Winchester Cathedral Christmas Morning Eucharist 2004

Two days ago I found a e-mail from Kinshasa, from my friend Archbishop Dirokpa of the Congo – his Christmas message to colleagues, friends and supporters around the world at the end of a year which for him has contained on the personal level the death of his wife, worryingly serious illness and a double attack in his absence on his home, all in the context of the endemic violence, insecurity and political hiatus which plague the life and hopes of the vast majority of Congolese. He ended with these words:

“Take courage for the New Year and know that every step you take, no matter how big or small, is not a step that you are taking alone. You are walking in the company of Emmanuel and of your brothers and sisters in Christ.” 

With that “Take courage......realise and understand....”, and then with those last words, “You are walking in the company of Emmanuel and of your brothers and sisters in Christ”,  he catches the encouragement and the challenge to each of us this Christmas morning of that Prologue to John’s Gospel that we’ve just heard read, which included the words: 

“To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave authority to become children of God.” (John 1:12)

Alongside Congolese and Burmese, as well as British, “brothers and sisters in Christ” of all sorts and traditions, I have on my heart this Christmas people in Bethlehem with whom my wife and I spent six days in early November. 

Bethlehem is part of a Territory “Occupied” now as when Jesus was born – but today suffering a still more stringent and more demeaning Occupation: today Joseph would not get through the check-points into Bethlehem; and many a Mary has given birth at a check-point – and some have died - while the young soldiers have argued about whether a little family has the right permit to be allowed out or in. 

On one of our visits to the Basilica of the Nativity, four of us – a local man, a German Pastor and Lou and I – found no milling crowds as we, like many of you who have been to Bethlehem, had known before. We were the only pilgrims in that great, numinous building that has been cleaned and tidied after the occupation, the siege, the deaths there of April 2002. It struck me powerfully how remarkably, tragically appropriate a place Bethlehem is to be the birthplace of the Prince of Peace, the Lord and Hope of the world of our television screens, our newspapers, our workplaces and our families. It can stand for every front line of fear and frustration, of intractable disagreement, of violence actual or threatened, of hope against hope – and it’s a point where the three Abrahamic Faiths, the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim, rub shoulders....

But “the light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”. 

And although “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not receive him” – and today, in England, we must reflect with shame on the picture of Christian values and culture that our own country and the United States have presented especially to the Muslim world, including to our Muslim fellow-Britons, through these last years since 9/11 – what John says next is for each of us because it tells us who we are as Christians:

“To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave authority to become children of God.”

“Children of God.” Our Lord calls us to believe that this is the fundamental truth about each other and about ourselves, because of what we believe at Christmas about Him; and to long for this “becoming children of God” to be the main-spring of our lives. We have his authority to dare to be, like children of their parents, “imitators of God” (words of St Paul), “brothers and sisters in and of Christ” (again words first of St Paul), to dare to have his life formed within ours – in our own personal behaviour and in every life-style choice that we make, in thinking and speaking for God and in his character in our political judgements, in the face of the views of others who look to other authorities which they may or may not recognise.

If you’re like me, you know how hard, and often how puzzling, a path this is; and how often we take a wrong turning, fail to spot an opportunity or a challenge to which we should respond – or spot it but are not brave enough to meet it as a “child of God”. In so many ways we forget, we fail to believe, that he has given us “authority to become children of God.”

Perhaps, too, we forget, and so we fail to trust, what follows in John. Our reading ended by describing “the father’s only son” as “full of grace and truth”. Two verses later John continues: “and of his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace, grace over-flowing” – God’s love, which is Jesus’ character and purpose, poured into you and into me, so that we become his “children”, his witnesses. So by God’s giving, we don’t walk, and struggle, and fear, alone. 

Listen again with me to Archbishop Fidele Dirokpa:

“Take courage for the New Year and know that every step you take, no matter how big or small, is not a step that you are taking alone. You are walking in the company of Emmanuel, God with us, and of your brothers and sisters in Christ.”