Today's first
reading in the New International Version reads, in
part:
“He will stand and shepherd his flock
in
the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty
of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely,
for then his greatness
will reach to the
ends of the earth.
And he will be our peace
when
the Assyrians invade our land”
The Good News version
phrases it slightly differently,
and
the various translations seem almost equally divided as to whether
there is a full stop after “He will be our peace,”
and the
next sentence starting “When the Assyrians invade our land”,
or
the phrasing that says that when the Assyrians invade our land,
He
will be our peace.
Which is more true to the original Hebrew I
don’t know;
I do know that I prefer the second version!
And
I find that prophecy strangely comforting in these dark
days!
“He will stand and shepherd his flock in the
strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord
his God.”
“And he will be our peace when the Assyrians
invade our land.”
However, as we all know, a text
without a context is a pretext, so rather than just taking the words
as a lovely Christmas prophecy –
which of course, on one
level, they are –
let's look a bit deeper and find out a bit
more about Micah,
and what he was talking about.
Micah
was a prophet in 8th-century Judah,
more or less a contemporary
with Isaiah, Amos and Hosea.
As with so many of the prophets,
the book starts off with great doom and gloom.
He
prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem,
particularly because
they were simply dishonest and then expected God to cover for
them:
“Her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a
price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money.
Yet they lean
upon the LORD and say, Is not the LORD among us?
No disaster
will come upon us.”
But Micah said, “Well, actually....”
As one modern paraphrase puts it:
“The fact is, that
because of you lot, Jerusalem will be reduced to rubble and cleared
like a field;
and the Temple hill will be nothing but a tangled
mass of weeds"
An archaeologist called Roland de Vaux
has excavated village sites only a few miles from where Micah is
thought to have lived, and he found
something very interesting:
“The houses of the
tenth century B.C. are all of the same size and arrangement.
Each
represents the dwelling of a family which lived in the same way as
its neighbours.
The contrast is striking,” says de Vaux, “when
we pass to the eighth century houses on the same site:
the rich
houses are bigger and better built and in a different quarter from
that where the poor houses are huddled together.”
During
those 200 years, Israel and Judah had moved from a largely
agricultural society to one governed by a monarchy and with a Temple
in Jerusalem.
The distinction between the “Haves” and the
“Have nots” had grown, as it does still today.
In the tenth
century, the “haves” may well have been richer than the “have
nots”, and have had more luxuries, but their homes were basically
the same, their lifestyles similar.
And then it changed.
But
Micah tells the powerful ones –
the judges, the priests, the
rulers –
that God doesn't prop up any so-called progress that
is built on the backs of other people.
For God, justice and
equality matter far more than progress or growth.
But God's
people disagree, and they try to stop Micah, and other prophets,
telling them God's truth;
they only want to hear comforting,
agreeable prophecies about how their crops will flourish and there
will be plenty of wine!
But when Jerusalem has been
destroyed,
when her people have been carried off into exile,
then a day will come when a new leader will be born to them,
a
leader who will “stand and shepherd his flock in the days of the
Lord”,
and “who will be our peace when the Assyrians invade
our land.”
I expect you realise that these prophecies
were often dual-purpose;
they did and do refer to the coming of
Christ, of course,
but they also often referred to a local
event, a local birth.
We don't know who Micah was originally
referring to,
who would be born in Bethlehem,
but we do
know that, for us, these prophecies refer to Jesus.
“He
will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”
These
days we worry rather more about Syrians than about Assyrians –
whether we are concerned about the number of refugees seeking
asylum here, or whether we are more concerned, as we should be, about
how relatively few our government is allowing in.
Some people, I
know, worry that we shouldn't allow them in in case they turn out to
be terrorists,
but those are the tiniest of tiny
minorities among those fleeing Syria and Afghanistan,
and,
indeed, most are fleeing just such terrorists at home.
I mean,
how desperate do you have to be to try to cross the Channel in a
leaky rubber dinghy, and then not be allowed to land?
Which is
actually illegal on the part of our government –
if people
genuinely want to seek asylum,
they should be allowed to land
and apply through the appropriate channels.
We call them
“migrants”, lumping them all under one umbrella.
The term is
supposed to be neutral, less laden with emotional baggage than
“refugee” or “asylum seeker”.
It isn't, of course,
because people then talk about “illegal immigrants” or “economic
migrants”.
And it's noticeable that if we Brits go to live
abroad we aren't called migrants –
I did the whole economic
migrant thing back in the 1970s,
when I went to work in Paris
for some years after leaving school,
but nobody called me a
“migrant”, economic or otherwise –
I was an
expatriate!
And people talked about cultural exchange, and our
young people learning about different lifestyles, and so on, and it
was all considered a Good Thing.
And, of course, many of
your families,
and perhaps some of you are the first generation
who did so,
many of you came over here to work and contribute
to our society and learn about our way of life –
and have
enriched this country beyond all measure!
