Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Pope slams ‘false respect’ for non-Christians driving Jesus out of Christmas




Dec 27, 2017

ROME - After U.S. President Donald Trump made a point of wishing Americans “Merry Christmas,” saying he was irked by “politically correct” efforts to scrub references to Christmas from the holiday, Pope Francis on Wednesday warned the real danger is taking Christ out of Christmas, driven by a “false respect” for non-Christians that amounts to a desire to “marginalize” faith.

“In our times, especially in Europe, we’re seeing a ‘distortion’ of Christmas,” the pope said in his final General Audience of 2017.

“In the name of a false respect for non-Christians, which often hides a desire to marginalize the faith, every reference to the birth of Christ is being eliminated from the holiday,” Francis said. “But in reality, this event is the one true Christmas!”

“Without Jesus, there is no Christmas,” the pope said, drawing strong applause from a crowd gathered Wednesday morning in the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall.

“If he’s at the center, then everything around him, that is, the lights, the songs, the various local traditions, including the characteristic foods, all comes together to create the atmosphere of a real festival,” he said.

“But if we take [Christ] away, the lights go off and everything becomes fake, mere appearances,” the pope said.

Francis argued that without the memory of the birth of Christ at its heart, the Christmas story loses its sting.

“God made man like us, reveals himself in a surprising way: Born from a poor unknown girl, who gives birth to him in a manger, with only her husband’s help. The world is unaware, but in heaven the angels exult!”

“That’s how the Son of God presents himself to us today,” Francis said.

“He’s the gift of God for a humanity that’s immersed in the night and the torpor of sleep,” he said. “Often humanity prefers the dark, because it knows that the light would reveal all its actions and thoughts that make us blush or pick at our conscience.”

The pope insisted there’s another element of the Christmas message that shouldn’t be lost - the way it upsets the ordinary sense of worldly values and priorities.

“God involves those who, confined to the margins of society, are the first to receive his gift, which is the salvation brought by Jesus,” Francis said. “With the small ones, the disrespected, Jesus establishes a friendship that continues across time, and nourishes hope for a better future.”
With these persons, Francis said, “In every age, God wants to build a new world, a world in which no one is thrown away, no one is mistreated and indigent.”
The pope’s next public activity during the holiday season will come on Sunday, when he delivers his last Angelus address of the year at noon and then, in the evening, presides over the traditional vespers service in thanksgiving for the year coming to a close. On New Year’s Day, Francis will celebrate a Mass honoring Mary as the Mother of God, followed by another Angelus.

Traditionally, the Vatican’s holiday season is said to wrap up on Jan. 6 with the feast of the Epiphany, when Francis will once again lead a Mass in the morning followed by an Angelus. Informally, however, it’s usually considered to extend through the pope’s annual speech to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican, in which the pontiff lays out his foreign policy priorities for the year to come.

This year, that speech to diplomats will be held on Monday, Jan. 8.

....
Taken from: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/12/27/pope-slams-false-respect-non-christians-driving-jesus-christmas/

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Michael Jensen: The peace of Christmas

Michael Jensen: The peace of Christmas
Nativity Scenes Christmas Greeting Card | Xmasblor with regard to Christmas Manger Scene
We retell the story of the angels who heralded him with the chorus: “Peace on earth to those on whom God’s favour rests”.
 
Michael Jensen.
But, as the English author Francis Spufford writes: “Peace is not the norm; peace is rare.”
In 2017, we’ve been wondering whether we in Australia are within range of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un’s weapons, as his missiles have been flying over Japan.
We’ve had the unceasing round of terrorist attacks across the globe.
And we’ve been hoping that US President Donald Trump’s diplomacy by Twitter is not taking us to the brink of world conflict.
What’s more, we know bitter conflict all too well from more personal experiences of it.
Just ask a family law solicitor what the disintegration of a marriage can be like, or recall the pain of office politics, or a neighbourhood struggle to the death over property boundaries.
Perhaps the Christmas dinner table — supposedly a moment of family togetherness — will be another round of the decades-long war ­between those two aunties of yours.
A dying man once said to me: “I’ve prayed for peace on earth for 60 years. Why does it never happen?”
However much we hope and pray for peace on earth, it seems frustratingly elusive.
One problem is that when we try to make peace, we do so by finding a winner and loser.
Inevitably, one side slinks off in bitter resentment, and the hostilities resume.
Is the Christmas declaration of peace empty, since we human ­beings seem so addicted to fighting one ­another?
The Bible has a very particular ­diagnosis of why this is so. Our lack of peace with one another is a symptom of our lack of peace with God.
And it gives us that profound sense in ourselves that we are not at peace.
What’s the remedy?
We need to understand what Christ was about, for without him, the Christmas spirit proves to be nothing but a ghost. We’ll come to that in a moment, but first we need to understand what the Bible means by “peace”, or “shalom”.

MORE: These are what real Christmas miracles look like

It’s worth using that wonderful Hebrew word, which Jews use as a greeting because it’s a much richer word than our word “peace”. (Arabic speakers say “salaam”, which is the same word.)
Shalom is not simply the cessation of hostilities.
Shalom is when everything is in harmony with God, and so with everything else.
Shalom means that everything and everyone in the creation is doing what it’s made to do, playing its part like the players in a great orchestra producing beautiful music.
Shalom is the way everything is supposed to be. The divine vision for peace is not just universal, it involves the universe.
And shalom on earth — the Christmas good news — begins when there is an armistice between human beings and God. That’s where Christ, the Prince of Peace, comes in. What is it that he does to bring shalom?
Peace with God comes because the Prince of Peace reconciles us to God on the cross.
His victory does not mean our ­defeat; but he makes his victory our victory too. In himself he has ­absorbed human hostility against God, and now a truce has been ­declared. And what are the terms? Do we have to pay?
At end of World War I, Germany was forced to pay reparations to the value of $US33 billion.
It was a crushing burden that contributed to the rise of Nazism and the bloodbath of World War II.
But even though we are the rebels against God, it is not we who pay for the peace.
The Prince of Peace bears the cost himself, in himself, so that God’s peace — his shalom — may be ours.
And it’s not just peace that he brings, it’s shalom: that deep experience of the harmony of all things with their creator and between all things.
And through all this, you and I are invited into a deep experience of God’s shalom.
To know it in ourselves — “the peace which passes all understanding” as the New Testament calls it.
If we know truly that God’s peace in Jesus Christ — the Christmas shalom — and invite it into our very souls, we will become God’s agents for peace in a troubled world.
Peace on earth begins with the piece of earth on which you stand.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus. It is not just up to the diplomats and politicians.
It’s too easy to blame them for war while we fail to recognise the conflict and unrest of our own lives.
Bringing about shalom is something that can start with us and in us.
If we really want to see a bit of Christmas cheer, we can seek to make peace a reality on Earth — in our families, in our neighbourhoods, and in our workplaces, as well as between nations.

Michael Jensen is the rector of St Mark’s Anglican Church Darling Point and the author of My God, My God — Is it Possible to Believe Anymore?
 
....