22nd December 2019

This morning's homily:

…they shall name him Emmanuel’,

which means, ‘God is with us.’

(Gospel reading for the day; Matthew 1.18-end)

God with us, you and me, and those like us spanning all the way back to that first night in Bethlehem when God was with them.

Richard Rohr, my favourite Catholic priest and Franciscan says this in the introduction to his “Preparing for Christmas” Advent book:

We Franciscans have always believed that the Incarnation was already the Redemption, because in Jesus’s birth God was already saying that it was good to be human, and God was on our side.

For me during each Advent this is the crucial point; coming once again to that realisation that The Creator of all things, the one with unimaginable power, chose, for whatever reasons, to not only live amongst us, to be with us, but to be one of us. 

And it’s not just the realisation of that fact but what that meant and still means now. So much of our history as an institution has been spent elevating spirit and soul above the flesh, and concentrating on the supposed sinfulness, the badness of our bodies, that we overlook the most important thing; God chose the flesh. God chose to be embodied, chose to be what we are, with all it’s problems, with all it’s fallibility and frailty.

I don’t know what your relationship is with your body but mine has been mixed. It’s only now as I’m getting older that I appreciate what my body is, what it can do, even as it starts to let me down more than maybe it used to.

Maybe it’s the transient nature of our bodies which causes us to overlook them, Spirit and soul are permanent whilst our bodies are just for a time, our bodies can also be the cause of anger and frustration as they let us down or are subject to acute or chronic illnesses which effect the quality of our lives and ability to live the abundant life.

The church has at times, and I don’t know whether we feel this more as women, led us to be ashamed of our bodies, but this for me directly goes against God’s message to us. By choosing a human fleshy, fallible body God is saying “this is good; this is Holy, this is part of me”.

Today is the Sunday in Advent set aside for Mary and Kaitlin Hardy Shetler put a poem on her social media platforms this week which spoke of what Mary’s body went through in bringing Jesus into the world, how she felt to hold him close, to try and breast feed him, an inexperienced young mum in an outhouse. It made such a change from our basic Christmas Carol understanding of that first Christmas, or theology filtered though a white, male, middleclass perspective though hundreds of years. It’s a visceral, beautiful poem. The more prominent inclusion of women’s voices in our church gives us a whole new perspective on the incarnation and Jesus’ birth.

Through the God who has chosen our messy, imperfect world and our messy imperfect bodies we have, unique amongst faith traditions, the God who is with us. When I’m with a patient, whether as a nurse or a chaplain, I have no explanation for them as to why they have an illness, or why we sometimes have to suffer in the ways that we do, but I do have the certainty of the God who is with us, has suffered as we sometimes suffer, and is Emmanuel.