Join the human race this Christmas -- 12/25/2012 - Homily by Rowan Williams, archbishop

from the Archbishop of Canterbury's website (Christmas Morning):

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is urging people to go and ‘join the human race’ this Christmas and become agents of transformation and renewal.

In his final Christmas sermon in Canterbury Cathedral, Dr. Williams says the purpose of the Christian message isn’t to defend religion or make the church credible, but to pose a challenge to everyone to reconsider who they are:

“Here is something so extraordinary that it interrupts our world; here is something that – like Moses in the story of the Burning Bush – makes you ‘turn aside to see’, that stops you short. Faith begins in the moment of stopping … the moment when you can’t just walk on as you did before ...”

Dr Williams acknowledged the damage to credibility that the church experienced in the vote over women bishops, but rejected the notion that census statistics showing an apparent religious decline were entirely good news for campaigning atheists. 59% of people (in the U.K.) still identified themselves as Christian, he observed, and faith has to mean more than ‘what public opinion decides’. Christians should not, he says, lose heart:

“We are after all, doing something rather outrageous, asking men and women to stop and look and turn around, and learn how to keep company with a figure whose outlines we often see only dimly.”

The challenge of the Gospel message, he says, is not about religious defensiveness but about the possibilities of transformation:

“Jesus does not come just to answer the questions we think important … he does not come to give us a set of techniques for keeping God happy; and he certainly doesn’t come to create a harmlessly eccentric hobby for speculative minds. He comes to make humanity itself new, to create fresh possibilities for being at peace with God.”

And people responding to this invitation and bringing about incredible transformation and had proved inspirational to him in his time as Archbishop:

“When people respond to outrageous cruelty and violence with a hard-won readiness to understand and be reconciled, few if any can bring themselves to say that all this is an illusion.
“The parents who have lost a child to gang violence, the wife who has seen her husband killed in front of her by an anti-Christian mob in India, the woman who has struggled for years to comprehend and accept the rape and murder of her sister, the Israeli and Palestinian friends who have been brought together by the fact that they have lost family members in the conflict and injustice that still racks the Holy Land – all these are specific people I have had the privilege of meeting as Archbishop over these ten years; and in their willingness to explore the new humanity of forgiveness and rebuilding relations, without for a moment making light of their own or other people’s nightmare suffering, or trying to explain it away, these are the ones who make us see, who oblige us to turn aside and look, as if at a bush burning but not consumed.”

The challenge is for everyone, he says;

“Go and join the rest of the human race and acknowledge who you are. That’s the truest heroism and the hardest. It’s a foreshadowing of the New Testament invitation: repent and believe and be baptised. Turn round and look where you’ve never looked before, trust the one who is calling you and drop under the water of his overflowing compassion. Be with him. Join the new human race, re-created in the Spirit of mutual love and delight and service.”

www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/