Remain in my love

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”

Thus Jesus in the first part of our Gospel reading today. To set it in a little context, which I probably don’t need to do, but still, this is, of course, part of Jesus’ farewell to his disciples. They have met together for the Passover meal, and Jesus has washed their feet. And the other Gospels tell us that he took bread and wine, blessed them, and gave them to the disciples – the ordinary actions that the host would have done at any special meal together, particularly a Sabbath or Passover meal. But Jesus, we are told, took this and lifted it into something different: This is My Body; This is My Blood. And now he is speaking to them, telling them things that perhaps they won’t take in all at once, but that the Holy Spirit, so Jesus reassures them, will remind them of in the days, weeks, months and years to come.

Above all, he is reassuring them. Basically, he is telling them that he must leave them, but that they will not be left alone. The Holy Spirit will come to them – something that couldn’t happen if Jesus didn’t leave. And the Holy Spirit will lead them into all truth.

The bit about loving one another, though – that’s so important that he says it twice. First, right at the very beginning: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And now in the passage we have just read: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”

Well, yes, all right, we know that. We have heard it before. It is familiar. But, hang on a minute – how are we supposed to do this? And what does Jesus mean, anyway?

Part of the problem, of course, it does depend on your definition of “love”. Our English language lets us down here, unusually, as we only have the one word that has to cover an awful lot of meanings, from loving God down to loving cheese on toast, including loving our families, our friends, our pets, our old teddy-bear, our hobbies and the person we're in love with! In Greece they managed better, and had several different words!

There is “storge”, or affection, the kind of love you feel for your child or your parents; then there is “eros”, which is romantic love; “philia”, which is friendship,and “agape”, which is divine love, and this is the word that is used in this passage. It is also, as you may or may not know, the word that St Paul used in that lovely chapter in 1 Corinthians, when he talks of the nature of that sort of love:

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

One of the interesting things is that when Jesus reinstates St Peter after he has denied him, you remember, by the lakeside, when he says to him “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” he uses the word “agape”. Peter can’t quite manage that, so he, when he replies “Lord, you know that I love you”, he uses the word “philia”; in other words, “Lord, you know I’m your friend”. Then when Jesus again asks him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”, he again uses the word “agape”, and Peter again replies using the word “Philia”. And then the third time, Jesus himself uses the word “philia” – which is why Simon Peter was so hurt. He’s already said twice that he is Jesus’ friend, why does he have to say it a third time?

Simon Peter found that committing himself to agape love, to God’s love, was pretty much impossible. I’m not surprised, are you? Let’s look at it again:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

This is the sort of love that Jesus was talking about, when he told us to love one another in the same way that He loved us.

But how? Heaven knows, I don't always succeed in this, I'm sure my centre is far more often on myself than it is on God, and I expect many of you feel the same way.

Even Simon Peter couldn't do it, as we have seen: “Lord, you know I'm your friend!” It wasn't until after Pentecost, after the Holy Spirit came down, that he became the great apostle and evangelist. His love for God, and for his neighbours, was never in doubt after Pentecost, however much it was before!

So it seems as though we can't love God or one another without God's love first in us, in the Person of the Holy Spirit. And in our Gospel reading, Jesus says that we need to remain in His love. God loves us. We need to remain in that love, “abide” in it, the older translations say. A modern paraphrase, “The Message”, says “Make yourself at home in my love”. So if God’s love is in us, and we remain in that love, we make ourselves at home in it, what does that mean? Jesus says that if we obey his commands, we will abide in his love, end of. And his command is to love one another.

But it's not always easy, is it? The trouble is, quite apart from anything else, our human loves can be so desperately flawed. You might think that there is nothing more wonderful than the love between parents and children but how easily that love can turn into wanting to dominate the child, to dictate how it should live, what it should do, who it should be. And you have all heard the old joke, “She’s the kind of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by their hunted expressions!” The kind of person who, out of love, misguidedly tries to run people’s lives for them.

And I don’t need to spell out just how easily romantic love can go wrong, and become something of a battle for possession. Or in this day and age, more likely, a refusal to commit oneself to the beloved.

As for friendship, you would have thought it would be difficult for that to go wrong. People tend to be friends because of shared interests; Robert and I have a great many very dear friends whom we would not otherwise have anything in common with apart from our love of skating. That is the thing that we are friends about.

But sometimes friendship can be more about excluding the other person, not including them. Particularly among children, of course, but it can happen among adults. Sadly, we see it a lot in the churches – we exclude those who, perhaps, are not of the same denomination as we are, or don’t worship God in quite the same way. Or perhaps we are Evangelical and they are not, or vice versa, so we tend to be sniffy about their way of being a Christian, and exclude them.

But God’s love is the kind of love that lays down its life for its friends. Jesus says that if we obey his commands, we will remain in his love. We need to love one another with God’s love, and that’s not something we can do alone. God’s love, we are told, is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit – we can love neither God nor one another without God’s having first loved us.

It all comes back to that, doesn’t it. God loves us and one of the implications of that love is that we are enabled to love one another.

But it’s not just about gooey feelings. Jesus pointed out that the greatest test of love is if you are willing to lay down your life for the other person. And St Paul’s description of love is eminently practical, too. Love, it seems, is something you do.

Love is something you do. Love is about putting the other person first. It’s about taking that extra step – giving someone a lift, even though it’s out of your way; making that telephone call, or sending that e-mail, to check that someone is all right. It can even be about commenting on someone’s Facebook status! It’s about remembering people’s birthdays and other special days. All that sort of thing – you know as well as I do; I scarcely need to spell it out.

In another place, Jesus tells us that we must love our neighbours as we love ourselves. Now loving ourselves is, very often, the difficult bit. It's all too easy to have the wrong kind of self-love, the kind that says “Me, me, me” all the time and demands its own way – the absolute opposite, in fact, of the love that St Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians. You can't love your neighbour – or God, either, for that matter – if you are full of that sort of self-love.

But then there is the equal and opposite problem – we don't value ourselves enough. We don't really like ourselves, we have a big problem with self-image, we are not what the French call “comfortable in our own skins”. And often it is the people who appear most self-absorbed, most unable to love others, who are the most wounded inside, and who are totally not comfortable with themselves. And again, it is only through the love of God, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, that we can be made whole, and thus enabled to love ourselves and other people, as we should.

So really, it's all one – we love, because God first loved us; we can't love God without also loving one another; we can't love one another unless we love ourselves – or, at the very least, have a healthy self-image, which amounts to the same thing; and we can't love ourselves unless we are aware that God loves us!
So the important thing, as it always is, is to be open to God's love more and more - which is basically what I think "remain in my love" means; to continue to be God's person; and to continue to be open to be being made more and more the person God designed us to be. To be fully human is to be fully God's person. Amen.

Children of God

I thought that today, for once, we wouldn’t look too closely at the Gospel reading, as Luke’s account of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection is very similar to the account in John’s gospel, which I expect you looked at last week. We certainly did at King’s Acre! The only thing I will point out is that Luke says Jesus actually ate with them – ghosts, after all, don’t eat! So that particular detail is, for the gospel writer, just another proof that Jesus really was raised. He wasn’t just a ghost; he wasn’t just a figment of their imagination. He ate some fish – and there’s the dirty plate!

We read the first chapter of this letter from John last week, too. I want to focus on the passage we read today, in a minute. It isn’t quite a letter, is it – it’s more of a sermon. He doesn’t put in the chatty details that Paul puts into his letters, nor the personal messages. Nobody seems to know whether it was really the disciple that Jesus loved that wrote the Gospel and this letter, or whether it was someone writing as from them, which was apparently a recognised literary convention of the day. But I noticed last week that right at the very beginning of the letter, or sermon – hey, let’s just call it an Epistle and have done – right at the very beginning, he says: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” In other words, the writer, too, claims to have seen, known and touched Jesus!

But to today’s passage. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”

We are God’s children! You know, when you come to think of it, that’s a pretty terrifying concept. People tend to think of themselves as serving God, or as worshipping God. But to be a child of God? That’s a whole different ball-game. After all, if we worship God or serve God, that doesn’t necessarily imply that God does anything for us in return. But if we are God’s children? That’s different! That implies that God is active in caring for us, in being involved in our lives, in minding.

Many of us here this morning have had children of our own. And all of us have been children! Perhaps some of us didn’t have very satisfactory childhoods, or our parents weren’t all they should have been. The model of God as Father isn’t helpful to everybody, I know.

But I still want to unpack it a bit, if I can, as I do think it’s important. We are all children of God, so we are told. We are not servants. We are not just worshippers. “Children” implies a two-way relationship.

Actually, it almost implies more than that. It implies that God does the doing; we don’t have to. No, seriously, think about it a minute. I have a daughter – she’s grown up and married now, of course, but for eighteen years she lived at home, and for many of those years she was totally dependant on Robert and me for everything – for her food, for her clothing, for her education, you name it! When she was a tiny baby, she needed us even more, as babies do. They can’t even keep themselves clean without a parent or other carer to see to that for them.

Parents look after their children. Quite apart from the seeing to food, clothing, education and so on, it’s about the daily care – seeing to it they get up and so on. There’s a video doing the rounds on YouTube at the moment, called “The Mom Song”, where a woman sings all the things she’s apt to say to her children over the course of a day to the tune of the William Tell Overture. It’s extremely funny; do look it up sometime. And okay, so we do say the same things over and over again: Have you cleaned your teeth? Have you done your homework? Have you fed your hamster? Don’t talk with your mouth full. And so on and so forth. But it is, of course, because we care for and about our children, and want them to grow up to be the best possible person they can be.

And parents do this because they love their children. Ask any new parent – all those sleepless nights, the pacing up and down, the nappies, the lack of sleep – and yet, they are delighting in that precious baby, and will show you photographs on the slightest provocation. And that is just how God feels about us! Pretty mind-blowing, isn’t it?

And yes, God does want us to grow up to be the person he designed us to be. And sometimes that will involve saying “No” to us, as we have to say it to our children. “No, you mustn’t do that; no, you can’t have that!” Not to be mean, not because we are horrid – although it can feel like that sometimes when you’re on the receiving end – but because it is for their best. You can’t let a child do something dangerous; you can’t allow them to be rude; they can’t eat unlimited sweets or ices.... and so on. And the same sort of thing with us.

God loves us enormously and just wants what is best for us. And because we are, mostly, not small children, we tend to be aware of this, and allow Him to work in us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

John goes on to comment about sin and sinfulness. It is rather an odd passage, this; we know that we do sin, sometimes, because we are human. And yet we know, too, that we are God’s children and we abide in Him. Yet John here says nobody who sins abides in God. If he were right, that would mean none of us would, since we are all sinners.

But then, are we? I mean, yes, we are, but the point is, we are sinners saved by grace, as they say. God has redeemed us through his Son. We don’t “abide in sin” any more.

St Paul tells us that when we become Christians, we are “made right” with God through faith in his promises. I believe the technical term is “justified”, and you remember the meaning because it’s “just as if I’d” never sinned. However, we also have to grow up to make this a reality in our lives. That’s called becoming sanctified, made saint-like.

One author described it like this. Suppose there was a law against jumping in mud puddles. And you broke that law, and jumped. You would not only be guilty of breaking the law, you would also be covered in mud. So when you are justified, you are declared not guilty of breaking that law – and being sanctified means that you wash off the mud! Or, to be more accurate, God helps us (through the power of the Holy Spirit) to get rid of the mud, just as we would help a muddy child to have a shower and get some clean, dry clothes.

So we no longer abide in sin, but are we washing off the mud? Are we allowing God to help us wash off the mud? That’s not always easy to do – the temptation to conform to the world’s standards can be overwhelming at times. We all have different temptations, of course; I can’t claim to be virtuous because I don’t gamble, since gambling simply doesn’t appeal to me! But I am apt to procrastinate, and can be grouchy at times! And so it goes.

