Diocese of Chichester

Bishop of Chichester says Christmas can be seen as the essential protest against extinction and the damage we are doing to the planet.

The celebration of Christmas concerns “the recovery of respect for persons, for places and for the planet” and can be seen as “the essential protest against extinction and the damage we do to the earth” the Bishop of Chichester, Dr Martin Warner, said in his Christmas sermon in Chichester Cathedral today.

The Bishop focused on the role of Mary in both the Christmas story and birth narratives and explains how theology has reinterpreted Mary’s often understated significance for every generation.

“Mary’s indispensable role in God’s work of restoring creation to its former beauty is persistently expressed through the mystery of creation itself.She is identified with the woman in the book of Revelation who is clothed with the sun standing on the moon, and crowned with stars,” explains Dr Warner.

The Bishop looks at some of the images associated with the Virgin Mary over time including the theme of “the rose, in some of our oldest and devotional texts about Christmas.”

Referring back to the theme of the symbol of the crib, which featured in the Bishop’s video Christmas message to his Diocese, Dr Warnersaid that the great theme of liberty in the Old Testament was present for those come to worship at the crib: “They will encounter that same God, revealed through the mystery of the virgin birth, in which the whole glory of the Godhead takes flesh in Mary’s womb, her self-offering is consumed but she in her person is preserved intact, free and fruitful in her motherhood.”

The Bishop explains how the true significance of the symbol of the crib is understood here in terms of Mary’s response to God’s call. In the light of the damage we have been and continue to do to the planet, Christmas demands that we recover the respect “for people, places and the planet.”

Dr Warner ends will a rallying call: “So let us come in awe and wonder as Christ, the everlasting Lord, offspring of a Virgin’s womb, is placed not simply in the manger, but into our hands and lives in holy communion and with the angelic host we proclaim this truth: “God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine”.

Ends

Here is a full text of the sermon

The processes of preparing for Christmas have provided plenty of opportunities to perfect the art of being a grumpy old man.“For goodness sake, what planet are these people on?”has been a refrain I think I’ve heard myself using on more than one occasion.

But I’ve also been caught out by something that has silenced my grumpiness and made me take stock of why Christmas matters, why it is a season of joy, and how powerfully it can transform us.What caught me out is the white Christmas rose – not really a rose at all, but its simplicity and flowering in late December have lent it the dignity of that name.And I have been struck by the theme of the rose in some of our oldest devotional texts about Christmas, but specifically about Mary, the mother of the Christ Child.

“There is no rose of such virtue, as is the rose that bare Jesu”, is the reference to Mary in one of these texts.Set to music by Benjamin Britten, and again by John Joubert, this has become a familiar part of the Christmas repertoire in our Anglican musical tradition.

And yet we rarely explore the significance of Mary, the virgin mother, to which it points us.The rose, associated with fragrance, with love, with beauty, and in the history of England, with dynastic rivalry for political power, has a certain nobility about it that marks it out as an appropriate flower to be associated with Mary, and with the story of the birth, death, and resurrection of her son, Jesus Christ.The fragrance of good actions, contrasting with the stench of corruption; the power of love to overwhelm fear and hatred; the demand that beauty makes upon us in the exercise of justice, and our political power struggles judged against the revealing of God’s authority in the fragility of a vulnerable child – these are considerations about the meaning of Christmas that is held in the description of Mary, the mystic rose.

There is something more than delicacy in the poetry of words blended with music that points us to Mary, the rose of virtue and mystic beauty: if we have the patience and humility to explore further, we discover an invitation through and beyond the routines of this world into a deeper truth and mystery.

Every child knows that night time is when mystery comes alive, as Raymond Briggs’ popular story of The Snowman indicates.The star is a potent symbol of the power of mystery.We have lost the habit of reading the night sky, though for our forebears it was like an App on the phone.And when we can escape the realms of contemporary light pollution, and look up at a night sky, studded by the bright lights of the stars, we never fail to be amazed.

