A sermon preached by Bishop Brian Farran for Christmas at S. Mary's Swan, 2002

We have assumed Christmas. There was a period, the 1980s until 2000, when the near tranquillity of life in Australia beguiled our thinking about Christmas. Indeed, we were beguiled in our thinking about life in general. This year, Christmas is not so assumed. There has been much pain and heartache in Australia that brings an altered perspective to Christmas. This will be for many Australians a Christmas that is less sentimental. This Christmas might even be harrowing for some Australian families, given their experiences of tragedy, and given their profound sense of absence.

The reason that I, your bishop, am with you this Christmas is because of the awful accident that engulfed your beloved priest, Nancy. This parish is more sensitised to Christmas this year because of the pain that has preceded today. I wonder whether the anxiety, the trauma that has covered this parish does not alert us to an understanding of Christmas that is deeper and more significant than the usual, casual Christmas greetings that people exchange.

This deeper understanding that is more authentic and historical is suggested by the theme of the nativity setting under the Altar. This setting is located in the outback. This theme recognises that across Australia 2002 has been the year of the Outback. In fact, the church has celebrated this theme too in the Synod Service in October, in a special outback service in the Cathedral, and by Diocesan Council travelling to Esperance for its November meeting.

Urban Australians romance with the outback. Some of us wear Akubras when we light the barbecue. Others buy four wheel drives that only travel as far as the local shopping centre! In my office car park there is an immaculately kept Subaru, an Outback model. It does not look like the outback at all!

My point is that we can be romantic about the outback, forgetting that the outback is named because it is out the back of the coast where most Australians prefer to live. My two daughters flew to Perth on Thursday to arrive in our 40^o heat. They were seated alongside a teenager who lived four hours north of Adelaide. As my daughters lamented the 40^o, he casually remarked that the day before the temperature at his farmhouse had been 52^o! That is the outback.

The Christmas events happen in the outback. Bethlehem was a small town in a remote region to which the public servants of the Roman Empire loathed being posted. If in some way, an administrator in the Roman Empire had offended the Caesar of the day, it was probable such an administrator would become the Governor of Judea, as Pontius Pilate did. The Roman authorities had no love of Judea because of the constant guerilla warfare the Jews waged. Terrorism was as much a daily activity then as it is today in Jerusalem.

Mary and Joseph as recent research has validated probably camped in a cave that was part of a typical impoverished house - most likely, in the outhouse of a distant relative. You may have seen the first episode of the four part television series being screened on ABC TV in the Compass programme that showed the archaeological evidence for this prevalent housing that still functions in Israel. The cavern would have had a higher section which accommodated the family, and a lower section which accommodated the animals. This structure served as a primitive heating system, allowing the family to be warmed by the heat the animals gave off in the very cold winter nights.

Jesus is born in such a cave, out the back, in poverty, dependent upon the hospitality of probable distant relations. Babies still are born in such circumstances that make us cringe, given our standard of health and maternity care.

There is a profound insight into the nature of God in this outhouse scene. It is an insight that can give us our most fundamental appreciation of God. It is an insight that might turn our own thinking and attitudes into real sympathy with wider humanity, especially those close and all around the world who battle to survive.

Jesus begins life in the outback, out the back. We can understand from the conditions of his birth, that a profound statement is being made about his life, his purpose, and especially, about the view God has of the world. For in the birth of Jesus, God is embracing humankind, the life and experience that you and I share. But this birth and its conditions go further than that general understanding. This out-the-back birth is including all those who live life pushed to the margins, all those who are kept out the back, all those who are dealt blows by their life circumstances.

This insight into the significance of Christmas is far greater and more life-giving than the tinsel and the baubles, and our usual festive trappings. For every human being has experiences of being out the back, cast aside, even if this does not characterise their lives.

As Jesus begins his life as Son of God and Saviour of humankind, so he continues his life, working in an outback town, Nazareth, and spends most of his ministry and mission in Galilee. Galilee was considered a backwater, even by those who lived in Jerusalem.

Even more emphatically, Jesus dies out the back. Jesus was crucified, most probably on the site of the rubbish dump of Jerusalem, on a site that had continuous smoldering fires, as most rubbish dumps have. What began out the back in a cavern, climaxed in his execution out the back of Jerusalem.

The theological significance of all of this is that as far as God is concerned, nothing is out the back Nothing is too remote or too discarded, for God's presence. This understanding means that even when we are most stupid, most life-denying, most out of our minds, most neglectful, we will encounter God's attracting, restorative presence. There can be no greater gift.

The fact that God is at home in the outback, and with all who live out the back, and with us when we put parts of ourselves that we may dislike out the back of our consciousness, has definite consequences for us who believe that Jesus is the insight into God. For Jesus' birth out the back asks to attend with the same graciousness of God to anyone who is pushed out the back in life.

Unfortunately, our authorities have pushed families from desperate nations into detention centres in our remotest outback. This has been not just a physical action, locating them in distant places, but a psychological action as well, removing them from public view and awareness.

Psychotherapists warn us that whatever we repress, send out the back of our consciousness, will exert itself in some form of diminished behaviour that will cause us to be psychologically unwell. I think that this is not simply the case for individuals. This can become a condition for a nation too. We may become an unbalanced, psychologically impaired nation, a nation whose soul is diminished, if we continue to discard out the back, those who come to us in need of security.

The haunting aspect of the denunciation of Jesus and his violent execution is that human power can go against God, can resist God, can reject the commitment God has to humankind. Whenever such rejection happens, those who do the rejecting, morally and spiritually diminish themselves, and place themselves at risk of being antagonists to the purposes of God.

Christmas brings a wonderfully life-affirming announcement: that God is with humankind in the out the back conditions of human life. Christmas also brings a forecast that God is to be met in these out the back arenas, and that God's people are expected to be Christlike there too.

This is the realism of Christmas, that God is this kind of God, who embraces all humankind. Surely, this is the realism our world desperately needs both from God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and from us, as believable believers!