09.12.2013
International Carol Service Takes Place in St George and St Thomas’s
People from around the world gathered in the Church of St George and St Thomas on Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin, yesterday to take part in the annual Discovery International Christmas Carol Service.
The lessons were read in nine different languages including Irish, German, Yoruba, Igbo, French, Malawian, Italian and the Philipines. The Gospel was read in English by Archbishop Michael Jackson. The service was led by the rector, the Revd Obinna Ulogwara, who is also chaplain to the international community while lay reader, Gillian Dean, also contributed. (Both are pictured with the Archbishop.)
St George’s Brass Band were the special musical guests and gave a donation to the parish. Children from the international community sang a carol and Roisin Judge sang a solo. Organist Ciaran Judge played and sang also.
The sermon was preached by the Archbishop who opened the service with a tribute to Nelson Mandela. It is reproduced in full below.
Advent ii 8th December 2013; St George and St Thomas, diocese of Dublin
Readings: Nine Lessons and Carols
A sermon preached by the Archbishop
St Luke 2.1: … in those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.
My privilege is that of sharing with you some thoughts about Christmas; your gift to me is that you have decided to worship God with me and to listen. I shall try not to be too long–winded, nor to try your patience unduly. It is a delight to be with Obinna my good friend, and with the International Community of Anglicanism and beyond in Ireland. The words of the Hymn for the Feast of the Transfiguration, as sung at a warmer time of the year in the month of August: …‘tis good, Lord, to be here … sum up the sense of privilege and excitement which I feel.
We are in the Season of Advent and we are celebrating Christmas. This is not a criticism; it simply is the reality of how life works and how life moves forward. Either we are part of it or we step off it and allow others to take it all over. Advent is an invitation to do something with God. It is an invitation to walk in the light at the darkest time of the calendar year. And Christmas is a celebration of the same light of Jesus Christ which lives in and through the darkness, and, as St John tells us, the darkness can not and will not snuff it out. And so the wheel turns; we realize that the light switch which we use morning and evening and the darkness outside the kitchen window are metaphors – they carry the naming and the meaning – of the spectacular failure of evil to suppress goodness. And we too know that it is God who turns the wheel. This is the confident humility of Christianity which we want an old and weary earth to hear.
I cannot possibly tell you what Christmas means to any one of you. To me, it means the voice of the angels and the response of the shepherds. The angels represent God to the creation as we know it and are part of it; they inform, they protect and, while manifesting themselves to us, they still remain close to God. The shepherds are the lifeblood of Palestinian society; they farm and they have a stake in the land. As the Old Testament is not slow to tell and to teach us, shepherds have the opportunity to be cruel or kind, depending on their personality and their temper and their sense of professionalism. They have the responsibility for ‘the other’ who is weaker, who is dependent and who is ultimately incapable of life without being guided and steered and protected and helped. Angels and shepherds are part of the creation which God nurtures and to which God gives freedom and capacity to cherish and equally to destroy. This surely is what we have to grapple on a day such as this with a Reading about sin and evil in Eden, however difficult we find all of this to comprehend in a modern world. It remains part of our tradition, whether we feel we have grown out of it or not. I suggest that we haven’t.
What, I always ask at Christmas, do the angels and the shepherds see? Scripture tells me they see the glory of God revealed on earth; they see what theologians call: incarnation, the enfleshing of God in human form. They see a mother and a child and a father and animals. They see new creation from elements of old creation: God, angels, humans, animals. But in terms of theology and ecology, they see it and feel it from the bottom up. We start again every year with the predictable and what is taken for granted. The animals give heat and the mother gives life and the child gives salvation. He is destined to save his people from their sins: after all, his name is Jesus. Miraculously all the threads and components of salvation are there; after all, his name is Jesus, the one who will save his people from their sins.
Is this, then, simply a piece of cosy sentimentality? Is it the sort of decoration we used to see in the windows of department stores in this city and now find more readily in the windows of pubs? The life and the witness of the International Community are vital to our life and to our identity in Ireland and in the Church of Ireland. Earlier in the year, I spoke of the urgent need for structured and structural inclusion of those who were once immigrants to Ireland and who now are our friends and our neighbours. The hue and cry that greeted what many people saw as a slight on their generosity towards ‘the other’ convinced me more and more strongly that this reality is painful and that it has not been solved or resolved. Lady Macbeth springs to mind. The challenge, of course, is to inform people of the realities; the challenge is also to equip people who consider themselves to be on the inside to meet and to en–neighbour those who are considered to be on the outside. Maybe we will find, as the rest of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany unfold, that things are even more upside down and bottom up – so that the outsider in fact is the insider in the eyes of God.
In order to open the eyes of the self–styled and self–appointed insiders, I need the help and the assistance of everyone here. You help me in many ways: by the integrity of your witness and your fellowship; by the inclusivity of your togetherness; and always, always by your instinctive hospitality you model a harmony which all too often is lacking in other places. Don’t let anyone intimidate – or as archbishop Desmond Tutu says: whitemail – you out of this generous and trustful innocence of faith. You model a global internationalism of faith and generosity which ought to be the proper envy of everyone who is brave enough to call herself or himself Christian in this country.
The Gospel was born and bred out of a piece of imperial bureaucracy as my text from Scripture shows and tells us. It grows into the birth of a tiny child on earth who transforms the world because he is the child of God. We live in and by a very demanding world which imposes on us high standards and long hours of often impenetrable bureaucracy.
I wish you a very Blessed Christmas and leave you with another verse of Scripture:
St Matthew 2.6: Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, you are by no means least among the rulers of Judah, for out of you shall come a ruler to be the shepherd of my people Israel.
In a sense it could perhaps have been anywhere on earth – but it is to Bethlehem that we hasten with gladness and with love.