Speak Tenderly to Jerusalem (Advent #8)

Comfort, comfort my people

says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

that her sin has been paid for... (Isaiah 40:1-2a)

When John the Baptist was asked by the Pharisees to give his job description and show his credentials, he responded first by denying the positions of honour that they suggested to him and secondly by quoting the prophet Isaiah, describing himself as:

A voice of one calling:

"In the desert prepare

the way of the Lord..." (Isaiah 40:3a)

And what was that desert in which he called, or the desert in which the way was to be prepared? For Israel there was one desert which resonated in their minds: the wilderness in which they wandered for 40 years after escaping Egypt but before entering the Promised Land. And when Isaiah wrote these words, he was speaking to an Israel that was facing another desert - the desert of exile in Babylon. When John the Baptist came preparing the way of the Lord, Israel was in another desert - the desert of Roman occupation. The comfort of God felt far, far away.

When Jews quoted Old Testament scripture, they were not only talking about the exact words quoted but the whole context that the scripture came from. It was expected that their audiences would know the background and fill in around the quote. So John the Baptist was not only identifying himself; he was identifying the age that had come. And that was a time of comfort for God's people.

The church in the West is sufficiently comfortable and complacent that we seem therefore to miss a huge amount of what Jesus came to do. We don't understand what it meant to set captives free, because we don't understand what it is to be captives. We sing about Immanuel "ransoming captive Israel" but the words are potentially no more than figures of speech.

Perhaps the persecuted church could teach us something about longing for Jesus' second coming as first century Jews longed for the first. Perhaps they could help us understand Simeon's joy on meeting "the consolation of Israel". Perhaps then it might mean something to read Isaiah 40 and to know that, when Jesus came, He fulfilled all of that, and that we who believe are just on the cusp of knowing and experiencing precisely what that means.

So for our music today we have something a bit different. I have found myself unexpectedly discovering some music of late that draws heavily on Jewish and Middle Eastern roots in capturing the emotions of some of the Psalms and prayers of the Old and New Testaments. For this, I can strongly recommend Aaron Strumpel's two animal-themed albums, but today I would like to share a version of the Lord's Prayer sung by highly eccentric and experimental outfit Psalters. You can, I think, imagine that you are seated with the early church, waiting, hoping, begging to God for the consolation of His people. It's quite long, and it isn't an easy listen. But sit back, take it in, and perhaps then read Isaiah 40 and pray that these words will truly resonate with you this Advent.

"The beginning shall remind us of the end..." (Advent #7)

Last night, while preparing a class on T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi", I found another one of his wonderful "Ariel" poems which so perfectly suited the Advent season that I decided to share it with you all today.

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish - which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or int he piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By "eightieth" meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy,
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

He did what the angel commanded (Advent #6)

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly...

Of all the ways that God could have chosen to come to earth - this. An unplanned teen pregnancy; a scandal falling over a young couple's engagement. If your head doesn't swim a little at all of this, you probably aren't thinking about it terribly much. Is this the triumphant way that a king comes to be among His people? Is this the way we would expect the Infinite to make His presence felt in His creation?

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel' - which means, 'God with us'...

And somehow it all seems part of the plan, first signalled by the prophet Isaiah talking to Ahaz, a fairly reprobate King of Judah. That king thought that he could use God for his own purposes, and feigned piety when Isaiah caught him out. That time, the prophecy of Immanuel - God being with Israel - was not necessarily a word of encouragement. God could not be put in a box; He was not Israel's great nationalistic Secret Weapon. Who could predict what God can do? Who could know His mind? Who could ever hope to contain Him?

When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus...

And so we have a great mystery. No-one can contain God, yet a fourteen-year-old girl gave birth to Him. No-one can predict Him or box Him, yet He has made His plans known to us. And He is with us. He came to be with us in Jesus, and He remains with us in the very same way at the end of Matthew's Gospel as He is at the beginning (Matt 28:20).

Joseph and Ahaz both heard the news that God would be with them. But for each one, the news had vastly different implications. How, I wonder, does it strike our hearts today to think of, to prepare for, God being with us?

The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel...

