Choose Life

Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral

Rowan Williams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781408190388
• eBook ISBN:
  9781408188392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

A collection of Rowan Williams' Christmas and Lent addresses, delivered over the course of his term as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The addresses that Rowan Williams has given in Canterbury Cathedral for Christmas and Easter are small masterpieces of this kind. They constitute part of Rowan Williams' essential legacy to Christian believers.

With a new introduction by Dr Williams, this is the first time these pieces have appeared in print. Perfect reading material for Lent or Advent.

Christmas Sermons

THE KINGDOM OF THE SIMPLE

Christmas Day broadcast 2002

The low vault was full of lamps and the air close and still. Silver bells announced the coming of the three bearded, vested monks, who like the kings of old now prostrated themselves before the altar. So the long liturgy began.

Helena knew little Greek and her thoughts were not in the words nor anywhere near the immediate scene. She forgot everything except the swaddled child long ago and those three royal sages who had come from so far to adore him.

‘This is my day’, she thought, ‘and these are my kind.’

Helena is speaking some seventeen hundred years ago; she is the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great in Evelyn Waugh’s 1950 novel named for her. Late in life, she has discovered the new faith of Christianity, and sets off to the Holy Land to anchor her new belief in the sheer physical facts of history and geography – because what is different about Christianity is that it identifies the mystery of God with a set of prosaic happenings in a specific place. God is just there for all, not locked up in technical language or mystical speculation, but, as Helena has said earlier in the novel, the answer to a child’s questions: When? Where? How do you know?

But Helena, longing for this simple vision, is still caught up in the bitter, devious world of politics. Her son the Emperor, confused and anxious at his own extraordinary success in subduing the Roman World, gets more and more embroiled in palace intrigue, in espionage and assassinations, in black magic, in the hall of mirrors that is the daily life of the powerful. Helena, brisk and honest though she is, can’t completely avoid getting caught up in this too; feeling trapped in Constantine’s world of plots and fantastic visions of a new world order, she sets off for Jerusalem to find the remains of the cross of Jesus.

So here she is in church at Bethlehem, tired and puzzled. And suddenly, as the priests process solemnly to begin the service, the story of the three wise men makes sense to her of some of what she’s experienced. These so-called wise men were her sort of people, the people she was used to: clever, devious, complicated, nervous; the late arrivals on the scene.

‘Like me’, she said to them, ‘you were late in coming. The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle. They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way …

‘How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot! How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

‘You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you. What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!’

Even on their way to Christ, the wise men create the typical havoc that complicated people create; telling Herod about the Christ child, they provoke the massacre of the children in Bethlehem. It’s as if, in Helena’s eyes, the wise, the devious and resourceful can’t help making the most immense mistakes of all. The strategists, who know all the possible ramifications of politics, miss the huge and obvious things and create yet more havoc and suffering. After all, centuries after Helena, here we still are, tangled in the same net, knowing more and more, stepping deeper and deeper into tragedy. Communications are more effective than ever in human history; analysis of national and international situations becomes ever more subtle; intelligence and surveillance provide more and more material. We have endless theoretical perspectives on human behaviour, individual and collective. And still the innocent are killed.

Yet – here is the miracle – the three wise men are welcome. You might expect that a faith which begins in such blinding simplicities, the child, the cattle, the barefoot shepherds, would have no place for the wise men in their massive foolishness. But, thinks Helena …

‘You came and were not turned away. You too found room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you too.’

Coming to the Christ child isn’t always simple. It just is the case that people come by roundabout routes, with complex histories, sin and muddle and false perceptions and wrong starts. It’s no good saying to them, ‘You must become simple and wholehearted’, as if this could be done just by wishing it. The real question is, ‘Can you take all your complicated history with you on a journey towards the manger? Can you at least refuse to settle down in the hall of mirrors, and go on asking where truth really lies? Can you stop hanging on to the complex and the devious for their own sake, as a theatre for your skills, and recognize where the map of the heavens points?’

‘You are my especial patrons,’ said Helena, ‘and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

‘Dear cousins, pray for me,’ said Helena, ‘and for my poor overloaded son. May he, too, before the end find kneeling space in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly.’

So: don’t deny the tangle and the talents, the varied web of what has made you who you are. Every step is part of the journey; on this journey, even the false starts are part of the journey, experience that moves you on towards truth. It won’t do to think of Christianity as a faith that demands of you an embarrassed pretence of a simplicity that has no connection with reality; isn’t this what so often leads people not to take Christianity seriously? As though you had to leave the full range of human experience outside the door (the stable door), while the innocent alone entered without challenge?