And, of course, there are those who have not said “Yes” to God, who perhaps have no idea of doing so. In this model, they are not God’s children – but that doesn’t mean they are not loved! Indeed, God so loved the world that he sent his Son while we were still sinners, so we are told. God loves the worst and most horrible person you could imagine, just as much as he loves you or he loves me. Even terrorists. Even paedophiles. Jesus died for them, too. Just as he died for you, and just as he died for me.

And we, we are Children of God. We are God’s precious Children. We are not just servants of God. We are not just worshippers. We are children. And the Risen Christ calls us his friends. Amen.

Monday in Holy Week - The Entry into Jerusalem

This isn't being preached, at least, not this year! I wrote it in 1996 for our Monday in Holy Week service, and was asked to produce something for an on-line group, so looked for it and copied it. So I thought I would also post it here.

So, Jesus comes to Jerusalem in triumph.

He, and the disciples,
Have spent the night with Mary, Martha and Lazarus,
at that home in Bethany.
He loves them, so much.
Dear Martha,
never happy unless she is bustling bout doing for him,
getting irritated at Mary’s doglike devotion.
Mary, extravagant almost to the point of madness,
with the nard she was supposed to be saving for her marriage,
poured out over his head like that last night.
And her almost unfeminine interest in his teaching,
her ability to sit and listen and learn by the hour.
And Lazarus, totally unable to do enough for Jesus since he was raised from the dead.

And now it is time to move on.
Into Jerusalem.
It isn't the first time Jesus has been there.
On the contrary,
he has been there many times,
the first time being when he was a baby.
But this will be the last visit.
This time,
there won't be the teachers in the Temple falling all over themselves to enlighten him.
This time,
there won't be the vast crowds waiting to listen to him -
or if there are, the priests will soon move them on.
This visit promises nothing but pin and death.
Yet it must be done.

Long ago words echo from Zechariah:
"Behold your King comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey."

It never made any sense before.
Kings don't ride on donkeys!
Kings ride on war-horses, richly caparisoned.
Kings ride in carriages, pulled by six milk-white Arab stallions.
Kings are carried in litters on the shoulders of Nubian bearers.
A King on a donkey -
the picture is ridiculous.
Donkeys are for the elderly, for the infirm.
Donkeys are for carrying wood or peat in creels on their backs.
Donkeys are for children, for pregnant women.

And yet, and yet.
Today, Jesus will ride on a donkey.
He even knows which donkey.
It is in the next hamlet down the road.
A mare, with a young colt.
They sw it on their way to Bethany,
and stopped and said "Hello" to it.
The owner's a friend of theirs -
he'll lend it willingly enough.

So the disciples are sent off to borrow the donkey,
and, back they come with it, colt duly at foot.
And anxious owner, too, who doesn't mind lending it,
but wants to go with it.

Jesus climbs on.
Hmmm -
his feet nearly touch the ground.
Just as well, perhaps -
it doesn't feel very steady.
The mare shifts, uneasily.
This isn't her usual rider.
But she trusts Jesus, instinctively,
and lets him feel comfortable with her.

And so they set off.
A strange procession.
Jesus, on the donkey
and the disciples and followers on foot beside him.
Almost a young procession, really.
There's James and John,
Peter and Andrew,
all of the Twelve -
even Judas, looking sulky.
He still hasn't forgiven Jesus for snubbing him like that last night
when he pointed out - mildly -
that Mary shouldn't have wasted the nard like that.
Mary and Martha and Lazarus are there, too,
and the donkey's owner and his daughter.
Quite a procession.

And there are other groups of pilgrims going to Jerusalem for the festival.
Others on the road.
And somehow, nobody quite knows how,
they join up with Jesus' group.
Many of them have heard of him -
some have even heard him speak.

A group of boys rushes on ahead,
down into Jerusalem,
to announce that Jesus is coming!
The people, mostly holidaymakers,
come out to have a look.
Yes, that's him, over there, look -
yes, the one on a donkey!
Some say he's the Messiah, or a prophet.
Maybe he is.
Why not?
It is Passover, after all.

Who started the cheering?
Nobody knows.
Maybe it was one of the Twelve,
maybe even Peter.
Or maybe a child in the crowd.
But the cheers increase in volume.
"Hosanna!
Hosanna to the Son of David!"
"Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord."
"Hosanna in the Highest."
And they throw their cloaks into the road for the donkey to walk on.
And they tear branches off the trees to help line the route.

Now they are approaching Jerusalem.
The pilgrims and holidaymakers are still cheering.
It's a day for rejoicing, after all.
The end of the journey is in sight.
The pilgrims have been travelling for days, some of them,
ad are looking forward to getting to the inns and relaxing.
Some of them will be meeting family they haven't seen for some years.
So it's easy to cheer.
Its easy to throw your cloak in the road for the donkey to tread on.
It's easy to be carried along with the crowd.

But Jesus knows that this visit to Jerusalem will be his last.
He will not leave the city.
This crowd, which is cheering him today,
will be baying for his blood at the end of the week.
Without noticing the contradiction.

The disciples are relaxed, enjoying the attention.
But underneath there are shadows.
They know they are in danger.
They know that Jesus is convinced he will be killed,
yet has insisted on going to Jerusalem anyway.

But for now, as they enter the city, they are relaxed and amused.
Let us leave them like that,
for the storm clouds are gathering,
and they will not disperse until the day of Resurrection.

Getting back to basics

There are times when I look at the lectionary readings and my reaction is almost one of panic – whatever am I supposed to say about this? And the Ten Commandments is definitely one of those readings. Especially when linked to the clearing out of the Temple!

The trouble with the Ten Commandments is that people think they know them, but they don’t, not really. Every so often you see on television them asking random people to say what they are – everybody knows the ones addressed to human behaviour, about honouring your parents,not murdering, not committing adultery, not stealing, and, usually, not bearing false witness and not coveting, but they don’t place them in the context of the first four commandments, which are the ones about our relationship with God. The ones about worshipping God alone, not making graven images, not taking God’s name in vain, and keeping the Sabbath day holy.

