Sermons from St Faith's
The Word made Flesh
Revd Sue Lucas, Christmas
midnight mass 2014
Word out of silence, now in flesh
appearing.
Rowan Williams's 2013 Gifford lectures,
published this year are called ‘The Edge of
Words.’ And this night, as we wonder at
the Word made flesh, we truly are at the edge of
words, the edge of language, the edge of the
intelligible and so at the edge of mystery.
Yet – there is a sense in which words are always
already fleshly – words are material in the
beginning and from the beginning; God speaks, in
the passage from Genesis of which tonight’s
Gospel is a deliberate echo - and creation
comes to be; and, curiously, modern science
echoes this – our very being – from hair colour
to character to some extent, from height to
disposition to disease – are encoded
intelligibly in our DNA. Material
reality is intelligible – flesh is word and word
is flesh; the material world – speaks;
Poets have always known this; from Wordsworth’s
drawing of extraordinary affinities between the
environment and experience to, in a more
theological register, Hopkins’ view of
‘inscape.’ But the poetic voice is also a
prophetic voice, in its proper theological
sense; This isn’t bad theodicy – the crass
view that ‘everything has a purpose’ – but
simply that, the prophetic voice – the voice in
which, according to the writer of the letter to
the Hebrews, God spoke to our ancestors, the
material situations in which we find ourselves,
whether of rejoicing, or sorrowing, whether of
affirmation, or challenge, or even threat, are
potentially places for a deeper level of our own
calling, both as individuals and as
communities. The work of the poet and the
prophet is not an aberration or exception in the
human world but an intensifying of an experience
that belongs to our common humanity. Words,
already material things, are our means of
sharing in the work of our creator – of seeing
the world, of understanding it, and changing it,
of forming something new, and of being ourselves
made new, formed more closely in God’s
likeness. In conversation with one
another, and with God – we are recreated.
So it is both unsurprising and yet deeply
mysterious that the language in which God speaks
to us is material, is flesh; for whilst words
and flesh are one, ‘There are moments when our
speech is jolted into a different register.’ (p
7 The Edge of Words)
This is never more true than tonight; for we are
jolted into the recognition that the word made
flesh cannot speak – but is an infant,
communicates the way of all infants, through
cries and groans, and through the music of
lullabies.
But of course that’s rather the point – word
made flesh shows us that in the end, the words
we use, like the material world of which we are
a part, can be annexed, appropriated, co-opted,
put to work in our own idolatrous schemes; but
the word made flesh, in all his human
vulnerability, cannot be:
Those who cannot speak – babies, those who do
not have spoken language because of disability
or accident, those who have a learning
difficulty – perhaps most of all there we see
God. Indeed, the vision of Jean Vanier, the
founder of the L’Arche communities in which
people categorised as having learning
difficulties live in community with those
alongside them – is that, in our use, and misuse
and abuse of words, and of the material reality
of which they are part – we need to recognise
that it is we too that have learning
difficulties, and not just those we so
categorise: in our failure to acknowledge,
in fact, the difficulty of learning –
about our vulnerability, our flesh, our
dependence. And the narrative of Jesus own
life shows us just this; the consequences of
having the unconditional spoken in a human life.
(Edge of Words, p 89)
And in those who cannot speak because their
words and voices are silenced– those who are
poor, who are sick, who are asylum seekers, who
are alone, who are categorised as having
learning difficulties, they too speak to us of a
God in whom the unconditional is spoken, not in
temples and palaces, but in the manger, and on
the cross.
So perhaps our only possible response to the
word made flesh is silent wonder – that the God
who speaks us into being moment by moment, who
breathes his spirit into an intelligible
universe, speaks now, through this child, this
son, this baby in the manger, this broken man on
the Cross, and this risen one we meet, this
night, and in every Eucharist, in the breaking
of the bread.
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