| The Arms that Pull Compassion Down |
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Sermon by The Reverend Marjorie Brown. On Midnight Mass December 2009 Priestly ministry is not simply proclamation from a pulpit. The pattern that Christ modelled for us is an embodied ministry. He enacted the healing love of God by touching lepers, making mud paste with spit for a blind man’s eyes, breathing into deaf ears, producing abundant wine at a wedding, gathering children into his arms, and kneeling to wash the feet of his disciples. He gave his friends definite but puzzling instructions to eat his body and drink his blood whenever they gathered in his name after his departure.Clearly, what mattered to Jesus was not imparting knowledge but rather entering relationships. The ethics professor Stanley Hauerwas says that “Christianity is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian, but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.” (“The Sanctified Body” in Embodied Holiness, p. 22) In coming together week by week in church, greeting one another, sharing the peace, lifting our voices together, praying for one another, and eating and drinking at the Lord’s table, we are gradually shaped into people who find worship natural. Tonight, by leaving our warm houses and braving the cold to gather by candlelight around a crib, we share a powerful experience of waiting to welcome light in the midst of darkness. We will go home tonight changed by that participation. It’s not a story re-told but an encounter re-enacted. Tonight we celebrate the feast of the incarnation of God, the God who clothed himself in our skin and became a fully human being. Quietly in the womb of Mary, and then visibly in Bethlehem, the Son of God became a Jewish baby who could be seen, heard and touched. “Away in a manger” contains a serious heresy, by the way – there is no evidence whatsoever for the line “No crying he makes”. The newborn Jesus was not a china doll or an angel in disguise but a normal baby with a hungry belly and a good pair of lungs. Christianity is an earthy, grounded faith. Born from Judaism, it shares the same delight in the material world. Genesis gives us the image of God moulding an earthling, Adam, from dust, in Hebrew adamah. The Creator gets his hands dirty from the very beginning. Amen |
