Love came down at Christmas

Here is my sermon from  yesterday Eucharist of Christmas at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

In my last parish we commissioned a mosaic which hung on the outside of the East wall of the church facing the street. The mosaic was simply the word ‘Love’ created in grafitti-style. It hung there for several years without a great deal of comment as part of the community garden we created until one Christmas, in high winds, it was blown down from its position on the East wall; quite literally a case of ‘Love came down at Christmas’.

Christina Rossetti’s wonderful carol, from which that phrase comes, focuses on the Christ-child as the ultimate expression of love:

‘Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, love divine;
Love was born at Christmas …

Love incarnate, love divine’

Through these words, she reminds us that God is love and that the incarnation - God become human - is as much a sign of love for us as is Christ’s crucifixion. As the Apostle John wrote, “God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven” (1 John 4. 9 & 10). That is what she means by that marvellous phrase “Love came down at Christmas.” The incarnation is at the heart of Christianity because it is a sign of the love that God has for us. God loves us so much that he is prepared to become one of us, even though this means huge constraints and ultimately leads to his death.

On Christmas Day last year Peter Wehner, an opinion writer for the New York Times, argued in a piece for that paper that: 'Because the Christmas story has been told so often for so long, it’s easy even for Christians to forget how revolutionary Jesus’ birth was. The idea that God would become human and dwell among us, in circumstances both humble and humiliating, shattered previous assumptions.’ As a result, ‘we … do well to remind ourselves of the true meaning of the incarnation.’

So what is that true meaning and what does it mean that love came down? When I have run Quiet Days on prayer in everyday life, I have often used a prayer by David Adam which provides a simple answer to this question.

Escalator prayer

As I ascend this stair
I pray for all who are in despair

All who have been betrayed
All who are dismayed
All who are distressed
All who feel depressed
All ill and in pain
All who are driven insane
All whose hope has flown
All who are alone
All homeless on the street
All who with danger meet

Lord, who came down to share our plight
Lift them into your love and light

(David Adam, PowerLines: Celtic Prayers about Work, Triangle, 1992)

This prayer uses the imagery of descending and ascending an escalator to ask that those at the bottom of the descent will be understood and ministered to before being raised up. The prayer is based on the understanding that, through his incarnation and nativity, Christ comes into the messiness of human life, as a human being, to experience, for himself, all that we experience; the betrayals, dismay, distress, depression, illness, pain, insanity, loss of hope, loneliness, homelessness, danger and despair that many of us experience at periods in our lives and which some experience as their everyday life.

Christ comes to understand all this and to bear it on his shoulders to God, through his death on the cross, in order that, like him, we too can rise to new life and ascend to the life of God himself. “Lord, who came down to share our plight / Lift them into your love and light.” This is the hope held out to us through the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem; that he was born into poverty, exile, danger, stigma for our sake, in order to be one with us in our lives. Jesus was born to be Emmanuel – God with us. As John 1. 14 says, in the contemporary translation of the Bible called The Message: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.” This is what Rossetti meant by that marvellous phrase “Love came down at Christmas”.

Because God, through Christ’s birth, has entered our world and moved into our neighbourhood, he has identified himself with us. As we have reflected, he became a human being experiencing the whole trajectory of human existence from conception through birth, puberty, adulthood to death, including all that we experience along the way in terms of relationships, experiences, emotions and temptations. He has been made like us, his brothers and sisters, in every way, tempted in every way just as we are and able to sympathize with our weaknesses. As Hebrews 4. 16 say: “He's been through weakness and testing, experienced it all — all but the sin.”

This can be seen as the fulfilment of a promise of God recorded in Isaiah 43. 1 - 3:

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.”

That then means that, as we pass through life’s challenges, we never walk alone. As a result, we have a reason to sing, with the fans of Liverpool F.C.:

“Walk on, through the wind
Walk on, through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone.
You’ll never walk alone.”

The wonderful result of love come down at Christmas - of Christ’s nativity and incarnation – is that God is with us in all of our experiences. He is the one who leads us beside the still waters and walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death and he can do this because in Jesus he has experienced human life for himself. As a result, God understands and will be alongside us in all our experiences. God’s promise is that he will be with us as we walk the path of life and that is where true security is to be found.

As we know from our online lives: ‘... there is no substitute for being there - incarnate or, literally, in the flesh.’ No amount of words that we send ‘by post or by telephone or over social networking sites - can ever match the visceral reality of presence.’ ‘Face to phone or face to screen’ can ‘never match face to face’ (Rhidian Brook, Thought for the Day) and that is why Love came down at Christmas.