And I think, if you take the last six commandments out of context, as we are all apt to do, you get the wrong impression. You get the impression that it’s all about the “Thou shalt nots”. Christianity – well, Judaeo-Christianity, I suppose – comes across as very negative and joyless. But I don’t think it was meant to be like that.

There are plenty of very detailed commandments in the Old Testament about how God’s people were meant to live, especially while they were a travelling, nomadic race. Many of them were about the health and sanitation of the community – what could be safely eaten, for instance, or how to isolate infection, or even the basic hygiene of going outside the perimeter of the camp and taking a shovel with you when you needed a “natural break” as the sports commentators call it. Others were about criminal law, and still others about how you treated outsiders in your midst, and who you should be looking after. They go into huge detail, have a read of Leviticus or Deuteronomy sometime, ideally in a modern paraphrase.

But the basic Ten Commandments, as given in Exodus, are different. They are a summary of the Law – if you like, they are the Constitution for God’s people. In our modern world, except perhaps for prohibitions on murder and stealing, they are seen as anachronistic, not relevant to most people. Our very economy is based on the fact that people covet things they do not yet own, and advertising hopes to make you want something you didn’t know you wanted. And most people don’t even bother to think about God at all, never mind putting Him first.

But we, us, we who are here this morning, we are God’s people. What if we did live like this? We would like to think we did, of course, but you know as well as I do that we don’t! We fall far short of God’s ideal for us.

As, of course, everybody has since the Law was first given. We know that it’s not possible to keep the Law perfectly, we know we are going to fall short. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes carelessly, sometimes even just going rather over the top. That’s what was happening in our Gospel reading – I don’t necessarily mean that Jesus was going over the top, although possibly he was; that’s an interesting thought, which I’ll come back to in a minute. But right now, let’s look at what prompted his outburst.

I don’t really know what the Temple was like, and find it rather hard to imagine. I believe the actual central bit was quite small, but it was surrounded by a series of courtyards. Anybody could go into the outermost courtyard, which was called the courtyard of the Gentiles. Next in was the courtyard of the Women – any Jewish person could go in there, but no Gentile could. Then came the courtyard of the Israelites, where only Jewish men could go. Then you had the court of the priests, which is where the sacrifices were performed, by the priests, and finally the Temple itself, with the altar where incense was burnt, and inside that was the Most Holy Place where the High Priest alone could go, once a year, with blood.

So you approached God – at least, if you were a Jewish man you did – via a series of courtyards, getting closer and closer. In an ideal world, you arrived in Jerusalem, went to the ritual baths and cleansed yourself, and then took yourself and whichever animal you had brought to sacrifice into the Temple.

But.

And there is always a “but”, isn’t there. In this case, two “buts”. Firstly, it wasn’t always practical to bring a sacrificial animal with you, and sometimes, if you did, the priests would tell you that it was flawed and Would Not Do. So it was a lot easier to buy your animal when you arrived, and if you bought it in the Temple, the priests couldn’t tell you it wouldn’t do. But then there was a problem with money, or rather, with the coinage. You see, for everyday use you used Roman coins, but they, unfortunately, had a picture of the Emperor on them, which was thought to be just possibly a graven image, so you couldn’t use them in the Temple, but had to change them into Temple money, which had no such problems. And, of course, the rate of exchange often wasn’t what it might have been, and the commission may have been just slightly higher than strictly necessary, and then the animals might be just that much more expensive than you would have paid in the street (“After all, this sheep is guaranteed free from any flaws. Gotta pay a premium for that!”).

And even if it wasn’t, the whole atmosphere was more like a market-place than anything conducive to worship. And Jesus snapped.

Now, we don’t know what caused him to snap. He’d been to the Temple umpteen times before – St Luke tells us his parents took him every year for the major festivals. Perhaps he saw someone having to settle for a lesser animal than they’d planned. Or perhaps he had just prepared himself for the Temple and was feeling quiet and worshipful – and the atmosphere in the Court of the Gentiles simply wasn’t conducive to that. Whatever. He snapped, and we know the rest.

St John links the episode with Jesus’ saying “Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days”, which was looking forward to the Resurrection, as the disciples realised once this had happened. At the time, it did nothing but infuriate the religious authorities, and arguably signed Jesus’ death-warrant.

The money-changers and traders and souvenir-stalls and so on may not have been wrong in themselves, but they were in the wrong place. They were cluttering up the Temple and making it difficult to get an unbroken progression from the ritual bath up to the sacrifice. They were turning the house of God into a market-place, and this Would Not Do. They needed to get back to basics.

Jesus was clearing out the Temple, taking it back to basics. Was he over the top? Probably, yes. But then, Jesus always was over the top, wasn’t he? When he changed the water into wine, he didn’t really need to produce over 700 bottles of the finest quality wine at the tag-end of a party. When he fed the five thousand out of a small boy’s packed lunch he didn’t really need to provide twelve basketsful of leftovers. It is well within Jesus’ character to be over the top, in this case, wanting to take the Temple back to basics.

Jesus was forever trying to take people back to basics. The trouble was, because they thought you pleased God by keeping the Law absolutely perfectly, they kept having to provide “What if....” scenarios. What, exactly, was work – how did you keep the Sabbath Day holy? And it sometimes got a bit ridiculous; Jesus points that out on a number of occasions. When it got so that you fussed about tithing the contents of your herb garden at the expense of your elderly relatives, who should have had first call on you. When it got so that you fussed about how thoroughly you washed yourself before eating, but forgot to worry about how clean your heart was before God. When it go so that you worried about whether healing somebody on the Sabbath was work, or whether you ought to be allowed to pick a head of wheat and eat the berries if it was the Sabbath – wasn’t that reaping? Jesus picks up on all these things, and others besides.

