Homily: Christmas Day, 2015 by Sr. Constance Joanna, SSJD

• Isaiah 52:7-10 - read online here  »
• Psalm Canticle 3 – Isaiah 12.2-6  - read online here »
• Hebrews 12:1-12 - read online here »
• John 1:1-14  - read online here »

John’s gospel is always about signs – he records events in Jesus’ life and reflects on them as signs of the breaking in of the Reign of God. Many of the signs John identifies are familiar to us – turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, knowing the personal history of the Samaritan woman at the well, walking on water, raising Lazarus from the dead, feeding the 5,000, and several healing miracles.

The incarnation of God as the Word made flesh is not identified as a “sign” by John, but that is what it is. John does not tell the birth story like Luke does or even allude to it like Matthew does. He approaches the birth of Jesus from a theological perspective: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and “the light shone in the darkness and the darkness could never put it out.” For John, the light that Jesus brought into the world is a sign that God has indeed come to live among human beings. And it’s real light. John saw the joy, the peace, the healing that Jesus brought into peoples’ lives. He experienced the lightness of heart that comes with intimate friendship. He saw signs of the coming Reign of God – healings, people helped to see both their sin and their potential, the darkness of the mentally ill flooded with the light of reason, the darkness of the man born blind as he opened his eyes to the light.

And John also saw the light in the context of the darkness of the world around him – the political posturing, the deadly power of the Roman occupation, disease and hunger and homelessness. And into all that darkness came the light of God’s love.

 Reading the gospel offers us signs of hope in a troubled world. So does reading the occasional stories of random acts of kindness which our newspapers and TV and radio news offer us when there is a little extra space after telling of the random and planned / targeted acts of violence. And I receive great hope from hearing the stories of people who come here on retreat, or my students, or the many other people we are all privileged to walk with in their journeys of faith.

I was very moved recently when I read the story of the 18th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an American poet who wrote “Christmas Bells” – what we know familiarly as “I heard the Bells on Christmas Day” because his poem captures the tension that we live with today. There are several popular tunes for this poem, and I’ve chosen the one by John Calkin, the first person to set this hymn to music, and I think is the most familiar or at least the easiest to sing. Let’s sing the first two verses:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men! 

Very hopeful isn’t it? Longfellow is offering us a comforting and happy picture of Christmas Day in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He becomes even more ecstatic in the third verse:

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men! 

Christmas night is over, and the day comes. Light comes. And strangely the tone of Longfellow’s poem changes as well. Or perhaps he had been feeling melancholy all night and the poem was an attempt to buoy his spirits. His son was seriously ill. His wife had died tragically in a fire a year or two before. The Civil War was raging in 1863 with no better effect than to slaughter a generation of young American men of both races.

And so Longfellow went on to pen the next two verses – the ones that are never printed in books of carols and never sung or printed in a Christmas card:

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  

 It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men! 

You can just feel Longfellow falling into the grips of despair – as so many people do at Christmas, when the expectations for cheerfulness are high and we encounter times when we don’t feel at all cheerful. Let’s sing the next verse which describes his feelings:

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth," I said;
“For hate is strong, And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” 

 At this point, according to Longfellow’s biographer, he heard the bells actually break out in Cambridge, as the churches began to call people to worship. And a miracle occurred – a sign of God entering the heart of a man – and he penned the last verse, which includes the lines:

 “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, 

This may seem glib – moving from utter despair to joy at the sound of a peal of bells. But it is so often like that with us. We do not know how or why God breaks into our world, into our personal lives, into our fragile, frightened hearts – but God does. And it doesn’t take much to recognize a sign of God if our eyes and ears are open to it. Maybe the water we drink is often wine and we don’t notice it. Maybe God is raising people from the dead everywhere but they or we don’t notice. God is healing all the time, but we are often looking elsewhere and miss the moment.

Hope comes from attentiveness, from listening with the ear of our heart, looking with the eyes of faith at what is happening around us, seeing the signs – for instance of hundreds of people in this country welcoming refugees into their homes, churches inviting the homeless for Christmas dinner, intentional friendships formed among Christians, Muslims and Jews in our city.

And then the sound of a church bell may not sound so glib after all. It’s a little like the ending of Dickens’ Christmas Carol when Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning after his night of frightening confrontations with the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. He wakes to a whole new world, sees with completely new eyes that there is real goodness in the world. And interestingly, it is the bells in the city of London that most express Scrooge’s ecstatic happiness. Dickens says:

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, his was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long, line of brilliant laughs! 

“I don’t know what day of the month it is! said Scrooge. “I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!” 

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding, hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!” 

And Scrooge learns it is Christmas Day.

Longfellow’s final stanza may be a little more reserved than Scrooge’s wild elation, but it is just as joyful. As we sing the final stanza, may our eyes be open to see the signs, the miracles around us, right now – the peace that we will shortly offer to each other, the bread and the wine offered by God at this table, the Christmas dinner to follow, the sharing of fellowship with friends old and new. And may we always keep our eyes and ears – and especially our hearts – open to God’s invasion in our lives. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . and the darkness could never extinguish it.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

Homily: Christmas Day, 2015 St. John’s Convent Sr. Constance Joanna, SSJD

Homily: Advent 2c Sunday, December 6, 2015 - preached by The Rev'd Andrea Budgey

With the coming of Advent, our lectionary presents us, every year, with the image of John the Baptist, the foremost messenger of the coming of Jesus into the world. Luke describes John's appearance on the scene with a quotation from that familiar and dramatic passage from Isaiah: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God ' ”. “Prepare the way of the Lord...” In Advent, we prepare our hearts for the coming of Christ, trying to be attentive to the great mystery of the Incarnation in our own lives, but there's more to it than that. Luke situates John very firmly in a historical context, reminding us that this mystery is revealed not only spiritually, but in the broader, messier world around us.

I suspect that we don't often analyse this passage, with its grand metaphors of divine landscaping, very closely: we're not meant, I think, to picture God's coming into the world as a levelling which will transform the physical, or even spiritual, vistas of our earth into a vast and undifferentiated plain, eliminating diversity and gradation, but rather, I believe, to imagine a transformation and reclamation of the human landscape on the principles of God's justice. We know, when we stop to consider, that many, many people in our society are trapped in dark vales of poverty and despair which they are powerless to escape unaided, faced with sheer cliffs of marginalisation and prejudice and indifference which they cannot scale alone; the paths before their feet are strewn with obstacles of illness, malnutrition, and bureaucratic delay. To fill the valleys to a level from which people can actually emerge safely, to make the heights passable, and to sweep away the jagged stones which cause our brothers and sisters to stumble, is to prepare the way of the Lord. To make straight the highway, to render it both just and true, is a work which can begin in charity, in small efforts of mending and realignment, but it is ultimately and inescapably a work of prophecy, of advocacy and exhortation. 

This is a work to which we are called as a church, to advocate for the oppressed and the vulnerable, to name injustice and to strive for transformation, and it's very concrete. For example, parishes in this diocese are being asked, at their vestries this year, to adopt a motion which addresses the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, committing themselves to education on First Nations issues, calling on the federal government to establish an inquiry into the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and asking the provincial government, in consultation with First Nations peoples, residential school survivors, and the churches, to develop mandatory curriculum on residential schools and the contributions of Aboriginal peoples to Canada. This is, admittedly, more prosaic language than that of Isaiah and Luke, but it is the same message: when we can overcome our genteel reluctance to let the spirit of our faith become incarnate in the flesh of the body politic, we may know ourselves to be participants in preparing the way of the Lord.

We do not labour at our prophetic tasks in preparation for the arrival of a God who is absent from us. The God in whose name we exercise justice and strive for equity is with us, a light the darkness cannot overcome, working in us – in our hearts, our minds, and our bodies – to achieve the purposes of the kingdom. John the Baptist, who would never know – in this life – of the saving death and resurrection of Jesus, was given the prophetic gift to name him as the Son of God. John came, we are told, that all might believe through him: prophecy demands transparency to the light of God, an effacement of self, and a clear sense of one's own identity in relation to God. When he is asked to identify himself, John's first response is “I am not the Christ” – the prophet knows him- or herself to stand over against God, and points always away from him- or herself and toward God. John gives way to the One who comes after him, and admits his own ignorance and doubt: twice he says “I myself did not know him, but...” Prophecy is an unfolding process of attention, obedience, declaration, and self-effacement. It is also a process – and here John is a very explicit example – in which we understand that we ourselves may not see the fulfillment of the promises we proclaim, or the full realisation of the work which God commands to and through us. This is something crucial to the work of justice and advocacy: however gratifying it may be to see a result from our efforts, the virtue of prophecy is measured on a far larger scale than our own quest for visible “success”. The task of proclaiming and preparing God's kingdom is in itself a gift, part of our invitation to enter into the life of God, the invitation which comes in the Incarnation. Christ comes to us, every moment of every day, calling us to live and love and work in him, surrendering ourselves and our preconceptions and our fears in harmony with his perfect self-offering and glorious resurrection. Let our Advent prayer today be for the gifts of the prophet – attentive discernment, humble obedience, fearless proclamation, and true self-effacement – that our lives may bear witness to the light, and manifest God's presence and love and justice in the world which waits for the coming of the kingdom.