Mini-Reflection #79 (17th December 2023 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
It’s an old, familiar, story – most of us have seen a good number of Christmases come and go – and the story of Jesus, born in a manger, is one that we know well. Or at least, we probably think we do. Various renderings of the story in popular culture – not least in school nativity plays – tend to play fast and loose with the details, everything gets mixed up, it drifts a bit from the original text. And that’s OK. We’re allowed to play with the story, the myth, and the archetypes it contains. This is a legitimate way of working with the text, and the tradition, to get at the deeper truth that it holds.
Each time we encounter the Christmas story, it will speak to us anew, if we let it. If we really listen, instead of setting our ears and our brain to auto-pilot, and open ourselves to what it has to say.
And each of us will have our own relationship to the season, and to the wider Christian tradition; therefore the story will bring up different associations, resonances, and baggage, for each of us. As Unitarians, sometimes we get a bit hung up on the traditional language, understandably. And yet – we sing the old, familiar songs – albeit sometimes with the words tweaked, here and there. Still, today we sing with gusto, ‘remember Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day’ and ‘Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to be our sweet Saviour’, and ‘O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord’.
What is the spirit in which we sing these words? I guess some of us can sing without reservation; for a few of us, Jesus is still central to our theology, and we’re fully at ease with our Christian roots. For some of us, there is likely to be a feeling of ambivalence and awkwardness, possibly even a sense that we’re crossing your fingers as we sing these traditional words, that aren’t really our theology. It’s complicated. Perhaps, for most of us, we’re just enjoying a good singalong, and not probing too deeply into what it all means… but we Unitarians do tend to be concerned about such things.
This year I find myself wondering about the talk of ‘Christ our Saviour’. What does that mean – and how could it helpfully speak to Unitarians – outside of the confines of mainstream Christian theology?
We don’t tend to talk about salvation much – not in the traditional religious sense, anyway – our take on sin and redemption tends to be much more this-worldly. But, thinking about it a bit more broadly, I’d say that salvation in a more expansive sense is still a real and present concern for most of us. Don’t we all have moments – and perhaps quite frequently – when we want to be saved? That is, moments in life when everything is awful – when we feel powerless in the face of our own problems and the world’s strife – and we desperately want someone to swoop in and make everything better, solve all our problems, wave a magic wand, sort it all out, smite the baddies and be home in time for tea. In those moments, at some level, we yearn for a saviour, a rescuer, one who will keep us from harm.
‘Christ our Saviour’ – my old friend Simon John Barlow, whose words have popped up several times already, he was very big on Christmas – he often reminded people that ‘Christ is not Jesus’ surname’! It’s more of a job description, a role, a title – the origin of the word ‘Christ’ comes from ‘anointed one’. So from the Gospel of Luke: ‘unto you is born this day… a saviour which is Christ the Lord’. A saviour.
What can we take from this? Perhaps, rather than being the saviour, Jesus is anointed as a saviour. We might say he is an example – for some of us, the prime example – of a way of being in the world that might save us, that might liberate us, from the worldly sources of suffering that drag us down. Perhaps he shows us what it might look like when a human embodies the light of God, and how transformative that can be, in a world of struggle and sorrow. Born in the humblest of circumstances, in a turbulent time, in the back of beyond – living among outcasts, at home in the margins of society – he preached a radical message of love and liberation: Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbour as yourself. (P.S. everyone is your neighbour!) Easier to say than it is to do. But his message, and example, is one that we would all do well to follow, as best we can, in our own time and in our place. Because it’s a signpost to salvation, here and now.
That’s the message I want to leave you with today. It’s not really about what happened once upon a time in Bethlehem. It’s about how we can each be agents of salvation – for each other, and for this precious earth we share – if we own and embrace that calling for ourselves. If we roll up our sleeves, and get stuck in, to the messy work of saving the world. In our own humble way, each day, we too can embody the light of God. And in that spirit I want to close with the famous words of St. Teresa of Ávila:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which He looks
Compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are His body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
May it be so, for the greater good of all. Amen.
Reflection by Jane Blackall
An audio recording of this sermon is available: