Nine Lessons and Carols-Living the Word

A homily given at the conclusion of the sequence of Nine Lessons and Carols at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 9th December 2025 at 5.30pm. Thank you to everyone who came to this first service of its kind here for many years. A special thank you to Colin Spinks and the choir and to all our readers, representing some of the many important organisations who call St Olave Hart Street their 'own' church.

The beginning – or prologue -to the Gospel of John traditionally concludes the sequence of readings at carol services at this time of year. Combining Jewish theology and Greek philosophy, it proclaims that the divine Word through whom all things were made—is most fully revealed in the person of Jesus, the fulfilment of prophecy. Drawing together all the readings we have heard previously, the prologue of John’s gospel is a cosmic-scale explanation of incarnation - the birth of Jesus – God’s eternal Word becoming flesh.

 

Later theologians developed this idea further. They taught that the divine Word – what the Greeks called the Logos - does not only become flesh in Jesus, but exists as a kind of seed of wisdom within all people—giving every human being, in every culture and every age, a capacity to recognise the one true God. 

 

The Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek powerfully describes how missionaries to East Africa struggled to make that Word known to the people they encountered there. By re-translating the passage I just read from a Luo dialect back into English, he shows how difficult it can be to convey the Word as written to a very different - and an oral - culture.

 

“In the beginning” is not a concept that was familiar to the Luo—who conceive of time in such a way that there can be no single moment from which all things spring. So the phrase became simply, “From long long ago.” And because there is no tradition of Greek metaphysical philosophy in East Africa, “the Word” could not be readily understood or conceived as the Logos, the source of light, truth and life. It was translated instead as “News.”

When missionaries encountered the many spirits of indigenous belief amongst the Acoli tribe, they insisted there must be one, and only one, creator spirit among them—because this was the only theological framework they understood. “Who created your people?” they asked. The elders, who had no concept of beginnings or creation out of nothing, replied honestly: “Our mothers.” The missionaries tried again: “Which God moulded you?” they asked.

The elders thought of the hostile spirit they held responsible when children were born with deformities - their bodies formed differently —and so they responded by giving the name of that spirit Rubanga. And because the missionaries considered all tribes and customs to be equivalent, they concluded that Rubanga must be the creator God of all Luo people, not just the Acoli.

 

So instead of “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” the text given to the Luo by the missionaries reads:

“From long long ago there was News, News was with the hunchback spirit, News was the hunchback spirit.”

A reading of the scripture apparently accurately translated but stripped of all meaning.

p’Bitek’s challenge remains ours today: to ensure the living Word does just that. That it lives—which means that it is not simply translated and memorised by rote, but received and inhabited.

 

So often we act as though faith is an intellectual exercise—as if we simply need to read lots of books to understand the Word of God. But to be living in us, the Word must be digested. It must enter the bloodstream. Otherwise we remain spectators—people who read the word but do not inhabit its truth; people who risk, in p’Bitek’s words, worshipping the hunchback spirit – and not our Lord and Saviour.

 

In recent years, scientists have spoken about the “gut brain”—the vast network of neurons in our digestive system that as part of our autonomic nervous system plays an important role in regulating our behaviour – and how we perceive and engage with the world.

Scripture recognised this long before neuroscience. When the Gospels say Jesus was “moved with compassion,” the phrase in its original language literally means he was moved in his guts – or his bowels.

Compassion is not just a word to be read and translated. We feel it, as Jesus did, as a physical stirring, an embodied - or somatic - response. Likewise our guts tell us when we feel love or encounter injustice. We feel it when we see news reports on TV or read about shocking atrocities in the paper. And often, when we think about what our gut is telling us we dismiss it – or find excuses as to why we should not, or cannot act upon it. We decide we don’t have the time or the money or the power or the skill to act. That’s when our head brain gets in the way of what our gut brain is telling us. 

 

Being fully alive to the life Christ has revealed to us and that we are called to live means living the Word not just in the mind, but in the gut. The place where instinct, compassion and courage are formed.

If we make space for the Spirit to work in us in this way, the Word becomes more than something we hear and read and translate. It becomes something we embody. 

The living word, that source of light, truth and life, becomes flesh in us.

Advent is the season when we cry O come, o come Emmanuel, when we call for that seed, that Logos, to grow and flourish in us. 

So this week, may we make time to hear the living Word amidst the noise of our busy lives, read Him faithfully, feel how he marks us deeply both in intellect and instinct, learn and from this experience and notice how our whole lives are transformed when we inwardly digest the light, hope and life he brings. 

May the living Word may be born in each of us this Christmas.

 

Amen. 

Links
I found this book to be an excellent introduction to the writings of the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek to be very helpful. Do also read his poems.