[This address was delivered to the congregation of Cross Street Chapel, Manchester via Mixlr as part of a short midweek service on Wednesday, 30th of December 2020]
[Reading: Luke 2:15-21]
Liturgically it is not too late for another Christmas address. We are, technically on day 5 of what is a 12-day long festival of Christmastide!
The life of Jesus queered social boundaries from the start. Who outside the Holy Family should hear of his birth first but shepherds. Shepherds were, according to the religious orthodoxy of the day, seen as ritually and physically unclean. They were at the mercy of the constant demands of their flocks and had no time for the meticulous program of ceremonial hygiene that would have been demanded of the average person.
There is no adoration of the three wise magi in the nativity scene of Luke’s Gospel and even where they do appear, in the Gospel of Matthew, they are not described as kings.
As such, according to Luke, it was the shepherds, the downtrodden and despised working people of the pastures who were blessed with the visit of angles and being among the very first people to know about Jesus. It was not the Kings, the Priests, the Wealthy, or the Powerful but ordinary working people who first received word of Jesus. The good news was theirs to hear and they were the first to proclaim it.
The greatest, most Spirit filled human the world has known was not born into a palace or a mansion. Unlike how it is portrayed in Christmas cards and nativity scenes there is nothing romantic about the scene Jesus was born into. The shepherds did not have to travel up a half mile gravel filled drive to find a big house in which he lay. Instead, they found him in an environment in which they were all too familiar with, the distinctive stench of a stable.
But of course, we also need to talk about Marry who, “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” When one realises that Marry was, according to church tradition, only 14 years old when she gave birth to Jesus after a long journey, and having been turned away repeatedly before settling down in a stable, one cannot be surprised that she didn’t have the energy to be amazed at what the shepherds were saying and, instead, resigned herself to pondering.
We in the Protestant tradition do not talk about Marry as oftern as we probably should do. Not only do our Catholic siblings easily out do us in treasuring the contribution of Mary but so do our Muslim cousins. The Quran mentions Mary more than the Bible does, and it has an entire chapter named after her.
It is, in many respects, a shame that we (and, by we, I mainly refer to male ministers and ministry students such as myself) do not give Mary much attention in our sermons at this time of year. It is not only Jesus who queered social boundaries but Mary too.
The queer theologian and former Jesuit Robert E. Goss refers to Mary as a Queer Prophetess. It was Mary after all who sings the words of the Magnificat – a song of how God will bring down the mighty and elevate the lowly. While being seen today as one of the holiest people ever, Mary would not in her own day have been deemed fit to enter the inner sanctum of the temple. Mary herself embodies what she sang. The gay Anglican poet W. H. Auden captured something of this when he wrote, in a poetic letter to his lover Chester Kallman on Christmas Day, 1941, the following:
Because mothers have much to do with your queerness and mine,
because we have both lost ours, and because Mary is a camp name;
As this morning I think of Mary, I think of you.
There is something in Mary, a woman of such lowly social status being bestowed with such a holy role that is inherently transgressive of social, economic and political order. Is it possible that in that stable, far away and long ago, a group of shepherds looked into the eyes of a child born into the straw of a manger and into the eyes of a tired teenage mother and, in that moment, saw something of a divine spark that was within them all along, reflected back at them for the first time? Was it this encounter that sparked the fire of the Spirit within their own hearts? Was that fire part of what set our faith tradition ablaze with what was and is a revolutionary love? Only we can be the proof of that by our actions today and tomorrow.
To paraphrase the words of the 17th century mystic Angelus Silesius, “Christ can be born in Bethlehem a thousand times anew, but it all amounts to nothing if he is not also born in you.”