Here is mystery that reminds us of our finitude and yet it is only the start of the adventure of faith that unfolds from the guiding of a star that brings us to the crib, and to Mary and the Christ child.

Mary’s indispensable role in God’s work of restoring creation to its former beauty is persistently expressed through the mystery of creation itself.She is identified with the woman in the book of Revelation who is clothed with the sun standing on the moon, and crowned with stars.

These are not trivial decorations; they point to a deeper, cosmic and universal truth about the mystery of the Christmas celebration: something is happening here that touches the very nature of creation itself.John Milton identifies the point of dislocation in the order of nature to which the birth of Mary’s child brings restoration.In Paradise Lost, Milton describes the dreadful impact of human pride and disobedience:

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,

Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe

That all was lost.

As a popular expression of this seriousness, the ancient carol of the holly and the ivy draws our attention to Mary, while introducing references to the red berry, the prickle of the holly leaf and its black, bitter bark that foretell the redemptive death on the cross that lies ahead of Mary’s child.

These very English traditions of celebrating the role of Mary in the work of God’s salvation draw from the early foundations of Christian teaching.The 7th century teacher, John of Damascus, invites us to see the Old Testament story of the Burning Bush as a powerful example of the mystery that Mary presents to us in the story of our redemption by God.

The bush that Moses sees at the start of his epic vocation, is enveloped in flames the symbol of the fire of love and glory by which God is so often depicted.But the glory of the flames does not destroy the bush; it is preserved intact.This sign reconfigures human reason to open our minds to God’s mystery; it redefines human space to allow access in the material world to sacred, eternal and invisible reality.

The consequence of this encounter for Moses was the liberation of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt in order to worship and serve the Lord their God in freedom and a land of their own.

Those who come to worship and adore at the crib will encounter that same God, revealed through the mystery of the virgin birth, in which the whole glory of the Godhead takes flesh in Mary’s womb, her self-offering is consumed but she in her person is preserved intact, free and fruitful in her motherhood.

I said earlier that the Christmas rose, in its simplicity had made me think again about why Christmas matters, why it is the season of joy, and how it can transform us.

The joyfulness of this season is, of course, to be found in family and friends, in acts of kindness and generosity, in presents and in hospitality.But another poet, John Betjeman, poses a sharp question in the poem, Christmas, his disarmingly genial musing on our seasonal festivities.His question is this: “Is it true?”Are the tissued fripperies, the sweet and silly things, the gaudy houselights that he predates – are these just for Christmas, or is there something else?Is it true?Is there reality, hope and eternal purpose mixed up somewhere in all the goodwill (“Girls in slacks remember dad/And oafish louts remember mum”)?

The material truth of Mary’s mothering does, I believe, point us to this something else.Beyond superficiality and superstition it points us to sacramentality and the restoration in what we touch and taste and see and hear of the beauty and perfection of our eternal destiny.The celebration of Christmas is the essential protest against extinction and the damage we do to the earth.It is the recovery of respect and reverence for persons, for places and for the planet.It is certainly the assertion that the joy of this season will outlast the grumpiness of growing old, for it promises the recovery in each one of us of the freedom of the children of God.

“Is it true?” asks the poet.Let the answer come from a theologian who shaped the Oxford that was so formative for Betjeman.In one of his Anglican and Oxford sermons, St John Henry Newman gives this response:

The world seems to go on as usual.There is nothing of heaven in the face of society; in the news of the day there is nothing of heaven; in the faces of the many, or of the great, or of the rich, or of the busy, there is nothing of heaven; in the words of the eloquent, or the deeds of the powerful, or the counsels of the wide, or the resolves of the lordly, or the pomps of the wealthy, there is nothing of heaven.And yet the Ever-blessed Son, ten times more glorious, more powerful than when He trod the earth in our flesh, is with us.

So let us come in awe and wonder as Christ, the everlasting Lord, offspring of a Virgin’s womb, is placed not simply in the manger, but into our hands and lives in holy communion and with the angelic host we proclaim this truth: “God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine”.