LIGHT FROM ST GREGORY NAZIANZEN

By Bishop David Chislett SSC

Sometimes we feel sorry for ourselves - especially after a late Saturday night and we are trying not to forget the things to pack into the car for Mass at Shafston College, or perhaps when we are helping to transform the lecture room into a basilica and remember what it was like in the old days just to turn up at an established church with gothic arches and stained glass windows with everything done for us!

Sometimes we get tired of being a relatively small community meeting in borrowed premises or each others' homes to hear the Word of God and to celebrate the Sacraments.

Sometimes we weary of having to explain to curious people what it means to be a "continuing Anglican", or belong to a parish of the small Anglican Catholic Church in Australia and the TAC.

Sometimes we forget that it is the gathering and not the building that makes the Church, and it takes a visitor to remind us that we share a love and depth of community that is difficult to find in ordinary parish life elsewhere!

SMALL IS GOOD
Most of all we forget how often God has used minorities to achieve his plan and purpose. Many times in the Bible and in subsequent history, the FEW have kept the Faith for the MANY. What often looked like the "established" order of things had departed from the Gospel and the Faith once delivered to the Saints, and God chose a small minority to work subversively, restoring right believing and right worship.

One such time was the fourth century. Whole provinces of the Church had gone off the rails and were teaching false things about Jesus. In many ways the false teaching then - that Jesus is a created being, "supreme" but not actually God - is similar to what many "liberal" Christians teach today. That teaching strikes at the heart of the Gospel and the Faith.

It seemed that the whole Church was to be sucked in by this. What could be done?

GREGORY NAZIANZEN
Well, there were giants in the land back then, raised up by God. One of them is a favourite of mine, St Gregory Nazianzen (329-390). He lived in what is now south-eastern Turkey. Highly educated, he was a sensitive man who liked to be left alone to pursue the life of prayer. But God had other plans . . . Gregory became a priest and then Bishop of Nazianzus.

HOUSE CHURCH
In 379 a Synod of 150 orthodox bishops met in Antioch. They decided to pull our Gregory out of retirement and send him as a "missionary" to the Diocese of Constantinople, which was presided over by one of the many bishops who were promoting the wrong teaching about Jesus.

Guess what Gregory did. He went to Constantinople and got hold of a house in which he set up a chapel as an alternative to the "established" church of the day with its heretical bishop. In this house he baptized, celebrated Mass, preached and nurtured the community in the true Faith. (One of the "parishioners" there was Jerome.) In fact, the sermons Gregory preached in his house church became the basis of the Nicene Creed!

Before very long Gregory and his parishioners made a massive impact on the wider Christian community, an impact still being felt over 1600 years later!

So, in those occasional moments when we at Patmos House feel discouraged and the task before us seems too great, we need to remind ourselves of Gregory and others down through the ages who with their inspired minorities were faithful to God's calling and won out in the end!

GREGORY ON CHRISTMASS
It's not a bad idea to turn to Gregory's writing at this time of the year, for he spends a lot of time pondering the meaning of Christmass. He says that the Nativity of Christ is a "festival of re-creation", that in Christ the world has not only been created, but recreated; that the real and historical event of the Incarnation is not an end in itself, but a means to the renewal, sanctification and re-creation of the whole universe.

Gregory reiterates the teaching of all the early Fathers of the Christian Church when he says that we commemorate not so much the birth of a child as the ultimate transfiguration of humankind and the whole created world.

This view of Christmas is echoed in the Eastern Orthodox Liturgy:

"Your coming, O Christ, has shed upon us a great light.
O Light of Light, Radiance of the Father, you have illumined the entire creation!"

BOUNDARIES GONE

In other words, because of the Incarnation, the boundary between matter and spirit, secular and sacred, the seen and the unseen has been abolished. This created world through which we stumble on our pilgrimage into God is tinged with a new sacredness and glory.

It's just as well, because there are times when we experience the world as a place of "exile", a "vale of tears"; a place of undeserved suffering, pain and confusion, a place of alienation, depression and despair.

In fact, the real magic of Christmass is not the "feel-good" stuff at all. It's that the transcendent Lord of glory enters into the fulness of what it means to be human, so as to redeem, renew and transfigure everything about human life - as well as creation itself - from within.

THE PAIN AND THE GLORY
The exuberant joy of the Angelic choir at Bethlehem balances the fact that those whom God chose to participate in this great event had a hard time of it. Mary and Joseph shunted from pillar to post, desperately looking for somewhere to stay; Jesus born in a smelly cave where the animals were kept; all the little boys under two years of age in Bethlehem slaughtered by the power crazy King Herod, their blood running red in the streets; the Holy Family living in poverty as homeless refugees in Egypt until it was safe to return to their own land.

The mystery of Divine Love invaded our world - not some sentimental make-believe feel-good world, but the real world as it is experienced by most people - to effect a union of the divine and human that can never be dissolved; a union in which God so freely abandoned himself to us as the Babe of Bethlehem, the Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of Calvary who shed his precious blood that we might be forgiven and set free, the Risen, Ascended Lord, AND the Bread of eternal life in the Blessed Sacrament of Holy Communion.

You will be reminded of all this even at the supermarket when you hear booming over the loudspeakers ". . . and man will live for evermore because of Christmass Day".

Whatever your circumstances, your joys, your sorrows, your blessings or your pain, I pray that this Christmass by God's grace you will open your hearts afresh to the wonder of his Divine Love and experience more deeply than ever before the transformation and renewal of your life in Jesus.