Advent Reflection

I think I always approach Christmas with a sense of failure. I start Advent with Great Expectations, and then - things happen. But this calendar year has been good. Has it given me any insights?

Certainly our pilgrimage to the Land of the Holy One has given a renewed emphasis on the grounded-ness, even the earthiness, of the events of the Incarnation. It’s not just that the places we sing carols and read lessons about actually exist (though that is not unimportant.) It’s also that we experienced just a little of the pain, frustration and sorrow of Palestinians living under a frequently arrogant occupation, And that is a reminder that similar feelings prevailed in that same country in 4 BC (or whenever). God did not choose a happy smiling place to be born in! He is still active and bringing change in dark and hurting places.

I’ve also been struck in a fresh way about the importance of the Advent season. That has often been manifested in a grumpy old man’s complaining that Christmas starts too soon, and we’re singing carols when we should still be using ‘O come, o come, Emmanuel’ or the Advent prose. Forgive the grumpiness - but Advent has its own message. It’s about expectation – and hope, which I increasingly believe is even more important than faith and love. For without that hope for the future we cannot bear the pain and darkness of much of life.

The experiences of Palestinian Christians reminded us of the similar feelings we heard expressed by Sri Lankan Tamils when we were leading clergy retreats there in 2007. There seemed to be little hope. Would things ever get better?

Humanly speaking, it often is hard to see signs of hope; and there’s where faith and the Advent prophecies are so important. I believe Christians are called to be bearers of hope in and to our world and especially for people who find it hard to see there is hope. We must not do that in a fatuous or trivial sense, but by affirming that the incarnation, particularly because of its setting, gives us reason to hope. God does not give up on his world, and gets involved in the most unexpected and unlikely places. David Jenkins once summarised the Christian message as: ‘God is, as he was in Jesus, and so there is hope.

If we are not bearers of hope, we have little to offer the oppressed, the dispossessed, the broken-hearted, the lonely and the terminally ill, apart from our sympathy. But in fact, Advent reminds us we can wholeheartedly offer them hope; the hope of a God who comes, a God who loves us unreservedly.

Finally this year has reinforced the experiences we have been blessed in having in the past, that the Church really is a world-wide and universal communion. Christians can and do meet and pray together despite social, ethnic and other differences. Week by week, throughout the world worship is offered in many widely distinct cultures and languages. And that is the point. As we look for the coming of the Kingdom we already enjoy being part of that fellowship, ‘that great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language.’

The child whose birth to Mary and Joseph - far from their home, in an animal shelter in an obscure town in an occupied province - we shall shortly be celebrating was born to bring comfort and hope for all people; he was and is and eternally will be ‘a light for revelation to the nations.’

Amen. Even so, Come Lord Jesus!

The Holy Land - Part 2 (see first instalment below)

This was my first visit to Israel/Palestine. Cost had been one impediment previously. But almost more than that, I was hesitant for two reasons – one, that I might find the experience disappointing, and also (increasingly) a real concern about the political situation and the oppression of the Palestinian people.

The second concern remains, but Geoffrey ensured our visit incorporated as much contact as possible with Palestinians, especially local Christians. We spent two nights in a hotel in Jericho, and visited a school for the blind near Bethlehem and a boy’s home at Bethany. We also had first-hand experience of the separation wall, road checkpoints, and the frustration of being denied access to Palestinian territory by young Israeli border- guards.

To return to my initial concern: in the event I was not disappointed by any of the sites. I had expected to dislike the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, having read many negative comments, Yes, it was overcrowded, and the petty divisions among Christian denominations is shameful. And there is almost nothing remaining of the original church or its subsequent rebuilds before the 17^th century. And yet – it’s a place where Christian prayer and worship have been offered for nearly two millennia. Much love and devotion has been poured out by countless pilgrims. And there is something moving about the groups of Nigerian, Korean, Brazilian, American, French, British and other pilgrims filling the place. It’s a foretaste of that heavenly Jerusalem, where will gather “saints from every tribe and language and people and nation.”

And there were surprises. I had not expected Qumran to have such a numinous atmosphere; it’s a lonely place on the edge of the Dead Sea, leading into the Judean wilderness. But it’s not barren or threatening, but rather charged with the grandeur of God and resonant with the hope and expectation of the community that gathered there, away from the corruptions of urban life. And there were other places where the presence of God was almost tangible; like the ancient monastery, or rather laura (for hermits), of Mar Saba, also in the wilderness. Here lived and wrote the great St John of Damascus – author of ‘The Day of Resurrection! Earth tell it out abroad’, and the story of Barlaam and Joasaph (which I read in Greek in my first year at Sussex).

And time and again, although they may not have been ‘wow’ moments (I’m not very often subject to them anyway!), there were experiences of convergence and connection. The ruins of 1^st century Capernaum with its synagogue and homes echoed with Jesus teaching and healings: the man lowered through the roof, Jairus’ daughter and the woman with the haemorrhage. All around the Sea of Galilee we were reminded implicitly that the man whose death and resurrection we had focussed on in Jerusalem had here  spoken of and demonstrated the transforming reality of the Kingdom of God.

Places dimly remembered from Old Testament readings suddenly become ‘real’: Jericho, with its mighty walls; Samaria, where Ahab and Jezebel ruled; Beth Shan, where Saul and Jonathan’s bodies were hung on the city walls; Dan, where Jeroboam set up the golden calf to stop his people creeping back to Jerusalem.

And we must not forget those places that recur in both Testaments; like Jacob’s Well (in present day Nablus) – where the spirit of martyrdom has survived, following the brutal murder a few years ago of the Orthodox monk who looked after it, killed by an Israeli settler who resented the presence of non-Jew. And we met an actual Samaritan priest, part of a tiny community living on Mt Gerizim, who read only the Torah and offer sacrifice at Passover.

Heaven touches earth in so many places and at all times – but we need the particular and specific places and memories of history, to make that truth alive and challenging.

Advent: Reflections on visit to the Holy Land

Our eleven days pilgrimage in Israel and Palestine last month were remarkable, enjoyable and challenging. They will take time to process and reflect on. We were blessed with excellent leadership from Geoffrey Marshall; and better than average weather for the seaspn.

Where to begin? Perhaps we should note the remarkable fact that pilgrims are still visiting Jerusalem and the other Holy Sites – in large numbers. Despite uncertainties about the security situation, there were crowds of visitors from the UK, USA, Nigeria, Brazil, Russia, France, Italy and more. No doubt fror a few it was just another holiday – from Chaucer’s time, pilgrimages have had something of the package holiday about them. But something was driving people to queue patiently in the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem for up to 2 hours, to gain a few moments in the crypt chapel that marks the site of Jesus’ birth.

What draws them? Many of these places are charged with significance, with memories and with allusions. They are places where ‘prayer has been valid’ for centuries; places which remind us of the remarkable claim that God has acted in – intervened in – human history, at specific times and in specific places.

In an important sense, we can only worship God in England on a Sunday at the end of 2014, because he spoke to Abraham in various parts of Palestine, to Gideon at the springs of Harod, to Mary at the well in Nazareth, to Jesus at the Jordan and in the Judean wilderness. We can only meet the Risen Christ in our weekly eucharists all over the world, because Jesus broke bread with his disciples in the Upper Room, prayed in agony in Gethsemane, carried the cross along the Via Dolorosa, suffered and died on Golgotha and rose from the tomb in a garden somewhere nearby. We can only be guided by the Holy Spirit today, because on the Day of Pentecost, 33 AD, the disciples on the steps to the Temple Mount were filled by his power and enabled to preach in tongues.

The danger of the gilded palaces that have been built on the holy sites is that they obscure tyhe ordinariness. Frederck Buechnner wrote of Jesus’ birth:

If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."

So, although the places we can visit in Jerusalem, Judea Palestine and Galilee are not exactly the same as those that Abraham, Isaiah, John the Baptist and Jesus knew, they remind us that we are not imagining things, or creating our own stories. We are responding to events and places that real people – like us – experienced and knew.

For those privileged to have gone to the ‘Land of the Holy One’ (as the Anglican Church in Jerusalem prefers to call it), our reading of the Bible takes on a new freshness and liveliness. ‘That’s where Zaccheus climbed the tree to see Jesus.’ ‘That’s where the paralysed man was lowered through the roof.’ ‘That’s where Lazarus was called out of the tomb.’ ‘That’s where Jesus’ body lay for three days before the Marys found the tomb empty.’

Pilgrimage is not necessary. Unlike the hajj for Muslims, it’s not required of Christians, and there are many who are unable to go to the holy sites who have a deeper and more lively faith and commitment than those who have.

But for all who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the privilege of this experience means we shall not be the same again.

Introducing this site

December 1 2014

I am new to this - and in some ways don't approve! But - I have time on my hands, and the possibility of something to say, so will undertake occasional reflections on topics that interest me.
Most of this will be broadly theological, spiritual or devotional - but I may step out into other area, if I feel moved to.

I hope some of my thoughts will be of some interest to others. But if not - just ignore them!