During Advent, in a busy city church like All Saints’ Anglican in Rome, I must remind myself that all these tasks and responsibilities will inevitably ease up. There will come a day, one I can very nearly taste, when it will be finally done and dusted. There will come a morning, at the very end of December or the first days of January, when I will arise before my family to feed the dogs, to make myself a cup of coffee, and to wander through the living room in my ratty housecoat to my appointed armchair by the window.
Everything will be strangely quiet. If, on such a glorious and lazy morning, the intercom was suddenly to be rung by somebody standing on Via del Babuino, my questions to that person would be uncharacteristically ardent: Who are you? What do you want?
I might have posed that very question — possibly under my breath — at one of our larger services in the Christmas period, like the Nine Lessons with Carols, which for decades has drawn an enormous crowd to a church filled to the brim with unfamiliar faces.
Who are you? What do you want?
They do come out of the woodwork, don’t they? The Christmas parishioners, the extended families of individuals or couples we know rather better, the vaguely familiar face we’re sure we’ve seen before, the tourists and other visitors to our cities.
One of our stalwarts will inevitably comment, at some point in the Christmas season, “Where are all these folks throughout the year? Wouldn’t it be good if they were with us at our regular services?”
Regular services? What is a regular service at All Saints’ in Rome? What used to be the Diocesan Statistical Returns form (now called Statistics for Mission) shows a passing interest in our numbers at Christmas and Easter, but the framers of the form quickly get down to business and pick out the Sundays in October as giving a clearer picture of who we really are.
That October figure will outline what a “regular service” and a “normal congregation” look like — what the dependable mean could be. These are our members. These are the soldiers in the army of the Lord. Such are the men, women, and young people who bear the full day’s labor in the heat of the day, even if there are gatherings on other days of the church that a vicar, eager for eventual preferment, might elect to mark down instead, gatherings that are more impressive, requiring extra chairs at the back — the Christmas congregation, for example, awaiting their promised denarius by showing up before year’s end.
But this tension reflects the mystery of Christmas. Christmas services are public property because God sends his Word into the world — not some closed clique or boutique coterie. God sends his Word into this world, and for those who do not yet know him. We should not grumble about those unknown folk who we find in our churches on Christmas, particularly not at Christmas, since, it would appear, we are doing exactly what God wants us to do. God did it first. For evidence of this, we need only look to the Christmas readings.
An inconvenient census mandated by government provokes a movement of people around the countryside far from the seat of power. Foreign magi are summoned from abroad with a vague idea of what they are looking for. Curious shepherds are gathered in response to the promise of good news broadcast by angels in the countryside.
All this activity takes place beyond not only the courts of power, the halls of Herod and Caeser, but also beyond the expected religious orbit, beyond the synagogues and outside the confines of the Temple. God comes to a community of strangers for whom this is not their regular activity. God will not be limited to circles of local piety.
God comes into a world of strangers. His Word becomes flesh and dwells among them. There is probably no church, no cleric, and no church council able to drum up the same devotion, optimism, or commitment to the wider world as God demonstrates in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth and later ministry.
Such a wide invitation in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke links seamlessly to the later emphasis in the Gospels on Jesus’ outreach to the people of the land, to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, to those with half an idea of godliness and even to men and women who had thoroughly blotted their copybooks and brought shame and public anger upon themselves by raising taxes for the Romans or maintaining a lifestyle considered beyond the Pale.
All of this is by intention. It is no accident. The promise is spread broadly in village streets and on hillsides and is in no way to be seen as an addendum to the solid foundation of the 12 disciples or of the 72 or the larger cohort of his regular followers that could be more neatly quantified for the diocesan paperwork.
Here is the great contemporary lesson for the clergy and the congregation: that notwithstanding the Statistics for Mission form, we are not the only ones who count or even who count most. God sends his Son for the life of the world and not mostly for us. God addresses the outside world first and we are privileged to be participants in a universe that has the Incarnation of God in ordinary human life as its fulcrum.
And so we might well ask: Who are you?
The voice crackling over the intercom from the street outside might say that she is one of those people to whom God has extended his invitation. No, we have not met before, she adds. The pews were full, and she was on a chair at the back. This sense of an invitation came to her under separate cover — this need to make contact, this need to show up, to take her seat, and to listen to the story.
We might ask again: So, what do you want? After a pause, he could say that he wants what is due to him and what God has promised to him. A Word, he says — not words, not necessarily the words of the Mass or a favourite Christmas Carol, but some opening to grace, some possibility of treasure hidden in a field, and some promise of healing and wholeness and the companionship of a loving God who spoke first.
As the soldiers in the Lord’s army, those who bear the full day’s labor, those who are there on those Sundays in October, we are not the owners or even the named beneficiaries of the process. Our call, one that is beautiful, life-giving, and to be cherished, is to testify boldly to the presence and the invitation of God in and to the world and then, frankly, to step out of the way and let God accomplish what he has initiated.
God’s word to them and, only then, to us: Come.
Their word, and ours, to God: Yes.
The Rev. Robert Warren is a Guest Writer. He is Vicar of All Saints Anglican Church in Rome. A Canadian, his previous ministry includes appointments in British Columbia, Scotland, and France.