wfn.org | Episcopalians: Presiding Bishop's Christmas message for December 2002

[dmack@episcopalchurch.org]

November 19, 2002

2002-262

Episcopalians: Presiding Bishop's Christmas message for 
December 2002

Jesus' birth is God's declaration that embodiment is the way of 
divine dealing with our disordered and darkened world.	Through 
this divine act of incarnation, Jesus became an actor in the 
particular time and place in which he was born.  And, his 
personhood became a sign to us about the meaning of our own 
personhood in our own day and time.

Our forebears in the faith saw this clearly.  Against the 
background of the sacking of Rome, Augustine the Bishop of Hippo 
challenged his flock "you are the body of Christ; that is to say 
in you and through you the method and work of the incarnation 
must go forward.  You are to be taken, you are to be 
consecrated, broken and distributed that you may become the 
means of grace and vehicles of the eternal charity."

By his choice of verbs it is clear that Augustine had in mind 
not only that we are made one in Christ through our baptism, but 
also each time we take the bread of life and the cup of 
salvation in the eucharist. By so doing we, along with the bread 
and wine, are caught up into Jesus' act of taking, blessing, 
breaking and giving. 

Another ancestor in the faith, Maximus the Confessor, 
reinforces our identification with Christ when he declares "I 
diminish and cripple [Christ] by not growing in spirit with him, 
since I am the body of Christ and one of its members.'"(1 Cor 
12:27)

As we once again celebrate the mystery of God's embodiment in 
the birth of Jesus, in a fractured and fearful world, rather 
than being a diminishment of Christ, may we be made part of the 
going forward of Christ's incarnation by becoming more fully 
vehicles of God's "eternal charity" which is realized among us 
as mercy and truth, righteousness and peace.

A blessed Christmas to you all.

------

Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold III