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Before Advent I was preaching my way through the Lord's Prayer. Again. This time in the cultural context of the chaotic and at times toxic political climate of this past year. Whose kingdom counts most? Whose will to power should we support? What political leader is the least worst choice when politics itself is losing its capacity for constructive dialogue, civil discourse, a shared commitment to the common good. Is the Lord's Prayer too heavenly minded to be any use in countering the hard-edged cynicism and divisive rhetoric of life online?

And then there's that awkwardly ordinary request for bread. If Jesus was teaching his followers a pattern prayer, setting precedents and priorities, what on earth has bread to do with it? Quite a lot as it turns out, in a world where food is weaponised against those we oppose (sanctions); where food is wasted on an industrial scale; in which starvation and malnutrition remain a way of life for millions of people. What on earth does it mean to pray "Give us this day our daily bread" in the developed world where food security is now a crucial component of a nation's economic, foreign and defence policies? That small loaf makes the Lord's Prayer a searing critique of our politics, economics and ethics. Jesus teaches us to pray for enough food for all of us; and us doesn't just mean me and mine.   

Advent interrupted the sequence, so now on the first Sunday of the New Year, we will confront an even more demanding choice. Can we pray this – "Forgive us our wrongs, as we forgive those who have wronged us." No getting away from it; Jesus requires the kind of openness before God that is nothing less than a health check on all our relationships. 

Forget the walk in the park that is the New Year resolution charade. To pray these words is to enter a binding agreement with God that we will sort out our relationships. Reconciliation takes two sides to make peace; yes, but a Christian is a minister of reconciliation, and carries a portfolio on peacemaking. Forgiveness is something else, and no less demanding. The Lord's Prayer compels us to return regularly to the unfinished business of dealing with anger, memories, bitterness, grudges, grievances, misunderstandings, dislikes, and yes, hates.  

To pray the Lord's prayer as if we mean to practice it, is a daily exercise in reorientation towards others. And to pray for forgiveness and link that to our own intentional forgiving is to begin to take seriously the mercy that has forgiven us. The start of a New Year then becomes an opportunity for relational healing, and a recovery of love as the quality control of our emotional life. The Lord's Prayer is an eye opener, restoring our sight so that we see those who have become strangers to us in a new light. It is to pray for a heart that is Christlike in its default mechanisms of love and peacemaking, working towards mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation.

As much as any sermon a preacher ever dares to preach, a sermon on the forgiveness petition requires to be preached and practised first to the heart of the preacher. For a Christian community which is the embodied life of Christ a life of forgivingness is as demanding as it gets. 

 

On Christmas morning there wasn't much beach left to walk on. The tide was fully in, and a walk along the shoreline was a game of tag with the waves as they broke on the last two or three metres of sand. So a linear stroll became a meandering wander, avoiding wet feet but wanting to be near the gathered energy and final sprint of each wave. The result was not so much a walk on the beach, as a dance with waves, with the occasional broken rhythm, and these reflecting the inner ebb and flow, and broken rhythms of my own spirit.

On Christmas morning, walking the shoreline watchfully at full tide, I became aware of an inner coalescence of deep and self-defining emotional responses. That sentence needs some explanation. The first part is theological conviction; the second is personal history; and the third part is when these two perspectives merge in a deep acceptance of what faith in God entails when great loss and great joy reside in the same heart. 

1. Christmas day is the high holiday of Christian faith, its priority over Good Friday, Easter morning and Pentecost being both liturgical and theological. Advent begins the liturgical year and comes prior to everything else; it is also true that the incarnation is the theological prerequisite of the ministry, passion and resurrection of Jesus and is the precondition of making any sense at all of the Christian story. The incarnation, the voluntary vulnerability of God in Christ is the high tide of Divine Love at its most creative, purposeful and self-expending. The birth of Jesus is the decisive initiative of God in revealing, demonstrating, and evidencing once and for all his purpose of reconciliation. Every Advent the Christian soul is confronted with the scandal of Bethlehem, and the sheer embarrassment of that manger. Three times Luke mentions it; but not without spelling out the shocking paradox: "born to you..a Saviour, Messiah, Lord…and this sign…wrapped in cloths, lying in a manger." The one whose three names out rank Caesar's claims to deity and lordship and world authority, is a baby in a cow feeding trough.

2. Advent this year has had a deeper than usual significance for me. The celebration of the birth of the Christ child inexorably reminds every parent of the birth and the gift of their own children. Exactly a year ago on Christmas Eve, our daughter Aileen died, and the rhythms of our family life were irreparably broken. Life of course goes on, but no metaphor is near adequate to explain or describe what that means. A jigsaw that has lost pieces and is now essentially incomplete; a journey that seemed to have a set destination now diverted into strange and even frightening landscapes of life experiences; a piece of rare china falls and is broken, and however skilfully repaired, will never again ring with the clear sound of intended wholeness. Something beautiful, unique and irreplaceable is lost beyond recall, and that loss is felt in the deepest fundaments of the human heart where love, hope, joy, fulfilment and our own ultimate identity are formed. 

3. So walking by the sea on Christmas morning, dodging the more determined incoming waves, my heart was already in tune with the deepest chords of my faith; "for unto us a child is born…God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace." But there were broken rhythms too, because my heart was also ebbing and flowing with memories of love and laughter, loss and longing. In contrast to the joy of the angels, the nosy curiosity of the shepherds, the adoration of the Magi, there was the now familiar ache of love seeking its rightful owner, Aileen. There is in the Christmas story, at least for this bereaved parent, something of the pierced heart of Mary and, God knows, a sense that on this day of all days, God comes close to those who grieve for their child.

It took the whole day for all of this to settle into words that might make some sense. Not complete sense, but a way of holding in one heart the joy of the birth of the Christ child, and the sorrow of a parent's greatest grief. An understanding glimpsed, of how the waves of joy and sorrow, the ebb and flow of faith, the rhythms of life, are to be lived as faithfully and fruitfully as our weakness and strength allows. And in all of this, the growing acceptance that brokenness and wholeness, risk and trust, grief and gladness, fear and faith, despair and hope – these are the rhythms of life, the low and high tides of a life mysteriously gifted, and graced by the God who came amongst us in the Christ child, knowing that self-surrender would break His heart.

(The photo immediately above was taken some years ago, showing the storm-exposed remnants of old breakwaters on Aberdeen beach, viewed from a quite precise angle).    

Advent finishes with the advent of the Christ child. At the pivot of midnight, the hand of God moved forward, and creation's new beginning began.

Infant holy,
Infant lowly,
For His bed a cattle stall;
Oxen lowing,
Little knowing
Christ the Babe is Lord of all.
Swift are winging
Angels singing,
Noels ringing,
Tidings bringing,
Christ the Babe is Lord of all.

Flocks were sleeping,
Shepherds keeping
Vigil till the morning new,;
Saw the glory,
Heard the story,
Tidings of a Gospel true.
Thus rejoicing,
Free from sorrow,
Praises voicing,
Greet the morrow,
Christ the Babe was born for you!

 

 

Promises made and kept, but not the way we thought.

Prophets foretelling and forth-telling the truth as they saw it.

Empires on the make and populations on the move. 

Mary and Joseph, angels and shepherds performing the first scratch nativity.

A baby born in underprivileged circumstances.

A refugee family fleeing the slaughter of the innocents looking for a safe home.

All told, not the greatest story ever told.

Every day the story is retold in Syria, Myanmar, on the Mediterranean.

Advent is when Eternal love intersects with human history,

when reconciliation, peace, justice and hope

came gift-wrapped in swaddling cloths.    

 

Don't know who Anonymous 15th C was. But they were content with wonder, paradox, mystery. Some facts have no known precedent. Advent by definition is a first, and last.  

Wit Wonders

A God and yet a man,

A maid and yet a mother:

Wit wonders what wit can

Conceive this or the other.

 

A God and can he die?

A dead man can he live?

What wit can well reply?

What reason reason give?

 

God, Truth itself doth teach it.

Man’s wit sinks too far under

By reason’s power to reach it:

Believe and leave to wonder.

(Anonymous – 15^th C)

 

Over the centuries Christmas Eve has become encrusted with sentimental images and our own ideas about what was all going on, that mish-mash performed annually in nativity plays. So a gentle but necessary caveat: 

"Yes, plenty of angelic fireworks supercharge Luke's Birth Narrative, but these are more background special effects than bedrock significant events. The sign of God's salvation , the main event to see and know, is that of a flesh-and-blood infant boy swathed in cloth strips made from plant fibres and lying in a wooden feed-box for working animals. We cannot know God fully unless we know God there."¹

1. Luke. Two Horizons Commentary F Scott Spencer, (Eerdmans: 2019) page 69-70, emphasis original.

Yesterday at the Community Cafe Carol Service we were singing our way through the carol sheet. Asked for a favourite the pre-school contingent demanded 'Jingle Bells' – as antidote to the sacred stuff! 

Yes Jingle Bells lacks theological gravitas; yes Santa Claus and Jesus get a bit mixed up when you're four years old. But Advent is about surprise, expectation, excitement, and gifts. Because love really did come down at Christmas, we give presents celebrating God's presence here, now.

There is an adult seriousness that shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of believing in this God of inconvenient surprises!

A poem. Joseph wonders what in Gabriel's name he's got himself into!

 

I am Joseph

I am Joseph, carpenter,

Of David’s kingly line,

I wanted an heir; discovered

My wife’s son wasn't mine.

 

I am an obstinate lover,

Loved Mary for better or worse,

Wouldn't stop loving when I found

Someone Else came first.

 

Mine was the likeness I hoped for

When the first-born man-child came.

But nothing of him was me. I couldn't

Even choose his name.

 

I am Joseph, who wanted

To teach my own boy how to live.

My lesson for my foster son:

Endure. Love. Give.

(U A Fanthorpe)

Choosing carols for the Community Cafe was easy. Traditional, no unexpected alterations to well known words. No need for novelty or clever demythologising of such obvious eyebrow raisers as "Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes."

'Away in a manger' survives as an Advent and Nativity hit song not because of its theological precision, or historical verisimilitude. But because it evokes memories, provokes emotion, plugs in to those deep places of longing in danger of being disconnected by a culture that thinks such an inner ache should be erased by retail therapy. Advent validates aching hearts and hope long awaited.  

Election is about who is chosen, and who chooses, and means more than political decision-making. Mary is chosen, elect of God, as mother of the coming Messiah. 

"Hail Mary!" is the most outrageously empowering greeting to a young teenage woman. No wonder 'she was greatly troubled'.

"May it be to me as you have said." There are hinge moments in every relationship that push beyond the superficial now, pivotal points when choices are made that have forever consequences.

Advent is about that precarious moment of time, when an angel waited, what seemed like an eternity, for a young woman's 'Yes'.