For Jesus, what mattered was your relationship with God, pure and simple. In the end, as we know, it was his body that would become the Temple, that would be raised in three days, and that would be given us to eat, in symbolic form, at his table. And it was his Spirit that was sent to indwell us and help us to become the people we were created to be.

We know that if we try in our own strength, we shall fail. We cannot even keep the Ten Commandments, let alone any of the rest of the law. But we don’t have to do it in our own strength; if we try, we will inevitably fail. Thank God for Jesus! He cleaned out the Temple of the extraneous stalls and merchants that had crept in – although I doubt they stayed away for very long – to remind us that what matters is our relationship with God. We don’t have to go through intermediaries. We don’t have to struggle to keep the Law. We just need to rest in Him. Amen.

The Other

So this morning we have an incredibly familiar story. I don’t know about you, but I first heard it in primary school, and on and off ever since. But I think it’s some time since I last looked at it seriously – I’m fairly sure I’ve never preached on it – so decided it was time to do so again and see what we can learn from it about two thousand eight hundred years or so later.

Naaman was an important person. He was a high mucky-muck, a General, in the King of Syria’s army. Our version says “Aram”, which was part of modern-day Syria, I think, but same difference. And Israel and Syria then, as today, didn’t get on any too well, and there had been raiding parties on both sides – honestly, you could be reading today’s paper, not the Bible, couldn’t you? Anyway, a small girl had been among those seized, and was now being a maidservant to Naaman’s wife. Naaman would have had it good, but for one thing – he had leprosy.

I don’t think, mind you, it was what we know as leprosy today, which is more properly called Hansen’s disease. That wasn’t to reach the area for another five hundred years or so, when it was brought back from India by Alexander the Great. Naaman’s trouble seems to have been a kind of fungal disease called tzaraath that could affect houses and linen as well as people; we don’t know exactly what it was, but it seems to have been regarded, if you were Jewish, as a physical manifestation of some kind of underlying spiritual unease.

Naaman, who wasn’t Jewish, wouldn’t have been as excluded from society as, say, the leper in our Gospel reading was. If you were Jewish, you had to tear your clothes, cover your face, and live in exile outside the town, calling a warning if anybody got too near. And if and when you got better, there was a very strict cleaning ritual you had to undergo with the priests before you could go back into society – you couldn’t just say “I’m better!” and carry on. But Naaman, as a Syrian, was exempt from all that. Nevertheless, his condition was affecting his career and his quality of life in general. But how, how, could he get better?

And then the little slave-girl says to her mistress one day: “Why doesn’t the Master go to Samaria and visit the prophet there? He could cure him in a minute!”

I don’t know how impressed the missus was with that, but when you are desperate.... and they were desperate. So Naaman goes and sees his king, who readily gives him permission to go, and gives him a letter of introduction to the King of Israel, and quite a lot of money and treasure to be used in payment or bribes where necessary.

The King of Israel, who was called Jehoram, is, of course, utterly horrified! “What does he think he’s playing at?” he asks. “I reckon it’s just a scheme to pick a fight with me. I can’t cure his man, so then he’ll feel at liberty to attack me!” and he tore his clothes which, back then, was a sign of strong emotion. I suppose it’s better than throwing plates around.

However, Elisha gets to hear of it and sends to the king to say “Stop fussing! Send the man to me and I’ll deal with him.” So Naaman and his retinue trek into Samaria, to Elisha’s home, and when they get there, Elisha sends a servant out with the message, “Please sir, my master says to go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and you’ll be clean.”

Naaman is a bit shattered by this. “Well!” he says, “You’d have thought that at least the prophet would come out and pray over me, not just send a message through his servant. And why should I wash in the Jordan, anyway? Perfectly good rivers at home, if not better!”

But then his servant – servants do seem to play a huge part in this story, don’t they – says to him, “Well, look, Master, if he’d asked you to go and do something difficult or expensive, you’d have done it, wouldn’t you? Why not try washing it the Jordan. It can’t do any harm, after all.”

So, still grumbling, Naaman trundles off and washes himself seven times in the Jordan, and lo and behold, he is clean. No sign of the disease at all. His skin and flesh are completely restored, better than ever – no more wrinkles, even. He looks like a lad again.

He’s thrilled, as you can imagine, and rushes back to Elisha’s house and offers him all the treasure he’s brought with him. Elisha says “Thanks, but no thanks”, and Naaman says, “Well, if you really mean it, may I have a couple of wheelbarrowsful of earth as I plan to worship your God from now on.”

That may sound a little strange to our ears, but back in the day, who you worshipped very much depended on where you lived; that’s why, of course, Naaman would be expected to go to the House of Rimmon, his local god, when he went home (and, as he explains rather earnestly to Elisha in the bit of the story we didn’t read, he doesn’t actually plan to worship Rimmon any more, but he does need to accompany the King there when he does). Anyway, the point of the lorryload of earth is so that he has part of Samaria with him, presumably so that the God of Samaria feels at home.... well, it was a nice thought, anyway! We wouldn’t do it, believing that God is at home anywhere, but back in the Iron Age, their view of God was a bit different!

And, just to round off the story, Elisha’s servant, Gehazi, decides that even if Elisha is going to let a young fortune go without visible regret, he certainly isn’t, so he rushes after Naaman and says, “Oh, we’ve got some visitors coming – prophets, they are. Could we have some money to give them, please?” Naaman, still delighted, says “Yes, of course”, and hands some over.... but, of course, Elisha knows all about it and when Gehazi gets home he accuses him, and says that as he wants Naaman’s stuff so badly, he can have the tzaraath that went with it, too. And Gehazi’s skin becomes covered with tzaraath then and there.

Well yes, but this was back in the Iron Age, nearly three thousand years ago. What has it to say to us today? We don’t exclude people because of their illnesses. Do we? From what Stephen was saying to us last Sunday*, I rather think we do, a bit. And there are other reasons people get excluded, too. Or not exactly excluded, that’s not quite the word I want here, but made to feel different.