Helena’s answer is worth pondering. Bring what has made you who you are and bring it, neither in pride nor in embarrassment, but in order to offer it as a gift. It’s possible to say to God, ‘Use what my experience and my mistakes and false starts have made me in order to let your transfiguring love show through.’ It’s true that the Christmas event is precisely the answer to the simplest of human questions, to the ‘When? Where? How do you know?’ demands of the child. It’s true that those who are least well defended by sophistication and self-reflection get there first. They have fewer deceptions to shed, fewer ways of holding God at arm’s length, while so many of us have a lifetime’s expertise in this. From them we learn where to look; we know how much we long for that sheer presence and accessibility of God, the bare fact of the child in the manger, the life in Galilee, the mystery laid open. But we come as we are; room is made for us, healing is promised for us, even usefulness given to us if we are ready to make an offering of what W. H. Auden called our crooked heart. Evelyn Waugh knew something about this himself – like so many writers, he knew what it was for imagination to twist round on itself like a snake, he knew about the gaps that open between work and life, how a work finished and beautiful in its own terms emerges out of a human background of failure and confusion. He had no illusions about himself, recognizing the melancholy, anger and hyper-sensitivity that shadowed his life. His Helena is praying for her literary creator; the writing is a prayer for absolution.

In the straw of the stable, the humble and the complicated are able to kneel together. If God is there in the simplicity of the baby in the straw, the answer to a child’s question, that means he is there in naked simplicity for the sophisticated and troubled as well, those who have had long and tortuous journeys, cold comings, to the stable. Yes, we are told to become like children, faced with the invitation to believe and trust in the God of Bethlehem. But that is not the same as saying, as we all too often do, ‘Christmas is a time for the children’, meaning that it has nothing to say to grown-ups, who indulge the pretty fantasy for a short while but stay firmly outside the stable door.

Helena knows better. The childlike response of longing and delight can come even from a heart that has grown old and tired; and when such a response arises, let no-one think that they are too compromised, too entangled to be welcome. Waugh’s novel depicts a whole world grown old in intrigue and violence, cynicism, despair and false hope, and says that there is true hope in spite of all, in the indestructible fact of a cradle and a bit of stained old timber that once carried a human body in its death agonies, the cross that Helena finds in Jerusalem. Space has been made in this world, the real world of politics and struggle, for God to make himself at home, and to welcome all of us and use whatever we bring him.

So Helena prays for the late-comers, the confused, the gifted, the powerful who have so little power and freedom, the civilized and sensible who find, too late, that they have stood by and endorsed cruelty or corruption, those who have grown old and used to cynicism. The wise men stand at the cradle with a clear job to do for us, and Helena addresses them, unforgettably:

‘For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.’

‘FEAR NOT!’

Christmas 2003

‘Fear not!’, says the angel to Joseph, to Mary, to the shepherds. It is a recurring motif in the Christmas stories, and a significant reminder that the overwhelming news of God the Saviour’s coming is both all that the human heart could hope for and also something that powerfully disrupts the way the world goes and the way our lives go. There is something to be afraid of in the renewal of a world: I may not welcome being reconstructed or interrupted.

Religious commitment of any depth is bound to say to the world around it that the assumptions and habits of that world are not beyond question. It isn’t all that surprising if a secular environment looks at religion not only with suspicion or incomprehension but with fear. The proposal to ban Muslim headscarves in French schools suggests that there is still a nervousness about letting commitment show its face in public, lest ground be given to some threatening irrational power that will take over the world of reasonable people. President Chirac himself has defended the proposal by claiming that a school must be a ‘republican sanctuary’ in which children are protected from the cold winds of sectarianism while they absorb the proper values of their society. Religious belief is not banned, but its outward expression – the crucifix on the wall as much as the headscarf – has to be strictly controlled so that the purity of the nation’s values may be preserved. Faith must be invisible.

And at the same time, the Chief Rabbi of France encourages the men of his congregations to avoid wearing the skull cap in public because of the spiralling of anti-Semitic incidents. There’s more than one reason for religious commitment to be made invisible; sometimes invisibility is sought. Here, then, are two quite different aspects of the public face of religious belief and the complex reactions and feelings it produces – a secular world determined to protect itself against any show of religious faith; a religious community fearful about proclaiming its identity in public because of hatred towards its members. Different problems, different motivations; but behind both lies one central and urgent challenge to do with the public face of religious belief in the modern world.

For all our talk about pluralism, many still feel in all kinds of ways uncomfortable when religion makes a visible difference in public life – so that in turn religious people may feel excluded or threatened if they are visibly identified as members of a community of faith. Discomfort about religion, or about a particular religion, may be the response of an educated liberal or, at the opposite extreme, the unthinking violence of an anti-Semite; it isn’t easy to face the fact that sometimes the effects are similar for the believer. And in case we think the whole debate is just a French problem, we should recognize just a little of the same unease in the nervous sniggering about the Prime Minister’s religious faith which ripples over the surface of the media from time to time, or in the blustering irritation aroused by something like Joanna Jepson’s whistleblowing about our assumptions around abortion.

