• Home
• Services at Saint Peter’s
• Theology
  • What We Believe
  • The Pulpit
  • The Caversham Lectures
• News
  • News and Opinion
  • The Rock Archive
  • News Archive
  • Our Printed Heritage
  • Photo Gallery
• People
  • Friends of Saint Peter’s
  • External Links
• About
  • Music at Saint Peter’s
  • Saint Peter’s Character
  • Our History
  • Church Groups
  • Staff and Contacts
  • How to Get Here
• Login
  • Parishioners’ login
  • Vestry Members’ login
• Search Saint Peter’s

That Human Medium of Communication

Christmas Day : 25 December 2012

Not long before his death the late, great Johnny Cash penned an ironic song called, "Your own personal Jesus." Its subject was the electronic church, and the way television evangelists feed off the deep pools of loneliness and heartache in an atomised American society. Huddled around the flickering tube through the long night hours, without friends, without effective support networks, without inner resources, or a theologically literate way of making sense of the world, these people are sitting ducks for the flash Harries of television land, who reach out to them in their living rooms with the promise of a God who is tailor made to the contours of their personal misery. This is a totally individualistic religion, without community, without any sense of wider relationship, and oddly enough without any sense of actually relating to the preacher on the box as a real live human being. In the end the electronic church worshipper is left as alone as ever - even the God who has been served up to them is more of an idol created by their individual longings, rather then the full blooded God of surprises, who has not been captured by our agendas, whom we meet in the pages of the Bible.

The church of our day often tries with all its might and main to use the latest technology to communicate with bigger audiences. There is E church; there is talk of virtual reality worship that one can plug into on the Internet. Some of these are good ideas as a pastoral adjunct of what churches are already doing. But always the problem with these bright ideas is that in the end you are gazing at a flickering image, rather then picking up all the cues of from someone who is right there in front of you communicating with you in every sense as you interpret their gestures, facial expressions and body language.

How to communicate effectively - how to truly connect with your audience - how to relate at the deepest level with the people you want to draw alongside - this is not just the church’s issue - it is God’s - and what is more for him it is an even bigger challenge. For the human race since that original catastrophe that we call the Fall has not wanted to listen - has been intent on doing its own thing in its own way regardless of the consequences. And even more significantly God and human beings are radically different kinds of being - there is a huge gulf in ways of operating, in ways of understanding, and in modes of personal existence.

Any attempt at communication across such a divide is bound to bring with it the possibility of misunderstandings, distortion, and the tuning out of the target audience. That is particularly the case since God is operating under a considerable self-imposed limitation. God respects our freedom, our right to say, "no thank you" - so the means he chooses to get through to us will not involve coercion, seduction, or false advertising. In a sense the Bible is the record of these communication attempts - through the Prophets, through his special people the children of Israel, through the Shepherd Kings of Israel, and so on. Yet all these communication attempts are at one remove - they involve the use of messengers and intermediaries.

What we are celebrating tonight/today is a staggeringly different initiative by God to get through to us. In the incarnation God modified his being. God inserted himself into the medium of existence that is ours. Within one particular human being he became completely who and what we are, while at the same time remaining his unique divine self.

To use an analogy, it is as though we really had discovered life on Mars, and that so great was our desire to establish a relationship of affinity with the inhabitants of Mars that we used amazing scientific techniques to make an outstanding human being, who was also like one of the Martians in every respect. This dual nature human being and Martian would at the same time be aware of their difference, their uniqueness, their mission to link together the creatures of our respective planets.

Christianity is an embodied religion. The resurrection of the body isn’t just an image or a metaphor. It points to the fact that we require a body to be present to others, to have a sense of ourselves, to maintain that sense of continuity between who we were in this reduced earthly reality, and who we will be in our transformed, glorified body. We are creatures of eternity orientated towards that homeland of the life of the world to come - yet even as creatures of the dust we came from, we have our earthly joys here too.

The incarnation of Jesus in the stall at Bethlehem is a very fleshly business. It is about the embodiment of God. God understands what communication really is for human beings. We read a person who is right there in front of us by all manner of subtle cues - by the tone of their voice, by their facial expressions, by the way they move their body, by their gestures. And when we get close up and personal there is the tactile dimension of touch, not to mention the way they smell, and even the taste of them. They say that we make up our minds about whether we like or dislike a person within the first 10 seconds of meeting them, and it is these kinds of cues and clues that are the basis of our decision.

In the incarnation God has drawn as close to us as it is possible to get. He has become a human person, an identity, a narrative, and a life story, through which the invisible God becomes a visible reality that we can know and relate to. There are staggering implications in this that a sentimental telling of the Christmas story doesn’t even begin to touch on, and in a sense the church is still unpacking the richness of what all this means. I am going to finish by pointing to just two of these further dimensions.

First, in the incarnation God has become like us so that we can become like him. Of course we can never become a divine being just like God, but we can share to some extent in his character and in his liberty, and in that way become a little more like him. St Paul writes, "Though my outer nature is wasting away yet my inner nature is daily being renewed." When we are in tune with the God who came in Jesus he supplies fresh resources of being so that this kind of inner expansion of being can occur. Our salvation isn’t just about the forgiveness of our sins, and about finding peace with God, though of course it includes those things. It is also about growing up into a greater maturity of character, into an enhanced spiritual, intellectual, emotional and relational capacity, so that we can become, as it were, junior brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.

And secondly, God is so much in love with us that he has become like us in order to develop a relationship of affinity with us. An amazing exchange has taken place in which he has become homiform so that we can become deiform. It is this first part of the exchange that I am dwelling on here, the reality that he has changed himself in order to develop his relationship with us.

The church says that at his Ascension Jesus Christ took his human nature into the Godhead - that human nature now dwells within the eternal being of God. The church teaches that, without really going on to spell out what this actually means in terms of the way God is in himself, as an end result of what takes place in the Christmas story. There is much work for the theologians to do here.

They say that when two people deeply love each other, and have spent a considerable amount of time together, then they come to resemble one another in some ways. As the husband in such a partnership once said to me, "It is hard for me now to know where I end and she begins." To some extent this is what has happened as a result of the incarnation - God and humankind have modified one another to an extent that wont be fully clear until time is over, and the human story is complete.

This is a stupendous miracle that we are celebrating tonight/today - one that is on a par with the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead - an exchange of natures. It began when he took this amazing step towards us, in a way that we could never have anticipated, and now nothing will ever be the same again.