The incoming archbishop of Canterbury has warned in her Christmas Day sermon that “our national conversations about immigration continue to divide us, when our common humanity should unite us”.
Acting in her current role as the bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullally told St Paul’s Cathedral: “Joy is born exactly where despair expects to triumph. As joy breaks through in our lives it gives us the opportunity to become people who make room.
“Room in our homes. Room in our churches. Room in our public conversations and in the attitudes we hold. The joy asks us to allow our lives to be interrupted by the needs of others, just as the people of Bethlehem were interrupted.”
Mullally continued: “This insight matters because our own society carries uncertainties that can wear us down. Many feel the weight of economic pressure. Some feel pushed to the margins.
“Our national conversations about immigration continue to divide us, when our common humanity should unite us.”
Many people also “experience the hardship and injustice of inequality”, she said.
The bishop added: “These issues do not define the whole of our life together, yet they can leave us wondering whether the world is fraying at the edges.
“We who are Christians then hold fast to joy as an act of resistance. The kind of joy that does not minimise suffering but meets it with courage.”
She told the Christmas congregation: “God chooses to be born precisely into a world like ours. A world of limited resources and crowded homes.
“A world of political tension and uncertainty. A world where people do their best to offer kindness even when they feel stretched. God does not wait for perfect conditions. God arrives in the midst of the incomplete.”
In his Christmas Day sermon, the archbishop of York also spoke of divisions in society and how he was “intimidated” by Israeli militias during a visit to the Holy Land this year.
Stephen Cottrell said he was stopped at checkpoints and that militias told him he could not visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank.
“We have become, I can think of no other way of putting it, fearful of each other, and especially of strangers,” he said. “We cannot see ourselves in them. And we, therefore, spurn a common humanity.”
He described how YMCA charity representatives in Bethlehem, who work with “persecuted Palestinian communities” in the West Bank, gave him an olive wood nativity scene carving depicting a “large grey wall” blocking the three kings from getting to the stable to see Mary, Joseph and Jesus.
“It was sobering to see this wall for real on my visit to the Holy Land, and we were stopped at various checkpoints and intimidated by local Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” he said.
He said that, as well as “thinking about the walls that divide and separate the Holy Land”, he also thinks of “all the walls and barriers we erect across the whole of the world”.
He continued: “And perhaps, most alarming of all, the ones we build around ourselves and construct in our hearts, and of how our fearful shielding of ourselves from strangers.”
“The strangers we encounter in the homeless on our streets, refugees seeking asylum, young people robbed of opportunity and growing up without hope for the future, means that we are in danger of even failing to welcome Christ when he comes.”
In October, Mullally was named as the first female archbishop of Canterbury.
A former chief nursing officer for England, who was made a dame in 2005 in recognition of her contribution to nursing and midwifery, she has been bishop of London since 2018.
The Confirmation of Election ceremony on 28 January at St Paul’s Cathedral will lead to Mullally legally becoming archbishop of Canterbury. She will remain bishop of London until then, and her enthronement will take place at Canterbury Cathedral on 25 March.
The 105th archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, formally resigned in early January, having announced his intention to stand down in November 2024 over his handling of one of the church’s worst abuse scandals.
Pope Leo decried conditions for Palestinians in Gaza in his Christmas sermon. Leo said the story of Jesus being born in a stable showed that God had “pitched his fragile tent” among the people of the world.
“How, then, can we not think of the tents in Gaza, exposed for weeks to rain, wind and cold?” he said.
Leo was celebrating his first Christmas after being elected in May by the world’s cardinals to succeed the late Pope Francis.
In Thursday’s service with thousands in St Peter’s Basilica, Leo also lamented conditions for the homeless across the globe and the destruction caused by the wars roiling the world.
“Fragile is the flesh of defenceless populations, tried by so many wars, ongoing or concluded, leaving behind rubble and open wounds,” said the pope.
“Fragile are the minds and lives of young people forced to take up arms, who on the frontlines feel the senselessness of what is asked of them and the falsehoods that fill the pompous speeches of those who send them to their deaths,” he said.