The fear of faith itself is part of what can breed fear in a vulnerable or minority community, of whatever tradition. And before we rise up and angrily deplore this, it’s worth pausing to ask just why faith provokes such a passionate protectiveness. Historically, the answer is, alas, that religious faith has too often been the language of the powerful, the excuse for oppression, the alibi for atrocity. It has appeared as itself intolerant of difference (hence the legacy of anti-Semitism), as a campaigning, aggressive force for uniformity, as a self-defensive and often corrupt set of institutions indifferent to basic human welfare. That’s a legacy that dies hard, however much we might want to protest that it is far from the whole picture. And it’s given new life by the threat of terror carried out in the name of a religion – even when representatives of that religion at every level roundly condemn such action as incompatible with faith.

The believer says to the secular world, ‘Don’t be afraid!’ Yet religion has appeared as something fighting to take over territory in the human soul and the human world – an empire pushing at the frontiers, struggling to defeat the independence and dignity of people. You may remember Swinburne’s famous lines – ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean! The world has grown grey with thy breath.’ That sums up what a great many people at least half believe. It comes from a highly selective version of history, yet it has enough plausibility to need an answer at the very deepest level.

And this is what our Christmas story and our Christmas faith offer. Why should Joseph and Mary and the shepherds not be afraid? Because what happens when God comes to earth is not something like the first landing of an occupying army, the first breach in our defences by a powerful enemy who wants to take all that is ours. The truth is as different as could be; and the clue is in those simple words, simple words that invite a lifetime’s joyful reflection: ‘The Word was made flesh’.

When God comes among us, he doesn’t first of all clear humanity out of the way so that he can take over; he becomes a human being. He doesn’t force his way in to dominate and crush; he announces his arrival in the sharp, hungry cry of a newborn baby. He changes the world not by law and threat but by death and resurrection. Robert Southwell’s poem wonderfully captures this overturning of all our terrors and apprehensions:

His batt’ring shots are babish cries,

His arrows looks of weeping eyes.

And the anonymous mediaeval lyric puts it unforgettably:

He came al so stille, Where his mother was,

As dew in Aprille, That falleth on the grass.

He comes in stillness. He comes in dependency and weakness. He comes by God’s absolutely free gift. Yet he comes from the heart of our own human world and life, from the womb of a mother, from the free love of Mary’s heart given to God in trust. And this is mysteriously the same thing as his ‘coming down from heaven’. He is utterly different, the human being who lives God’s own life; he is utterly the same, like us in all things, as the Bible says.

The manner of his coming tells us so many things – but not the least is that human nature, bruised and disfigured as it is by sin, is still capable of bearing the life of God. In the birth of God in flesh and blood, we see what we were made to be – carriers of divine love. And with this birth we begin our journey back to where we belong, back to God, back to what we were made to be. To live in peace and delight with God does not mean that our humanity has first to undergo such radical surgery that it barely seems human any more, that our nature has to be beaten into submission by a divine aggressor. He came all so still; he came to his own.

Here then is the real Christian response to the modern secular person’s fear. God is no hostile alien, snatching away what belongs to us. Faith is not either a perversion of human freedom or a marginal and private eccentricity. It is human freedom raised to its fullest by the fact that God has embraced it in love – ‘from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace’. The Word, as St John makes plain in this morning’s gospel, is no stranger in the world; he is the very centre and energy of creation itself, the heart of every heart.

So Christian faith does not seek to carve out a territory to defend for itself, nor does it look to take over a potentially rebellious world and subdue it by force. It simply witnesses to the world that the world will never be fully itself except in the glad receiving of God’s presence and the recognition of the ‘true light’ at the centre of all human, all created life. If this makes us afraid, the Christian will say, that is because at some level we are afraid of ourselves, of what we really are and might be; afraid of a destiny for human beings more glorious than we could imagine; afraid that we may have to change our lives unrecognizably in order truly to become ourselves.

No, it isn’t comfortable: it may be terrifying. ‘He came to his own’, yes, ‘and his own would not receive him’ – and ‘his own’ in this context is all of us who are made in his image and who yet can’t cope with his promise. And because we people of faith have so often behaved as though we had never heard or understood the Christmas gospel, we can’t expect the secular world to believe us straight away when we say that they have nothing to worry about and that faith is the flowering of human dignity not its opposite. First we have to show that we truly are on the side of humanity – by patient loyalty to people in their need, by courage and sacrifice for the sake of justice, by labour for reconciliation, setting people free from the threat of violence. God comes to ‘his own people’, religious people, and we have often failed to know or receive him.

And then, supposing we have cleared away the fears that arise from the way religious people have failed to witness fully to their God – then the deeper fears can and do come to the surface, the fears of what faith may demand of a person. Nothing will take away the challenge here; we can only hope that there are enough lives showing joy and humanity to make the challenge worthwhile – lives in which the eternal Word will speak. Such lives will have about them the great mark of God’s action in Jesus, which is that he doesn’t invade, doesn’t push us out of the way, doesn’t reduce or demean us; he invites, he opens up to us his own infinite hos...

Table of contents

• FC
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Christmas Sermons
• Easter Sermons