, a flower has bloomed in the heart that will flower even in the religious rubble.
Today Alison Jane and Oscar Sebastian, mother and son, have stepped by God’s grace across a threshold from outsider to insider. They have entered a threshold that can only be crossed once: you can’t be baptised again. God has grasped you, washed you, made you his and he never goes back on his promises. But we do. Time and again we will go our wilful way and stomp off into the far country and turn our back on home. Time and again we will need to cross the threshold and rediscover ourselves sons and daughters of God, insiders who have come back again from the cold.
We come back again and again, not because we have some knockdown argument that clinches the God conundrum but because something has stirred in our imagination, something has warmed in our heart and we are home again. I had a poem from a friend in her Christmas card; I’ll read part of it now.
Worlds have turned, planets exploded,
constellations collapsed; clatter and chatter
have crowded out the silence
in which that word
was spoken.
But still it is heard
sometimes
in song, or poem
or love letter;
and still the promise finds expression
in the laughter of small children
and the patience of the gardener,
in the passion of the lover
and the antics of the clown.
(The whole of this poem by Alwyn Marriage is printed below.)
God said
‘I give you my Word’.
Before the music of the spheres,
a word;
before the Milky Way was drawn
across the darkness of
the heavenly void,
or solar storms and sunsets
mixed chaotic colours, splashed
across earth’s darkest skies,
or charmed its muted moods
to glow with vibrant light:
a word.
Stars spun, theological dust storms
swirled down the centuries,
chattering and raging,
Maybe its meaning
could have been clearer;
the occasional hint
given to explain why
God was revealed in a baby’s cry.
Worlds have turned, planets exploded,
constellations collapsed; clatter and chatter
have crowded out the silence
in which that word
was spoken.
But still it is heard
sometimes
in song, or poem
or love letter;
and still the promise finds expression
in the laughter of small children
and the patience of the gardener,
in the passion of the lover
and the antics of the clown.