Pope Benedict's Christmas Eve Sermon

Christmas Day has come and gone, and the Priest family Christmas (this year celebrated on New Year's Day but always delayed by our travels to visit other family members on the actual holiday) has also come and gone. But while we are still within the 12 Days of Christmas, I wanted to write again (as promised) and comment on the Pope's Christmas sermon.

I dimly recall watching some of the ceremonies when Pope Benedict was installed, and I suppose I heard thim then, but I don't recall being deeply affected by anything he may have said at the time. Then again, it was a service and a ceremony I was unfamiliar with. Christmas is another story, and this was the first time I'd watched the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass with "the new pope." There was also a new commentator--my wife and I joked that US Cardinal John P. Foley, who did the broadcast voiceover for 25 years, always sounded like he was covering a tennis match--and the poor guy had to try to make sense of the "shoving" incident early in the broadcast. Although Pope Benedict chose to do the ceremony two hours earlier, it was still broadcast the usual time, which was too late for my wife this year, so I ended up watching alone (which brought things back to the first times I'd watched it).

I've always enjoyed the international flavor of the service, and the camera work and editing (for someone who grew up watching Billy Graham Crusades as the ultimate experience in religious broadcasting, where all the cameramen could do was pan across the crowd or focus on the stadium flags flapping in the breeze, the Vatican offers a real treat to the eyes!) The Protestant part of me sometimes gets squeamish thinking of the oppulence and wondering how much of the lovely art and architecture of St. Peter's was purchased by misguided people purchasing indulgences, but for the most part I can buy the idea of trying to make a worship space look like heaven by using large dimensions, the best artists and the finest materials available. Heck, wasn't that what Solomon's temple was all about?

But I digress... As inspiring a person as John Paul II was, I don't recall ever being impressed by him as a speaker, or remembering any of his sermons I listened to. And it was the sermon that struck me the most this year.

The main point for me was the contrast Pope Benedict made between the shepherds and the wise men. While the shepherds lived close to Jesus, the wise men had to make "a long and arduous journey" to see and worship the Christ child. This physical distance he likened to spiritual distance; "there are simply and lowly souls who live very close to the Lord," but most of us "live our lives by our philosophies, amid wordly affairs and occupations that totally absorb us and are a great distance from the manger." God has already made a great journey from heaven to be born amongst us, but he still must push and prod most of us to get us to "go over to Bethlehem" and meet him where he has chose to reveal himself.

God wishes for us to come to him, but we must be receptive to his call. The shepherds were "watching"--they were awake and cognizant of the world around them. The wise men came from a pagan culture, and citing Origen (who evidently was citing John the Baptist "out of these stones God can raise children of Abraham" and the author of Psalm 135, who comments that those who make and worship gods of lifeless materials "shall become like them") he says "lacking feeling and reason, they are transformed into stones and wood." But God desires to give us hearts of flesh. He became like us in order to make us become like him. This was the "sign" given to the shepherds--God's humility expressed in the incarnation and seen in a "babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and laying in a manger."

So, we must be alive, we must be awake, and we must be attentive to the presence and calling of God. And repeatedly, Pope Benedict the liturgy (or "Liturgy") as being of prime importance, as "the work of God" and as a time when "the Lord himself is present in our midst," if only we had the grace to see.

Liturgy is something I need to explore this year--for some very practical reasons (at home I am preparing my daughter to begin receiving communion and at the church I am pulling together a Confirmation program for our yout)--but also for my own spiritual well being. So this sermon seemed especially appropriate for me as I kick off the new year.

One Holy Catholic Church at Christmas

Christmas 1984 I was surprised with a large Christmas bonus the last day of work before the holiday, which allowed me to greatly expand my Christmas shopping the last day or so before Christmas. That left me wrapping presents late on Christmas Eve, and, searching for something Christmasy on have on TV as I worked, I first ran across the Midnight Mass broadcast "live" from the Vatican ("Live" because midnight hit the Vatican quite a few hours earlier than it did Eastern Standard Time). I'd been raised largely ignorant of Roman Catholicism and Church History in general--judging from my Sunday school lessons there simply were no "real Christians" between John the Revelator and Martin Luther--and had only recently begun attending an Episcopal Church and getting comfortable with the idea of liturgy not being all "vain repetition" condemned by Jesus. So, I was surprised and intrigued to realize how much of the service sounded familiar (once translated) to what I was hearing and saying Sunday mornings.

Looking back on that now I think of my earlier self as laughably naive. Shortly afterwards one of my best friends (and the only one I can claim in any way to have had an influence on his conversion to Christianity) decided to return to the Catholic Church he'd been raised in (and had pretty fully rejected when I'd first met him in high school), and that--along with my own rediscovery of liturgy--caused me to begin a serious investigation of Catholicism. Some time later I was prompted to do some reading on the Orthodox church, and eventually at seminary I had to take a few courses in Church History (which my wife now teaches). Despite various frustrations with the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism in general, and despite seeing many of my friends from seminary depart for either Rome or Constantinople, I've never felt the need to move any further up the ecclesial family tree (or down towards the roots?) than Anglicanism, but I appreciate what I have and can learn from other traditions and their followers. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said (in a quote I read a couple days ago):

From the deeds of Jesus in the flesh, there springs a society which is one in its continuous life. Many kinds of fellowship in diverse places and manners are created by the Spirit of Jesus, but they all depend upon the one life. Thus each group of Christians will learn its utter dependence upon the whole Body. It will indeed be aware of its own immediate union with Christ, but it will see this experience as a part of the one life of the one family in every age and place.

--quoted from The Gospel and the Catholic Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock (1936/1990), 43-44.

All of that to say, I watched the Pope's sermon on Christmas Eve, and found it quite moving. Though, with an introduction this long, I now will have to wait for a future post to comment on what he had to say.