Episcopal Cafe reprints Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ Christmas message today. the original was delivered on BBC Radio and may be found at the Archbishop’s website.

One of the main things that Christmas means to me is that God actually likes the company of human beings, God starts living a human life in the middle of the world when the life of Jesus begins, and that suggests that as the Bible says – God actually loves the world, he likes to be with us, he likes us to be with him. And what flows from that for Christians, is the sense that human beings are just colossally worthwhile. God thought they were worth spending a lifetime with and all that spills over into how we see all kinds of human beings; the ones we don’t like or the ones we don’t reckon very much, the ones we don’t take very seriously. But they are all to be taken very seriously, they are all to be loved. And so Christmas, as I see it, is the very beginning of that sense of huge human dignity in all the people around us, and that’s what I think we are celebrating, that is the most important thing. I hope everyone listening has a very happy Christmas.”

I’m struck by the simplicity of this message, by it’s generosity, and by the way it parallels +Katharine’s Christmas message. I’m wishing I could put my arms around them both.

John 3:16 has long been a chief Christmas text for me. I like it best in Luther’s German: Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt . . . , of thich there is a wonderful paraphrase by Heinrich Schütz. You can hear a fragment of it here that concludes with my favorite passage, auf das alle die an ihn glauben, nicht verloren werden . . . , “so that all who believe on him might not be lost.”

auf das alle: alle, alle, alle . . .

I love this text. It is part of the fabric of my being. I could no more separate myself from it than from my own name. Perhaps the psalmist meant something of the kind in writing, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem . . . .” This is not belief in the modern sense. It has nothing to do with what is today sometimes called a belief system. But I think it may be belief in the sense the gospel writer meant in the centuries before Irenaeus; not what Luther meant–Luther was too much of an individualist on his own part, if not for others. But I believe Schütz loved the text as I do: as musicians, perhaps, love the word of God.

auf das alle: alle, alle, alle.

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