The Archbishop of Canterbury says Christmas challenges individuals and whole societies alike not to build lives based on selfishness and fear, but to be open to searching questions about identity and solidarity, stark questions that are more pressing in the wake of falling confidence in institutions and challenges to social order.
In his Christmas Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Archbishop Rowan Williams says that the coming of Christ still poses immense challenges to the way people understand their lives and the times they live in. The Gospels are still full of questions to us about who we are and how we respond to God’s love – and early Christian writings are full of the faltering attempts to give voice in response.
“Very near the heart of Christian faith and practice is this encounter with God’s questions, ‘who are you, where are you?’ Are you on the side of the life that lives in Jesus, the life of grace and truth, of unstinting generosity and unsparing honesty, the only life that gives life to others? Or are you on your own side, on the side of disconnection, rivalry, the hoarding of gifts, the obsession with control? … What we say or do in our response to Jesus is our way of discovering for ourselves and showing to one another what is real in and for us … the truth is still an uncompromising one: if you cannot or will not respond, you are walking away from reality into a realm of trackless fogbound falsehood.”
The challenge, he says, is not simply to individuals but to society as a whole to find words to respond and he cites the Book of Common Prayer, which is this year celebrating its 350th anniversary, as providing an example of how a society’s response came to be articulated. It underlines, he says, notions of duty and common interest; speaking of and to a world in which the church, the state and the rich and powerful need continually to be aware of the immense obligations owed by those who have much to those who are poor and vulnerable. He says that, even though centuries old, the Prayer Book reflects far more than the social conventions of the day:
“ … much of this language feels dated – we don’t live in the unselfconscious world of social hierarchy that we meet here. But before we draw the easy and cynical conclusion that the Prayer Book is about social control by the ruling classes, we need to ponder the uncompromising way in which those same ruling classes are reminded of what their power is for, from the monarch downwards. And the almost forgotten words of the Long Exhortation in the Communion Service, telling people what questions they should ask themselves before coming to the Sacrament, show a keen critical awareness of the new economic order that, in the mid sixteenth century, was piling up assets of land and property in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite.’ The Prayer Book is a treasury of words and phrases that are still for countless English-speaking people the nearest you can come to an adequate language for the mysteries of faith.”
He quotes from the communion service as a pointer to a developing understanding of mutual obligation:
“If ye shall perceive your offences to be such as are not only against God but also against your neighbours; then ye shall reconcile yourselves unto them; being ready to make restitution.”
The need to learn these lessons is all the more important, he argues, in the wake of the events of the past year:
“The most pressing question we now face, we might well say, is who and where we are as a society. Bonds have been broken, trust abused and lost. Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today’s financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark.
And into that dark the Word of God has entered, in love and judgment, and has not been overcome; in the darkness the question sounds as clear as ever, to each of us and to our church and our society: ‘Britain, where are you?’ Where are the words we can use to answer?”
The full text of the Archbishop’s sermon is available at:
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2292/archbishops-christmas-sermon-dont-build-lives-on-selfishness-and-fear