The United Dioceses of Cashel & Ossory CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2008 FROM THE RT REVD MICHAEL BURROWS
Just a few weeks ago, during a visit to Athens, I stood on the hillock known as the Areopagus where it is recorded that Paul preached the Gospel to the sages of ancient Greece. Probably some readers will have visited this captivating spot themselves. Paul had noticed, as he wandered the streets of Athens, an altar dedicated ‘to the Unknown God’. Sensing that the Greeks had a developed sense of the divine, but were unsure in what direction to place their faith, Paul suggested in his Areopagus sermon that the God made known in Jesus Christ provided the answer to the Greeks’ quest for wisdom.
We live these days in a world where there is, as in ancient Athens, a keen if rather vague sense of the divine – most people in Western Europe profess belief in some sort of God, interest in spirituality remains intense, people cry out for meaning. It is the task of Christians to make anew – as Paul did – the connections between the inevitable longings of the human soul and the God we believe is supremely revealed in Jesus Christ, the baby of Bethlehem. Christmas provides a unique opportunity each year for those connections to be proclaimed and celebrated. After all, this is the one time of the year when many twenty first century searchers for the unknown God remain inclined to turn their ear towards the church and its compelling seasonal narrative. The story of Christmas remains fresh, captivating and beautiful each successive year – as they retell it to-day’s disciples of the child of Bethlehem enable those who search still for the unknown God actually to name him. He is Emmanuel, God with us.
When one visits the Areopagus to-day, it is not quite what one might expect. It is not surrounded by the remains of great ancient public buildings, it does not feel like a great place of political assembly. It is a high rocky hillock overlooking the city, difficult enough to stand on without feeling unsteady. Yet in this place Paul transformed the cultural and spiritual destiny of Europe. So it is that the most effective preaching places of our time too are not necessarily great edifices or more obvious lofty pulpits. The locations where the message of Christmas, the identification of the unknown God, is most effectively shared in our day are very likely to be across the table in the coffee shop, around the fire in the pub, at the convivial dinner table, as friends walk and talk together on a quiet road. Wherever friends trust each other enough to bear their souls in honest encounter, there the unknown God can become Emmanuel. Great Christmas liturgies with majestic words and glorious music have their place, certainly, but the Areopagus of to-day is much more likely to be a place that is on the face of it disarmingly undramatic. But surely this is true to a religion whose greatest preachers chose rocky outcrops and whose God became human in a herdsman’s shed.
Michael
Cashel & Ossory
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Sotto Voce
(Source: UDCO)