Maybe you can remember
the bewilderment of arriving here,
not too sure of your
welcome,
not too sure what life in this cold and rainy land was
going to be like.
Even if someone does make it across the
Channel,
their problems aren't yet over.
They aren't
allowed to work while their claim for asylum is being processed, and
although they do get an allowance, it really isn't very much.
Not
really enough to live on, and certainly not enough for a comfortable
lifestyle.
And if they are found not to be in imminent danger of
death back home, they are thrown out again, and if that's on their
records they can't really go and try their luck somewhere else in
Europe.
I don't know what the answer long-term is.
The
politicians will have to work that one out between them.
But we
need to pray for all migrants, and do what we can to help.
That
may be only donating a few pounds to the Unicef appeals that we see
daily on our televisions,
or we may be called to do something
more “hands-on”.
Whatever, though, we mustn't think of it as
someone else's problem!
Because Jesus will be our peace,
so Micah tells us.
If we believe Matthew's account, he was
himself a refugee for awhile,
when they fled to Egypt to avoid
Herod's troops.
As I understand it, God won't necessarily keep
the bad times from us,
or protect us from what lies ahead,
but
Jesus will be there with us in the midst of it all.
And I,
personally, find that reassuring.
And there is, of course,
the other “Assyrian” that invaded our world some twenty months
ago now and turned all of our lives upside-down.
I’m speaking,
of course, of the Covid-19 virus.
All of us have been affected;
all of our lives have been touched in one way or another.
Even
if we didn’t get ill, we have had to adapt to wearing masks
and
using hand sanitiser frequently,
to getting vaccinated and
boostered,
to testing regularly,
and, until July, we had
to get used to unwarrantable intrusions into our personal freedoms.
I mean, did you ever think it would one day be illegal to sleep
or eat anywhere other than in your own home?
I never did!
But
it came, and it happened.
And we learnt that God was, and is,
still with us in the pandemic.
When we couldn’t attend
public worship, we discovered new and creative ways of
being church together.
And that legacy lives on as many churches
livestream at least some of their services –
Brixton Hill does
every week,
and my daughter’s church is to livestream their
carol service this evening;
I hope to watch at least part of it
as my grandson is reading one of the lessons.
God has been with
us in this pandemic,
no matter what it has felt like at times,
and God will still be with us for the rest of it, and when it
is over.
All may not be totally well, but God will be with
us.
Our Gospel reading, too, told of someone who badly
needed reassurance.
Mary has just met the angel and been told
that, if she will, she is the one who will bear God's son, and she
has said “Yes”.
But it's early days yet –
there
aren't any physical signs that she is pregnant,
she has never
slept with a man, what is it all about?
But one thing the angel
had told her, that she hadn't already known, was that her cousin
Elisabeth, surely far too old to be having babies, was six months
gone.
So Mary goes off to see Elisabeth –
incidentally
this, for me, is one of the pointers that she was living in the
Jerusalem area at the time,
whether at Bethlehem or Jerusalem
itself –
tradition has it that she was one of the temple
servants –
because she would never have been able to travel
all that way between Nazareth and Jerusalem on her own.
Anyway,
she arrives at Elisabeth's front door,
and there is Elisabeth
with a large bump,
and Elisabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit,
confirms all that the angel had said.
And Mary bubbles over into
love and joy and praise,
and even if the words of the
Magnificat are what St Luke thought she ought to have said –
rather
like Henry the Fifth's speech at Agincourt being what Shakespeare
thought he ought to have said, rather than what he actually did say
–
even if they are not authentic, they are probably very close
to reality!
We sung a metrical version of her song just a few
minutes ago.
And it reminds us that God is turning accepted
values upside-down by having His Son born to a virgin mother in a
small town in an occupied land.
“Tell out, my soul, the
greatness of his might!
Powers and dominions lay their glory
by.
Proud hearts and stubborn wills are put to flight,
the
hungry fed, the humble lifted high.”
In the culture of
the day –
as in ours –
it was thought that prosperity
was a sign of God's blessing, and poverty rather the reverse.
But
no, that was not what Jesus was, or is, all about.
Instead, he
himself was born to an ordinary family that, within a couple of
years, was fleeing for its life into exile,
and when they did
dare go home, they didn't dare go back so near Jerusalem, but moved
up to the provinces.
Mary was so brave, saying “Yes”
to God.
I don't know how much she understood, but of course
Joseph could –
and seriously considered doing so –
have
refused to marry her, and then where would she have been?
But
the angel reassured Joseph, and Elisabeth reassured Mary.
All
was not totally well, but God was with them.
And that's
the message to take into this Christmas, isn't it?
With all the
uncertainty about Covid, and the Omicron variant,
all the
shenanigans in Downing Street leaving you wondering what the
politicians really think,
all the worries about our loved ones,
especially those who haven’t had their booster yet.
All
may not be totally well, but God is with us.
And God's son,
Jesus, will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.
Amen.
The Map House
2 weeks ago
