If a turkey could smile I am sure that Blue Farrah would be beaming. She is a prize turkey owned by Anne and Michael Moorhouse from Powys, and the reason for her beaky smile would be because she didn’t end up on your or anyone else’s table on Christmas Day. On the contrary she has claimed top honours in the National Poultry Club of Great Britain and she is such a perfect specimen that her owners are looking forward to entering her in the competition again next year. In the meantime she will be used for breeding and hopefully creating more prize winners. A little bit of hope for all those turkeys out there! Blue Farrah has been saved!
Christmas, of course, has many associations: tinsel, turkeys, trimmings, food, drink, parties, presents, stockings, Santa Claus, and so on. It is a happy time, a time when people go out of their way to celebrate and it can be difficult to discover the Christian message of Christmas. However, even the religious imagery we often develop is also in danger of hiding what the mystery of Christmas celebrates. The crib scenes and Christmas card images, the cosy pictures, the glowing lights, the flickering candles and everything else can so easily descend into over-sentimentality that we can forget about the reality of the Incarnation, of the Word made flesh. As our Christmas celebrations continue, our celebration today stands starkly next to those images, as we remember St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. The reading from the Acts of the Apostles is not a pretty picture: there is anger, intolerance, bloodshed, pain, and death. And Jesus’ warning in the gospel reading really does bring us down to earth with a bump. ‘Brother will betray brother to death, and the father his child: children will rise against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by all men on account of my name; but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.’
Mary and Joseph knew the hard reality of life. They knew that putting Jesus at the centre of their lives was a difficult and sometimes treacherous path to take. Stephen, too, illustrates this to its extreme. We are not all called to martyrdom in the same sense as Stephen. But we are called to place our lives on the line, to embrace the hardship and challenges of discipleship. We are called to sacrifice and surrender, to give our lives to Jesus. We will know all kinds of complications and heartache, all kinds of divisions, sadness, pain and deaths. But, as Jesus promises us, if we stand firm to the end we will truly know what it means to be saved.
Readings: Acts 6:8-10; 7:54-59 John 10:17-22
The full story of the homily illustration may be found here
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