The author Robin McKinley calls it “Othering”, and she has this to say about it: “I have a major thing about what I call ‘Othering’. I’ve talked about it before in . . . terms of being a professional writer, some of whose readers more or less, or consciously or unconsciously, or worshipfully or hostilely, Other her: make her something Other than what they are themselves, merely because she has written a book or books that the readers respond to in some way they find disturbing or inspiring. I don’t like being Othered. You can admire (or despise) someone without losing sight of the fact that they’re human just like you. Excessive admiration makes me twitchy . . . and you wouldn’t believe some of the things that people who haven’t liked one or another of my books give themselves permission to say or write to me. If they got it that I was a person just like them they wouldn’t do it. They couldn’t."**

I think we do this a lot to people, don’t we. We do it to ministers – I was thinking that when I was making myself comfortable before the service; we have three loos here: men, women and ministers! And I have heard people say “Oh, you mustn’t criticise the minister!” as if they were something other than human. They aren’t. They’ve just had more training than most of us!

We do it to celebrities of one kind or another – and indeed to people whose only claim to fame is that they are different. Naaman was different. He was a Syrian. He had tzaraath. I think that’s why he was so upset that Elisha left him standing outside the door and just sent a servant out with a message. Was he being treated differently as he was a foreigner? Would Elisha have done the same to a local person?

It’s an attitude that has come down through history, hasn’t it. Shakespeare knew all about it, and has Shylock say: “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?”

Shylock felt himself Othered. People didn’t consider him quite human because he was Jewish. Sometimes people maybe don’t consider us quite human because we’re Christian believers. Or maybe it’s we who find it difficult to consider people quite human because they aren’t, because they are Muslim or something like that. I remember when, as quite a small girl, I was invited to lunch in the holidays with a schoolfriend, and my mother being terribly anxious lest I comment on the food, as it was a Friday and we would undoubtedly be served fish. Quite why she thought I would, when I liked fish, I can’t imagine – and anyway, by then Vatican II had happened, and fish wasn’t served. But it turned these people into Others, strange people who ate fish on Fridays because they had to, not because they wanted to.

One of my friends has recently been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome. How easy it would be to Other her, make her into something less than human, because of her illness. Yet she’s the same friend I know and love, she hasn’t changed just because some doctors have stuck a label on her. Another friend recently came out as a Lesbian. Again, all too easy to Other her, to only be aware of this particular aspect of her, but again, she didn’t suddenly change overnight – she is still the same person she was before she came out.

We all do it – perhaps especially in today’s “celebrity culture”. We ask intrusive questions of our “celebrities”, never stopping to think how we should like it if we were asked similar questions by strangers. We focus on just the one aspect of their personality. We feel free to write rude e-mails to people whom we contact via their website. I wonder, in fact, if the current phenomenon of Twitter, where certain celebrities, notably Stephen Fry, update us on their doings as though they were sending a text message, isn’t an unconscious effort on their part to avoid being Othered. Not all slebs – some are doing it to boost their celebrity status, but I think Stephen Fry, who also, famously, has bi-polar, wants to be seen as human like everybody else.

But Jesus never treats anybody as Other. Jesus holds out his hands to the leper: “Of course I want to heal you: be clean!” As he holds out his hands to us. And as we need to hold out our hands to our neighbours, whoever they are. Jesus sees everybody as human, and we need to try to do the same. To see everybody, no matter who they are, as a human being, just like us. As a human being for whom Christ died. Amen.


* The Revd Stephen Penrose had been speaking about his work with people living with HIV/Aids.
** Quoted with permission from http://robinmckinleysblog.com/

Samuel

The story of Samuel in the Temple is an old friend, isn’t it? I was
amazed, when I came to have another look at it, that it was actually a
much darker story than I remembered. We all know the bit about Samuel
waking up in the night and thinking Eli has called him, and Eli
eventually clicking that God was trying to speak to Samuel.... but what
is the context? And what, actually, did God want to say?

It all started, of course, with Samuel’s mother, whose name was Hannah.
She was married to a man called Elkanah, and, in fact, she was his
senior wife. But her great sadness was that she had no children, and her
co-wife, called Penninah, did. Elkanah actually loved Hannah more than
he loved Penninah, and although I don’t suppose he minded for his own
sake that she had no children, he minded for her sake.

And, we are told, whenever Elkanah went to the Temple to make
sacrifices, he gave Hannah a double portion. And one day, Hannah, in the
Temple, is just overcome by the misery of it all, and pours out her
heart to God – I’m sure you’ve been there and done that; I know I have.
And Eli, the priest, thought she was drunk, seeing her mumbling away
like that.

It was rather a bad time in Israel’s history. I don’t know if it ever
occurred to you – it hadn’t to me until this week – but this is not the
Temple in Jerusalem that Jesus would have known; the first Temple in
Jerusalem wouldn’t be built until the reign of King Solomon, about
seventy or eighty years in the future. This Temple was in Shiloh, and
really, it was the place where the Ark of the Covenant resided. And Eli
is the priest in the Temple. Now, back then, being a priest was
something that only certain families could do; and if your father was a
priest, you usually were, too. It’s actually only within quite recent
history that what you do with your life isn’t determined by what your
father did – and didn’t we just hear this week that people are finding
it increasingly hard to get a better education than their parents, and
perhaps do different things? Anyway, back then, you followed in your
father’s profession, and if your father was a priest, as Eli was, then
you would expect to be one, too.

Unfortunately, Eli’s sons were not really priestly material. They abused
the office dreadfully – taking parts of the sacrifices that were meant
to be burnt for God alone, sleeping with the women who served at the
entrance to the temple. I don’t think these women were prostitutes –
temple prostitution was definitely a part of some religions in the area,
but I don’t think it ever was part of Judaism. These women would have
been servants to Eli and his family, I expect, and considered that
service as part of their devotion to God. And perhaps, too, they helped
people who had come to make sacrifices and so on. Whatever, Hophni and
Phineas, Eli’s sons, shouldn’t have been sleeping with them, and they
shouldn’t have been disrespecting the sacrifices, either.

