Christmas Day 2011
Preacher: Canon Carl Turner (Acting Dean and Precentor)
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery
fender, before Nana came to idy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a
stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a
child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become
Real.” “Does it hurt? asked the Rabbit?”
Words from one of my family’s favorite stories, ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’. We live in an age
when we are surrounded by so much that is not real; my teenage children now live in a
virtual world called Facebook .My old dad never had a credit card; at 82 years old he still
insisted that if money didn’t grow on trees it certainly didn’t magically appear in credit card
statements. And, of course, he was right; we live in an age when we are encouraged to have
what we want, when we want and governments in countries all over the world, including our
own, have borrowed beyond their means.
The occupy Exeter camp outside is part of a movement that is attempting to get us all to
think hard about what is real and what is an illusion; as one of their banners states, getting us
to ‘ask questions’. I don’t like the Green as a camp site; I don’t like the mess and that means
that I am sometimes at odds with the protestors and their message which is also
uncomfortable because the message of Jesus Christ is also about asking questions and
working out what is real and what is of lasting value.
In her Theological Reflection on the Occupy Movement, Dr Siobhán Garrigan from the
University of Exeter comments on the connections between the message of the occupy
movement and the social teaching of the church and also the iconic image of the tents and
how they are almost a parable in our midst. Siobhan says this:
“It says in … the Gospel of John that God’s Word became human…It is usually translated as: “the
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”, but the Greek word used is sken: tenting. Is it not a
little bit helpful to wonder how the form created by these unwanted campers on the Cathedral
Green might embody aspects of this great poem about Incarnation? The image of the tents, the
sincerity of the organizers, the theological soundness of their challenging message: could it not be
that these serve as an unusually literal reminder of what it is like when God’s Word is made flesh?
“What is REAL?”
There are many encampments around the world; they are not occupations – they are fragile
and unhealthy gatherings of the poor and the marginalized. They are shanty towns were
there is little hope – conurbations built near rubbish dumps in India and South America;
corrugated iron and cardboard cities in South Africa and the Sudan. In October my wife and
I saw a terrible shanty town in a valley in Montego Bay in Jamaica – it had no running water
or sewers and was regularly washed away in storms; as we sat looking down from the safety
of an exclusive hotel our drinks became somewhat unpalatable. Those places are very real
and are very far from the little group of tents near this Cathedral owned by people who,
ironically, are reminded to bring their laptops fully charged when they come to a General
Assembly.
What is REAL?
God is not a set of ideas or good intentions; God is not a moral and ethical code; God is not
even a way of life. Those are all laudable and make for good people and the bettering of
society. No, our God is the Word made flesh – the ideas, the good intentions, the moral
and ethical code and the way of life personified in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God takes human
form and changes the world by his very presence in it: As we heard in the letter to the
Hebrews,
“He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being”. Hebrews 1:3 The
reality of God is the discovery of his presence in our world and in our lives and the
qualitative change that brings to our values and our stories. It makes us real, three
dimensional human beings - for Jesus reminds us that we are all made in the image of God
and will one day be made perfect.
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you
don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“You become. It takes a long time” said the Skin Horse. “Generally, by the time you are
Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the
joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you
can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.
He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” John 1:10-11
The message of Christmas is to discover not the reality of God, but to discover the reality of
ourselves in relationship with God and the world around us; to make a choice for change
that begins with ourselves deciding to be real and not to live a fantasy life bolstered by false
promises of those around us: “You can be great!” “You can be rich!” “You can be
beautiful!” “You can be successful!” Dear friends, even when we are poor and broken
human beings, God loves us and cherishes us for who we are and not what we ought to be.
I know that many of you know this and feel it keenly; like many of you, as I have grown older
I notice more and more the empty chairs at our dinner table. It hurts to be real and Jesus
has shared in that hurting through his incarnation and, ultimately, through his experience of
death. On the cross God makes himself ugly compared to what the world sees as beauty.
But God’s ugliness is the turning upside down of the world’s false hopes so that the reality of
his transforming presence can break in and make things new.
Some words of Archbishop Oscar Romero speaking to his Diocese in San Salvador at
Christmas in 1978 at a time when there was real fear in that country:
“Would that my voice might reach the imprisoned
like a ray of light, of Christmas hope,
might say also to you,
the sick,
the aged,
the hospital patients,
you that live in shacks and shantytowns,
you coffee harvesters trying to garner your only wage
for the whole year,
you that are tortured:
God’s eternal purpose has thought of you.
He loves you,
and, like Mary, he incarnated that through his womb.”
Oscar Romero 24 December 1978