Sermons

Sunday 17th December, Carol Service

by Revd Chris Palmer


One of our most common prayers for people is that God will be with them. It what we pray for ourselves too. ‘Be with us, Lord…’ It’s the prayer we find on the lips of children, in inarticulate pleas in moments of despair, and in the most common greeting of the liturgy, ‘The Lord be with you…’

The problem is that such prayers give the impressions that God’s presence – his with-us-ness – is an uncertain, undependable things – a possibility that we might be lucky enough to have gifted to us, or even that we might be good enough to deserve. A prize for a life well lived, or at least the present that God gives to his beloved children – but always with the possibility that he’ll hold it back from us, or even a delicate ornament that we’d better not drop, or it’ll be broken beyond repair.

But everything in Christian theology – in the Gospel of Christ – tells us it’s not like that. God is present in and through all creation. His being fills all; he nearer to us than we are to ourselves and his spirit, which is God’s own being, penetrates all creation and animates all entire universe. The difficulty is not being with God – the difficult thing would be to escape God. As the writer of Ps 139 says, ‘Where can I go from your spirit? If I climb up the heavens you are there. If I make me grave in the earth, you are there also.’

But it doesn’t feel like this. Very often it feels as if we are abandoned, as if we are alone in the universe. We have no sense of God’s closeness, of his presence. And meaningful spiritual writers tell us the problem’s not that God’s gone AWOL, but that we’ve gone AWOL. In other words, we have spiritually drawn back from God, not he from us. In fact I’ve said that often myself. And in a sense it may be true. But it’s a bit like Galileo telling people that the earth orbits the sun – it wasn’t how they experience the world – and so it didn’t make sense. It looks to all intents and purposes as if the sun goes round the earth. If feels to all intents and purposes as if God draws back from us.

And the problem with both perspectives is perspective. We define ourselves as at the centre – and everything else, even God, is moving in relation to us.

And the mistake within the mistake is not just of seeing wrongly – it is one of arrogance. This is the reason that this warped perspective is not intractable.  It’s not only about a scientific or theological opinion; it touches on our pride, even our hubris, our sense of entitlement; and it opens us to the scary possibility that we are after all specks on the edge of existence, to being humbled beside the sheer enormity of God or the universe.

But the message of Christmas is that God meets us in our humility, in our smallness, in our insignificance. God takes flesh even on the edge of human society. In a strange outpost of the Roman empire, to a trade family, to an unmarried mother, to a Jewish mother in a world where the Jews were suspected and often despised. We have gone AWOL from God, because we’ve refused to acknowledge our own marginal place in the universe. If we were willing to see that we are on the edge, then we might just see that God is already with us.

But we relentlessly define ourselves as at the centre – and talk of others as on the edge. Other nationalities, people with different education, different sexuality, different economic positions. I’m not saying that we do this with prejudice or antipathy or fear (though all of these sometimes are true); merely that there is us and them.

What would it be like to see ourselves as the other? To see ourselves as them? To see ourselves as outside? And to recognise that it is precisely in our otherness that the incarnate God meets us. One of the hymns we sometimes sing ask, ‘Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name?’ It is something about that leaving of self in order to dwell at the edge that will open us to recognise that God is with us.

This sounds very theoretical. But it is deeply relevant. Almost all our politics is about keeping the world revolving around us – just look at the Brexit negotiations. Almost all our neuroses around educational opportunities, or promotions in our work place are the same. Our catastrophic failure to tackle climate change effectively and the rubbishing of science in the process, looks exactly like a rerun of Galileo and his detractors. And many more examples.

And invitation of God in the incarnate and crucified Jesus is to create a politics on the edge, a society in which the margins are the place of hospitality and celebration, an approach to the climate which put a generation far in the future at the centre of our hearts, and a spirituality in which we orbit around the overwhelming love of our creator God.

I have long thought that contemplative prayer is a form of prayer that allows us to be on the edge. Which invites us to lose ourselves in the enormity of the spirit, rather than anxiously manipulating God to revolve around our needs. And I always feel very conflicted, therefore, about the rise in popularity of mindfulness, which takes traditional contemplative practices and gives them a secular expression; and the reason I feel conflicted is that the practices and great, and I’m just delighted that these mindful practice are being promoted, but the rhetoric is around mindfulness is often self-referential – I can be less stressed, I can be more productive, I can be a better lover – whereas true contemplation is about losing ourselves on the edge of existence in order that we can discover that God has found us and places us at the centre of his heart.

We are truly with God, we are his delight, we are object of his love, we are valuable beyond measure – because of who God is, because of the God who makes us, because of the God who takes our flesh, because of God who is With Us so that We might be with God.