"God with us", here
Christmas Day: 25th December, 2009
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
The front page of The Age yesterday included a large photo from inside Christ Church Whittlesea, the central church in the parish that includes Kinglake. It featured the presentation of a replica painting of an original called Anzac Christmas by Violet Teague, now in St Paul's Cathedral. St Mary's Kinglake was burned to the ground during the February 7th fires. The Kinglake church was for many years the location for that major painting placed behind the altar commissioned for the war memorial building in 1921. In the painting two young Australian soldiers take the place of the shepherds at the manger in Bethlehem, beside the baby Jesus and his mother. Many nativity scenes through the centuries have done this — adjusting either the surrounding scene or the people in attendance to the present local situation, whatever that might be. So there are black Madonnas, there are busy urban scenes, there are gorgeously clad medievals, and there are three drovers. The whole point of the nativity is 'God with us,' where we are, who we are, what we are. So the grieving people in Kinglake in 1921 wanted to believe this was so for their community then too. Perhaps the young men depicted were actual war casualties from the parish that those remaining would recognise, there beside the manger in Bethlehem. We are told that the vicar at the time had lost a nephew and the artist several family members. It was bringing something potentially timeless very clearly into a present focus. Such a painting being done today there could place the birth of the Lord right in the middle of the devastation remaining from the fires earlier this year. And that would make that same 'God with us' point very powerfully indeed in this generation.
God is with us in other ways as well. Very few of us I think would be unaware of the publicity surrounding the process of Mother Mary MacKillop towards canonisation. I was happy on behalf of our parish to take some flowers to the local Josephite sisters just down Albert Street in a house where Mother Mary herself worked. Apart from being neighbourly at a happy time, I also have a personal connection in that my own family in Penola South Australia in the 1850s and 1860s lived a stone's throw away from the sisters and my own great grandmother was one of the rural children given an education by Mother Mary, as she was later to become, in her first school.
The remarkable thing about Mary MacKillop is absolutely not the fulfilment of a process requirement involving the probability or otherwise of miraculous intercessory cures. There have been a number of cynical contributions to such discussion in the press. It is not really that useful to travel along the line of "100 year dead nun cures cancer," even if we immediately make the point that any curing is going to be God's work in any case. For a start, all those not cured just now might ask — 'why not them?'
Far more significant is the formal recognition (however arrived at) that this person of shining faith, born a couple of blocks from here just before this church was built, went on despite extremely difficult family circumstances to make an enormous difference in the lives of very many people, but especially in her educational and caring work for the very poor and the vulnerable. Such was her personality that she very soon gathered ever-increasing numbers of fine women who shared her dreams and her commitment. This was, as we know, to see her and her community through opposition and indeed a brief time of excommunication. The Church authorities did not appreciate her independence of spirit and the desire for her community to run its own affairs. But she came through.
Mary MacKillop is therefore a fine Australian example of 'God with us' — God unusually demonstrably and clearly at work in a life, a faith and a prime example of that 'sleeves rolled up and get on with it' sort of Christianity in action that goes down very well here. That is what makes her worthy of being called a saint and warmly acknowledged as such. With this formal recognition comes the acclamation from people of faith that such a life, such a person, such an example, has enduring and ongoing impact and influence into the present time. We are encouraged and invited to join our thanks to God with hers. As Mother Mary wrote in 1871, two years after the founding of her Australian order: 'There where you are, you will find God.'
Which brings us all on this Christmas morning to worship God beside this stable scene. Jesus and Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men on their way, the animals, the fresh straw. We are singing the well-known carols and hymns that tell this story again and again with all the details. The tree is dressed, the lights are on, the church is filled with flowers, and the weather is doing whatever Melbourne weather decides might be done. And we are here to honour that connection made so strikingly in Bethlehem nearly 2,000 years ago but remembering and celebrating all the reminders and signposts through all the centuries since that this is good news for every generation in every place and time. Works of art great and small have declared and illustrated this truth; lives of heroic virtue and witness have given new inspiration and renewed encouragement, generation by generation. 'The Word made flesh and dwelling among us full of grace and truth' is the wonder at the centre of this annual festival. That this should be so: that is the cause for our joy.
We are here this morning making it clear that for us, no matter what the distractions or distortions or diminishings that might surround us at this time of year, we give thanks for this great and mighty wonder.
May we all in this year that is to come, more clearly show 'God with us', in all that we live and say and do.
The Lord be with you.
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