Christmas - An Audacious Act of Respair
Christmas Homily 2020
What a year we have had! It’s been the opening line of too many of my sermons this month … but it’s true! The Black Summer bushfires were enough in themselves, when even the concrete jungles of Melbourne and Sydney were ominously enveloped in smoke as the fires raged around us. More than 18.5 million hectares of bushland was incinerated; an area the size of England and Wales combined. 34 people were killed, and another 445 lost their lives indirectly, as a result of smoke inhalation. 5,900 buildings, including 2,779 homes, were razed. By early January this year, the smoke was stretching some 11,000 kilometres across the South Pacific Ocean, as far as Chile and Argentina, belching out some 306 million tonnes of CO2 according to NASA.
In March the fires were largely contained, but then our news headlines began to be dominated by Wuhan, the Diamond Princess, and Daniel Andrew’s declaration of a State of Emergency. Supermarket shelves were emptying of toilet paper and non-perishable goods. And then on Sunday 22nd March, Laetare Sunday, I remember reading from the pulpit those ominous words of our Archbishop: “I am writing to you to ask that you advise members of your parish … that effective from Monday, 23rd March 2020, regular public services and parish organised group activities are suspended within the Diocese of Melbourne.”
It was a day that seemed unprecedented, the closure of our church, but then Fr Philip pointed me to a photo in Fr Colin Holden’s history of St Peter’s (From Tories at Prayer to Socialists at Mass) showing an outdoor celebration of the Mass in what is now our car park, from 1919 at the height of the Spanish Flu here in Australia. And now, as the year draws to a close, the worldwide death-toll from COVID-19 stands at 1.73 million and counting. Here in Victoria 820 people have lost loved ones to the virus. We’ve fought especially hard against the virus here, with our last lockdown lasting 111 days, but it’s taken a toll.
Despair, is a word that might sum up the way many, if not all of us have felt at one time or another over the past year. But there’s another word, the reality of which I think we have all known over the past year too: respair. Respair is a word you may never have heard of. It is a medieval English word, that the OED records from 1425, but it is a word that is seeing a modest come back of late, and is a particularly fitting word for Christmas 2020.
The noun “respair” means “the return of hope after a period of despair.” It may also be used as a verb, meaning “to have hope again.” I must say, that as 21 of us gathered for Mass in the St Peter’s carpark on All Saints’ Day, just a few weeks ago, mirroring what our forebears did 101 years ago, I felt respair. Our first morning tea since March, after Sunday Mass two weeks ago, was another moment of respair. Tonight, as we gather once again to celebrate the great mystery of the Incarnation, with a full choir, with a full serving team, with a good congregation, almost up to our density quotient limit, the respair is palpable. We have hope again.
I wonder if you have noticed something. Our communal experiences of despair and respair over the year have opened the Scriptures to us in a new way. Several people have commented on this, and I’ve become very aware of it myself. Our Biblical readings somehow feel more poignant. With Isaiah, and the dispersed peoples of Israel, after our experiences of exile from church this year, perhaps we now hear more immediately the cry of the prophet: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness – on them a light has shone.” Or St Paul’s words to Titus: “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” And certainly, with the help of our choir and the rising of incense, we join this night with a great cloud of witnesses: “a multitude of heavenly host, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those he favours!’”
Christmas really is the most audacious act of respair. A vulnerable child, born into poverty, oppression and persecution, will become our Saviour. This child will teach us to forgive one another, even our enemies. This child will show us how to be compassionate, self-sacrificing, kind and loving towards one another. This child will teach us a priority for the poor. This child will carry the sword of justice and truth for the downtrodden and abused.
In the final verse of his “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” John Milton captures something of the glorious vision of respair we celebrate at Christmas.
Yea, Truth and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Orb’d in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Thron’d in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;
And Heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.