The following sermon was preached in Winchester Cathedral by The Bishop of Winchester, The Rt Revd. Michael Scott-Joynt on CHRISTMAS DAY 2002 at the Sung Eucharist

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace…… (Luke 2:14)

“Mary treasured all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” (2:19)

Babies born in Bethlehem today may die because their mothers are kept waiting for hours at  roadblocks; and in the Congo, where I was two months ago, babies will have been born in the bush last night because their mothers, among tens of thousands of other people, were too frightened, of armed boys and men who rob and rape, to stay in their houses.

So what are we doing, what are we believing, as we celebrate the birth so long ago of Jesus?

The question is especially pressing, as so many millions all over the world are celebrating Christmas, or  have just celebrated Eid as Muslims or  Hanukkah as Jews, in the shadow of  a war with Iraq which threatens to affect them vastly more than Iraq threatens to affect the United States or this country  -  because they are Israelis or Palestinians who fear that Iraq will counter-attack Israel; or they are ordinary Iraqis; or people all over the Arab world who fear the destabilisation into chaos of their countries; or Christians in majority Muslim countries who fear that they will be held responsible for what will be seen as a Christian war against Islam; or because they are British Muslims alienated and made fearful for their future by the actions of their Government.

There are many  millions, too, for whom the horrors of other wars take precedence; no wonder that I heard next to nothing of Saddam Hussein in nearly three weeks in the eastern Congo, where the continuing war has been the cause of the deaths of some 2.5 million people since 1998, and where some 18 million have no access to services of any kind – and where this week further fighting has “displaced” another 60,000  people from their homes and so from the means to feed themselves.  

I found Congolese Christians convinced that only through Faith in Jesus, and through the life and ministry of the Churches, can there be Peace for their ravaged country. They have encouraged me to notice, and to take with a new seriousness and expectancy, the way in which Luke tells this Gospel story that we may have grown to know too well to be able to hear it accurately.

Luke knew well both his Bible, which Christians since his time have called “the Old Testament”, and the politics of his time; encouraged by the first and using its language, he addressed the second out of his faith in Jesus; and he challenges us to do the same.

Remember how the first Reading in this Service began: “How lovely…is the bringer of  good news, who announces peace and salvation, who says to Zion , “Your God is King””.

A few verses before we joined the story, Luke has begun with  “A decree went out from the Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered”; yet what follows speaks of another, the infant whom the shepherds will find “lying in a manger” , as “Lord” and “Saviour” (both favourite titles of the Emperor); and his birth means “glory to God in the highest heaven”, and “over the earth, peace” – the peace for which the Emperor, already increasingly worshipped as divine, had famously claimed the credit. For those with eyes to see, Luke is saying that this infant, not the Emperor and the pomp and culture of Rome, is the One in whom, through whose life and death and resurrection, the longed-for  kingly rule of God, the new world of Peace and Justice, has been established - “Your God is King” become the reality;  and in his Acts of the Apostles the same Luke describes this Good News  brought to the Rome of Augustus’ successors, and (as he puts it) “to the ends of the earth”, as Jesus’ followers are faithful as his witnesses – and how quickly the Greek word takes on its meaning of  “martyrs”!

I wonder whether you noticed, too, how Luke’s story includes the reactions of those to whom is announced  the birth of the infant who is “Saviour, Christ and Lord” – the shepherds, and his mother Mary?

The shepherds  exemplify those words from the Isaiah: “How lovely…is the bringer of  good news, who announces peace and salvation, who says to Zion , “Your God is King””; and Mary “squirrels it all away, turning it over in her heart”.  Both reactions  call for, challenge  and encourage such a response from us.

Through them, our Lord calls you and me to join the shepherds, and faithful Christians down the centuries, and so many Congolese and other Christians today - and in this country as well as  elsewhere - in looking to, trusting, Jesus as our and the world’s Lord and God, in learning together to submit our thinking, our fears and our hopes to His leadership,  and for his re-directing.  And this, both for every other element and level of our lives, and as we confront the “macro” realities of poverty and globalisation, of power and greed and debt and disease, of the mutual fears of  states and alliances and Faiths – and  the assumption that this war should and will happen.   Celebrating Christmas, the birth of Jesus as “Saviour, Christ and Lord”,  has to mean for us a new commitment to look to Jesus, as our Lord and God,   for “peace on earth”.

Within that, Luke – because the Christian Gospel - also holds under our noses a sharper and freshly contemporary challenge: the question of Empire, the question “Whose is the earth, who is Lord and King?” that runs through Scripture because it runs through history. Luke tells his story of the birth of Mary’s son, we worship Mary’s son  this morning as Emmanuel, God among us, in the faith that neither  the Roman Empire, nor any successor super-power, stands in his place as Lord, as arbiter of the world’s thinking and the world’s needs.

“Mary treasured all these things”- all that had happened, all that she was learning about her Son -  “and pondered them in her heart.” Let  us this Christmas, in this Eucharist, seek from Him the grace and power to do as she did.

Amen.