wfn.org | ACNS-Christmas message from the Presiding Bishop of the

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

ACNS 3217     |     USA     |	  6 DECEMBER 2002

Christmas message from the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, USA

"Rejoice: we are God's vehicles..."

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 realised
among us as mercy and truth, righteousness and peace.

A blessed Christmas to you all.

Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold III

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