(All Bible passages quoted come from Chapter 1 of Matthew's Gospel)

Is anything too wonderful for God? (Advent #5)

Luke 1:26-38

In my last post a few days ago I commented on the strange paradox that we see often in our society today: that we are surrounded by wonders yet so often fail to believe in the wondrous aspects of the Bible. There is, perhaps, an explanation for this: though we do not understand much of what surrounds us - the physics required, say, to allow a plane to fly off into the clouds, seemingly defying all laws of gravity; or the software programming used to make iBooks with translucent pages that we can turn with our fingers - we trust that somehow "science" has made each of these wonders possible. We couldn't do them ourselves, we reason, but we just don't have the know-how. Someone else does. But parting the Red Sea? That's impossible. A virgin giving birth to a baby? No-one can do that.

Which means, essentially, that we have elevated science to the true, marvellous miracle-worker of our age, but demoted God to the role of a fairly subservient heavenly janitor; all He can do is move around and tidy up what is already there, as if the laws of physics, which He created, are somehow too powerful for Him to overrule. Many have already commented wisely on the way in which the "miracles" of technology that happen daily have numbed us to the wonder of it all, one article from Christianity Today and the YouTube clip it references both expressing this phenomenon particularly well. The attendant effect that I often barely notice in my own life is that, though we expect great and marvellous deeds daily from our iPads, we expect nothing of an almighty God.

In a time well before iPads were even conceivable (even books with words printed on them and bound together were still a good millennium and a half away), a young girl was faced with something that still defies modern science and is therefore dismissed as nonsense: she was told that, despite being a virgin, she would have a child. On asking how this was possible, she was given a response that, to modern scientific readers, might sound like nonsense:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Not really a scientific explanation, but what could possibly be lacking from it? I do not ever feel the need to understand the mechanics of how exactly it is that I can tap away at a few black keys and hit a few buttons and suddenly become a globally published author. I just know I can, because I trust that my computer and those who have programmed it and the thing we call the Internet knew what they were doing when they set up the whole system in which I now can simply luxuriate. Likewise for Mary. How can a virgin give birth? To a human constrained by the law that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it seems more or less impossible. To a God who made everything out of nothing - creation ex nihilo, the theologians call it - it is surely no harder than what He has already done, no harder for Him to manage than any of what we take utterly for granted in our everyday lives.

I don't question the reality of what my computer can do, simply because it is beyond my understanding. I see the proof of it daily. So too, Mary, whose virgin body would soon begin to show all the signs of being with child, would surely have known before too long that the impossible had happened. For nothing is impossible with God.

With Clouds Descending (Advent #4)

This afternoon, as part of a unit on "Future Worlds", I set my Year 11 English class the task of writing a short piece about the future, using the opening phrase, "In twenty years from now..." While they wrote their pieces, I wrote my own. By the time I had finished it, it felt remarkably Advent-related, so now I am sharing it with you.

In twenty years from now, we will not know how much our world has changed. The rapid growth of our planet and the ever-increasing, ever-changing world of technology will conspire to make us blind to change.

We will wonder: was there ever a world in which we had to leave our houses to go shopping? Did we ever not drive in cars that talk to us, remember the route to work for us, avoid oncoming traffic for us? And yet we will still say, “It is not enough.” We will still say, “It is not enough.” We will still complain when our train is late by a nanosecond, when information on any topic in the world cannot be instantly accessed from wherever we stand at any point in time. We will still say, “Miracles do not happen”, even though all around us will be phenomena that in any previous age would be declared great signs and wonders.

And when we find we still cannot make grey skies turn blue, still cannot reach heaven with our iPhones, or whatever we will call them then; when we find that God is no further from us nor closer to us regardless of the speed of our internet connection, we will still shake our fists at the sky in rebellious fury, still retreat into our labs to turn gold into eternal life, still worship the things our hands have made.

And if, in twenty years from now, we see on the clouds a sign that makes our hearts rise or weep, we will look at what we have made, the miracles we poured our hearts into and ignored, and know that now all our hopes are either met or destroyed. If that happens in twenty years from now, the greatest scientist, the greatest software developer, the greatest engineer, the greatest politician, will all be on their humbled knees.