There had been a prophecy that the Lord would not honour Eli’s family
any more, and that Hophni and Phineas would both die on the same day,
and a different family would take over the priesthood. Eli had tried to
tell his sons that their behaviour was unacceptable, but they hadn’t
listened, and one rather gets the impression that he had given up on
them. He was not a young man, by any manner of means.

And now he had this child to bring up, Samuel, first-born of the Hannah
whom he had accused of being drunk. Hannah had lent her first-born child
to the Lord “as long as he lives”, since God had finally granted her
request and sent her children – unlike some of the other childless women
in the Bible, people like Sarah or Elisabeth, God gave her more than one
child in the end. So Samuel, her first-born, was lent to God, and grew
up in the Temple.

I had always somehow imagined the Temple as being the Temple in
Jerusalem, but, of course, it can’t have been. It was probably just an
ordinary house, but with the main room reserved for the altar of the
Lord and the Ark of the Covenant. Samuel sleeps in there, you notice,
and Eli has his own room at the back somewhere. And I imagine Hophni and
Phineas have rooms of their own, too.

I do think that the first verse of our reading is one of the saddest
there is: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not
widespread.” “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were
not widespread.” It sounds like a very bleak time, doesn’t it?

Samuel, we are told, did not know the Lord. He didn’t know the Lord.
This in spite of ministering in the Temple daily. He wasn’t able to
offer sacrifices, of course – he was not, and couldn’t ever be, a
priest, as he came from the wrong tribe. But he would have helped Eli
get things ready, he would perhaps have made the responses. He would
certainly have known what it was all about. But he did not know the
Lord, in those days. The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.

So when God calls him in the night, he has no idea what is happening,
and thinks that Eli is in need of help. And it isn’t until the second or
third time that Eli realises what is happening, either. But once he
does, Eli explains that it might be that God is wanting to speak to
Samuel, and he should say “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening!”

And then what? No message of hope or encouragement such as anybody would
want to hear. In fact, quite the reverse:

“See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of
anyone who hears of it tingle. On that day I will fulfil against Eli all
that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. For I
have told him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the
iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did
not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the
iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering
forever.”

There will be no escape for Eli; he could, and should, have stopped his
sons from being blasphemous, from disrespecting the offerings of God’s
people, from sleeping with the temple servants. I get the feeling Eli
has rather given up, don’t you? When Samuel tells him what the Lord has
said, his reaction is simply, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems
good to him.” And in the end, just to round off the story, both sons
were killed in a battle against the Philistine, and Eli died of a heart
attack or something very similar that same day. And the Philistines
captured the Ark of the Covenant.

All very nasty – not one of the nicer stories in the Bible, I don’t
think. But what does it say to us? What do we have in common with these
people at the end of the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, I’m not quite
sure which they are?

The thing is, of course, we do have rather too much in common with them.
This is a time when the Word of God is not heard too much in our land.
It is a time when churches are disrespected, and even ministers and
priests have been known to abuse their position.

I suppose that there is nothing new; every age has probably said the
same of itself. We know that we are, naturally, sinners, and unless God
help us we shall continue to sin.

Samuel served in the Temple but he didn’t, then, know God. Eli had given
up; Hophni and Phineas set him a poor example. It must have been
confusing for Samuel – what was it all about? And then when God did
finally speak to him, it wasn’t a comforting message of cheer and
strength, but a reminder that God’s judgement on the whole shrine and
the priestly family who ran it was going to happen.

But good things came from it, too. Samuel became known and respected as
a prophet and as a judge in Israel. He couldn’t be a priest, as he was
from the wrong tribe, but he could be, and was, a prophet who was widely
respected and loved. It was he who anointed Saul as king, and then David.

So there is hope, even in the cloudiest, stormiest days. The temple of
Shiloh was abandoned, and the Ark never returned there. But the Ark did
return, and eventually the Temple was built in Jerusalem. Samuel became
one of the most famous prophets of them all.

Samuel said “Yes” to God. He was willing to hear God’s message, no
matter how unpleasant it had to be, no matter how traumatic. He was
willing to hear, and he was willing to speak it out. And so God used him
to establish the Kings of Israel and then of Judah – perhaps not the
most successful monarchy ever, but from King David’s line came, of
course, Jesus.

It is never totally night. God ended Eli’s family’s service to him, yes;
but the Temple endured, and was eventually rebuilt in Jerusalem, bigger
and better than before. The Ark of the Covenant was taken into captivity
– but it came back, and remained in the Temple until it was no longer
needed, as God made a new covenant with us.

When we go through difficult times, and I think we all do, whether as
individuals, as churches, or as a society, it’s good to think back on
this story. God may be bringing one thing to an end; but a new thing
will, invariably, follow, just as spring follows winter.

The difficult thing, of course, is going on trusting Him when all does
seem dark, when we can’t see how things are going to work out. But
remember Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8: “And we know that in
all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been
called according to his purpose.” I do think that we can ask to see how
God is going to work a bad situation for good: it’s amazing how that can
and does happen.

And we need, like Samuel, to listen to God, and to do what He asks of
you, no matter how difficult? Are you willing to do this for God? Am I
willing? It isn’t easy, is it?

Thanks be to God that we need do none of this in our own strength, but
in the power of the Holy Spirit, who strengthens us. Amen!

Prepare ye the way

Would have liked to have uploaded all the pictures I used, but I'm not quite sure how to put them in the right place. Does one cut and paste the source code in the right place? Anybody who knows, please let me know in comments; I'd be most grateful. Then I might even edit to include the slides.



From Isaiah chapter 40 and verse 3: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God." This verse is taken up in Mark's gospel, too: "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight'." Mark applies the verse to John the Baptist, and we'll come to him in a minute, but first of all, let's have a look at when it was originally written, and why.

