Christmas 1 26th December 2010

Noblesse oblige!

One must act in a fashion that conforms to one's position, and with the reputation that one has earned.

The unfashionable nature of this truth fuels our mass media from the irresponsible expenses claims of our MPs to the goings on among minor royalty.

Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly.

This morning we ourselves have such a reminder as Christians.

The Prayer Book collect for the eight days of the Christmas Octave states the truth behind Christmas from God’s point of view:

Almighty God, you have given us your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin:

The prayer goes on to tell how this has consequences from our own point of view:

grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit;

The Son of God took our whole nature upon him, our total manhood, not just our body but our mind and will and emotional makeup so that our mortal nature might be capable of the divine nature.

Something happened yesterday on Christmas Day that affects us profoundly and affects the whole world through us.

Why did God become man? In order that we might become God, be made God’s children by adoption and grace and be daily renewed by God’s Holy Spirit.

To pray as our Christmas collect prays is to ask to be re-born in Jesus and become a partaker of the divine nature. In other words to ask that we may ourselves obtain the full benefit of the Christmas gift of Jesus.

Just as everyone is born of natural parents, if they wish to be regarded as God’s children, they need to be born again in a spiritual fashion, by water and the Spirit, by baptism, through which we share God’s essential nature and are joined to him.

Through the coming of God in Christ there is a new creation. From the incarnation – which means the making flesh of God – the whole world is divinised working from the souls of women and men out into the whole cosmos.

Noblesse oblige – we who are made children of God by the Son of God becoming Son of Man have obligations with such an awesome nobility.

Saint Leo the Great preaching in Rome at Christmas around 450AD had this appeal to his hearers which I hand on to you:

This is the day our Saviour was born: what a joy for us, my beloved! This is no season for sadness, this, the birthday of Life – the Life which annihilates the fear of death, and engenders joy, promising, as it does, immortality...

My beloved, let us offer thanksgiving to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit. In the great mercy with which he loved us, he had pity on us, and in giving life to Christ, gave life to us too, when we were dead through sin’, so that in him we might be a new creation, a new work of his hands.

Let us then be quit of the old self and the habits that went with it. Sharers now in the birth of Christ, let us break with the deeds of the flesh.

O Christian, be aware of your nobility – it is God’s own nature that you share: do not then, by an ignoble life, fall back into your former baseness. Think of the Head, think of the Body of which you are a member...you have been made a temple of the Holy Spirit; do not, by evil deeds, drive so great an indweller away from you.

Those words are as true in 2010 as they were in 450. Praise God for the faith of the church through the ages carried down to us by the liturgy of Christmas.

We are God’s children made so by the gift of his only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin:

Christians, be aware of your nobility!

Born again and made God’s children by adoption and grace, may we daily be renewed by the Holy Spirit;

Noblesse oblige! Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly.
So are we made noble, so should we conduct ourselves!