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Celebrating Our Bodies: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Friday 24th December 2021 (Midnight Mass)

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Readings – Hebrews 4: 1–4 , John 1: 1–14

The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

The word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

For some of you here tonight, that will be a familiar expression heard in Church a hundred times and regularly read in your Bibles. For others, it will undoubtedly a very weird collection of words that makes no sense whatsoever. Yet this phrase sets out the most important thing about the Christmas story; it’s why Christmas became the biggest holiday of our calendar, and why it remained so over many centuries. So let me unpack it a little.

After celebrating my first Midnight Mass as a priest at Holy Cross, Seend, 25 December 2021

The Word is God – God who made the universe, God who was there in the very beginning, God who existed when the Big Bang went bang, God who made the Big Bang go bang. Our Gospel reading a moment ago said many strange things, and another of them was this: “the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So we have two beings in the beginning, who make the Big Bang go bang – God and the Word; but the Word is also God. It’s very odd, isn’t it?

Now this “Word”, as St John’s Gospel calls it, became flesh and dwelt among us. In the form of a tiny baby in the womb. Not the son of a King, but the son of a carpenter, who married his mother when she was already pregnant, dragged far from home by the cold bureaucratic order of a distant ruler occupying their country. That the maker of the universe should become one of us is odd enough; stranger still that He should do it as an ordinary man, in a backwater town, without even a proper roof over His head.

We human beings are made in the image of God, not only in our souls, but in our bodies, because Jesus Christ is God, the Word who was already there when the Big Bang went bang. Our bodies are beautiful gifts of God. Our bodies are both unique to ourselves and something we share with everyone else who has ever lived and will ever live. Our bodies have limitations – we are not supermen – but those limitations are not flaws, but design features.

Yet we live at a time when many of us seem to be profoundly alienated from our bodies. We see this most clearly in the epidemics of eating disorders and self-cutting which have become so widespread, especially among adolescent girls and young women.

Technology is part of the explanation for this, although only part of it. Instagram and Facebook hit us with page after page of beautiful people living perfect lives, with all their teeth perfect and not a hair out of place. It’s almost always fake – a pose held for a few seconds, assisted by plastic surgery and a digital photo filter – but it makes us think we are inadequate. Yet you are made to be the way you are, to have the body and face you were given by God.

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Reading the Signs of the Times

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This article first appeared in the September 2021 edition of Franciscan magazine.

“In these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son.” So begins the Letter to the Hebrews. These days, we might joke that God should speak to us in a collection of social media memes or a Zoom call. After all, that’s the way everybody else communicates these days.

The joke is fair enough, but it also misses the point. The people of 1st Century Palestine may not have been able to log on to Zoom to take part in a heavenly videoconference, but they could and did expect God to communicate in all sorts of ways. Receiving enlightenment and instruction from divine visions is a repeated theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Peter and Paul are both recorded as receiving direct instruction through visions. But the Father didn’t send the divine Word to people in visions, although presumably he could have done – instead He sent the Word directly, in the person of Jesus Christ. Personal presence matters; the Word was made flesh because we are creatures of flesh and blood.

What might the digitisation of human relationships, accelerated by necessity due to the terrible pandemic we are enduring, mean for the Church? Let us first explore its wider societal impact to shed some light on that.

It is now a generation since communication started migrating into digital spaces, mediated by screens. I notice this shift most profoundly in pubs; people on their own are much less likely to strike up conversations with strangers or the barman than they were when I first discovered their amber-tinted pleasures in the mid-1990s. Instead, singles constantly flick through their phones to pass the time. A more specific example: gay bars have closed at an astonishing clip, rendered commercially unviable after losing the section of their custom primarily interested in casual sex to dating apps which leave many of their users experiencing incessant digital rejection. Gone with the bars is the broader sense of community they provided, including for those who had no interest in hooking up. A good pub, gay or otherwise, allowed people to meet in a way that transcended class, politics, race, and educational levels, at least to the extent their locality or workplace environs did.

On social media, in contrast, people often slip into clusters of the like-minded, forming small and cohesive online communities trapped in their own groupthink, increasingly incapable of assimilating any alternative viewpoint, and regarding their very expression of such as at best fake news and at worst an act of hostility.

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A Tallinn Memorial from the Days before Nationalism

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Tallinn Memorial

In the Toomkirik, Tallinn’s Lutheran Cathedral, this memorial to those who “für das Vaterland starben [died for the Fatherland], 1812-14”.

In the wars against Napoleon, the ‘Vaterland’ the German-speaking Protestant élite of Estonia died for was the Empire of the Tsars.

200 years ago, nationalism and the nation-state were concepts only beginning to emerge. Due loyalty was assumed to be to one’s sovereign, not one’s ethnic kinsman.

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Tides Also Come In

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TIDES ALSO COME IN (A response to Arnold. And to Cupitt.) A stormy sea today. Grey rock pools catch a leaden sky In Lowry hues; not very far away Bangor’s a shade; the hills of Ireland peer, Like dragons’ silhouettes through wind-whipped spray. Come, take the salt air, walk while the wind’s high! Only, the … Read more

God in the West: the New Atheism and Its Discontents

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My Address to the Bournemouth William Temple Association, 5th December 2016     

Thank you for inviting me to speak at a meeting of the William Temple Association. Temple has long been a man I have admired. Indeed, he is a man whose prayers I often ask for, particularly when I confront some problem of presenting the Christian faith publicly. His Christianity and the Social Order, about to have its 75th anniversary, posed questions once seemingly answered by the welfare state, but has become extraordinarily fresh and relevant again over the past generation as a result of the changes in work and welfare.

That’s a reminder, at the start of my talk, that history does not move in straight lines nor proceed to any inevitable destinations.

Just ten years ago New Atheism stood at the zenith of its influence. A lot has happened since, and indeed the talk I will give tonight is considerably different than that I might have written this time last year.

It is often said that there is no period in history more difficult to understand than the very recent past. With that in mind, let us strain our imaginations to take ourselves back to the distant days of the mid-2000s, when the world was a very different place.

The God Delusion

Few books have been launched at such a perfectly apposite moment as was Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in 2006.

Two scenes dominated the public conception of God in the 2000s: the collapsing twin towers of the World Trade Centre after Al-Qa’eda attacked them; and Bush and Blair praying together before launching a badly planned war against the wrong target. By 2006, that war had gone awry, and Iraq was in the midst of sectarian bloodletting that was killing tens of thousands.

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