The novelist Charles Williams suggests, in ‘The Descent of the Dove,’ that the incarnation, because it is not simply about God taking on flesh but also about our humanity being taken up into God, is also the ultimate affirmative act. This is based on the understanding that nothing is lost and everything can be redeemed. All experience and all images are ultimately to be gathered in and up to God and, in this sense, the beauty found in the selfless giving of the incarnation and crucifixion really will save the world.

So, by becoming one with us through the incarnation – by being the Love which came down at Christmas - God is able to be with us through times of darkness until we come to live with him in the light forever. As David Adam prays, Lord, who came down to share our plight, lift us all into your love and light. Amen.

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Bruce Cockburn - Cry Of A Tiny Babe.

The art of embodied experience

Transpositions has an excellent post today by Peter Phillips entitled Embodying Art: Renewing Religion?

Phillips argues that "the Church in the West faces continued decline until it reverses its rejection of artists who can frame and present their own embodied experience and draw their audience into an embodied understanding of the world in which they live or hope to live."

This is because "everything we experience has to be embodied ... every experience we have can only be perceived, received, experienced by a sentient, embodied individual." Art also needs to be experienced; art makes its own statement regardless of its audience but "the produced data (visual, verbal, aural, oral, plastic, moving, multimedia, monomedia) is usually meant to be experienced through the locus of embodiment."

"This was a truth which the medieval European Church understood" that, at its heart:

"religion is better understood as embodied experience than by rational assent. Think of all the sense images in Christianity alone: blood, wine, bread, flesh, sacrifice, baptism, circumcision, eating, drinking, purification, washing, meals, healing, touch, kiss, embrace, bite, devour, the word of God made flesh."

Therefore, "Art embodied, ‘live’ or digital, in all its forms offers an iconographic entry point into a multisensory embodied experience of Christianity itself."

Nicolas Bourriaud argued that relational art takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” and that a work of art, if it is to be successful, “will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space” by being “open to dialogue, discussion, and that form of inter-human negotiation that Marcel Duchamp called “the coefficient of art”.”

Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics suggests that “Art is a state of encounter” and that the role of artworks is that we learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” through participating in “arenas of encounter”, created by the artworks themselves, in which momentary micro-communities are formed:

“Today’s art, and I’m thinking of [artists such as Gonzalez-Torres, ... Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre Huyghe] as well as Lincoln Tobier, Ben Kinmont, and Andrea Zittel, to name just three more, encompasses in the working process the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it. A work thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers.”

What such artists produce, Bourriaud argues, “are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences ... of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out.” In other words, such artworks create “relations outside the field of art”: “relations between individuals and groups, between the artist and the world, and, by way of transitivity, between the beholder and the world.”

Richard Davey has a marvellous phrase for the network of relationships which form around any artwork; “respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."

As Phillips notes in his post, there would seem to be many resonances between what are essentially 'happenings' which involve the viewer as participant (indeed, which move those who are other than the artist from viewer to participant), the art created by 'relational' artists, and what happens in church services.

The Eucharist is a happening which is only completed by the congregation becoming participants and which only has meaning as this occurs. The Eucharist can only proceed if the president receives responses from the congregation to the Eucharistic Prayer and the point and culmination of the Eucharist is when the congregation take the body and blood of Christ into their own bodies. A theological analysis of relationships at this point should conclude that the body of Christ has been both dispersed and gathered among and by the receiving church community. There are significant parallels to significant works of relational art such as Rikrit Tiravanija's shared meal installation.

It is my belief that as Christians we should be seeking to create temporary signs of the Kingdom of God which can be experienced by those in our community but which are only tasters for the fullness of the Kingdom which is yet to come. These are embodiments of the Kingdom. The Eucharist is the central example of such signs which, as David Jones consistently stated, have to participate in the reality which is being signed in order to have validity and meaning.

Again, there are significant parallels to Bourriaud's idea of an endless succession of actions (or 'space-time elements') in which a temporary collective is formed by means of which fairer social relations are permitted together with more compact ways of living and many different combinations of fertile experience.

All this is ultimately about the reality and necessity of incarnation. As Rhidian Brook once said on Thought for the Day:

"... there is no substitute for being there - incarnate or, literally, in the flesh. No amount of words sent by post or by telephone or over social networking sites - can ever match the visceral reality of presence. Face to phone or face to screen will never match face to face."

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Evanescence - Tourniquet.