No-one really knows who Isaiah was. Almost all scholars think that the person who wrote Isaiah chapters 40-55 is not the same one who wrote the first 40 chapters. There might even have been a third person who wrote the last few chapters. too. These various prophecies have become gathered together into what we know as the book of Isaiah, but it does seem clear that they are different people, as the style of writing is different, and they are addressed to different audiences. The first Isaiah, the one who saw God in the Temple, was a priest in Jerusalem just before the people went into exile. The second one was writing just before the people returned in about 538 BC. His premise is that the time of punishment is over, that Israel will be going home soon.

We don't know what his name was, or how his call to be a prophet came, or anything about him except for his writings. He usually gets called Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that his name actually was Isaiah, although I did once hear someone wonder just why Mr and Mrs Isaiah had chosen to call their son, "Second". Yes, well, never mind, let's call him "Isaiah", for convenience. Now, many of the prophets spoke or acted their prophecies, and they had followers who wrote down what they said and did, which is how it has come down to us. But scholars think that this Isaiah actually wrote down his stuff, and read it aloud later. He was a poet, and his work is too complex, too literary, to have been spoken.

They also think, by the way, that the first chapter of the section, chapter 40, that was our first reading today, was written last of all, as a sort of introduction to the whole of Isaiah's message.

Isaiah is a prophet full of hope. His God is unique, the creator, the redeemer, and he is also a God of love. Some of the loveliest passages about God's love come in Isaiah; think of verse 11 of the passage we read today: "He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep." Isaiah knows God, and knows he is loved. He knows God's people are loved, too. That was the message that they needed to hear, stuck in exile in a distant land. Their redeemer was coming, and they should prepare a way for him.

Our whole concept of God as Redeemer comes from Isaiah. In those days, you see, there wasn't a police force, and it was down to the injured person's relations to deal with any wrongdoing. And the nearest male relation, who usually took on the burden, was known as the go-el or redeemer. If someone fell into financial difficulties and had to sell up, the go-el was supposed to buy the land or property. And if someone was so poor that they had to go into slavery, the go-el was supposed to buy the person back. The "redeemer", therefore, in ancient Israel, was the person who restored people and property to where they rightly belong, and if someone didn't have anyone in their family who could act as redeemer, then the King had to do it.

Isaiah, then, sees God as Israel's redeemer, bringing God's people back to Israel where they belonged.

===oo0oo===

Of course, we Christians see Jesus as our redeemer, bringing us back to being with God, where we belong. And Mark picks up the "Prepare the way" verse and runs with it, telling us that John the Baptist was the voice crying in the wilderness.

John the Baptist, of course, was a prophet. Luke tells us that his father was a priest in the Temple at Jerusalem, and his mother was a cousin of Mary the mother of Jesus. And John was a very late child; his mother had given up all hope of having a baby by the time he arrived.

John was about the same age as Jesus – again, Luke tells us that Mary and Elisabeth were pregnant at the same time. So he would only have been a young man when he started preaching. He seems to have come from the desert, certainly according to our reading today, so we have to assume that he went off there as a very young man to think and to study and to listen to God. When he came back, he was a prophet. He wore skins, he ate locusts and wild honey, he gathered a small flock of disciples around him. And he preached God's message: "Repent and be baptized and get ready for the coming of the Kingdom!"

Well, there hadn't been a proper prophet for many years, and it became very fashionable to go into the desert and hear John. Huge crowds went; it was better than the cinema! John got incredibly frustrated by this.

All these people, but none of them wanted to really hear what he had to say. None of them were really willing to repent, to turn right round and go God's way. Not even the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law. Not that they interfered with him, mind you – could have been nasty, if they had. But they didn't want to know! Very frustrating.

But there were the other kind of people, too. People who really did want to listen to John, to hear what he had to say and to act on it. People who came to him, asking to be baptized in the river Jordan. And one day, his cousin Jesus comes to him and asks for baptism.

And at that moment, John knows that this is the One he has been waiting for, the One for whom he has been preparing the way. And yet he wants to be baptised – surely not! Surely it should be he, Jesus who baptises John? John's always known that when the Messiah came, he wouldn't be fit even to undo his shoes and wash his feet, slaves' work, that. John mutters something to this effect, but Jesus says, "No, let's do this thing by the book!"

And as he enters the water, the Holy Spirit comes down on him in the shape of a dove, and a voice speaks from heaven, "Behold my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased!"

Of course, as we know, John wasn't always quite so sure – you remember how when he was in prison, awaiting death for having criticised the royal marriage once too often, he suddenly got a fearful attack of doubt and sent to Jesus saying, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" and Jesus has to reassure him. And in the end, of course, John gets executed, and Jesus is devastated by his death, and tries to go off by himself, but the crowds follow him....

===oo0oo===

Well, this is all very well, but it's all long ago in history stuff. What does it have to do with us this Sunday morning in the 21st century?

Well, we are in the season of Advent. And Advent is a time of preparation for Christmas. It's not just about writing cards, choosing presents, putting up decorations, preparing cakes and puddings, eating mince-pies, arranging family parties, and so on. That too, of course. But it is, or should be, a time of preparing ourselves for Christmas. For the coming of the King of Glory as a child in the manger at Bethlehem. In years gone by, many people would fast throughout Advent, and I know people who still do. They don't literally abstain from food for the whole month, but they might well deny themselves some pleasure or other – that of eating sweets, perhaps, or of watching certain television programmes. As a reminder that they are preparing themselves.

These days, we tend to moan that Christmas is too commercialised, but I rather think that is inevitable when we share the festival with non-Christians. And in a way, watching the shops decked out in their Christmas colours and full of stock they don't have at other times of year is rather fun. I've always loved walking through shops which sell Christmas decorations, and when my daughter was a baby, her first winter, she used to gurgle with pleasure on being taken for a walk through Woolworth's, for instance – we used to go most days, not to shop, but so she could enjoy the colours and sparkles as only a small baby can! Even now, I still enjoy it, and some shops are very clever. But, of course, what they want you to do is to buy their products. And why shouldn't they – after all, they have a living to make. It will be sad if Woolworth’s does go under after all these years – let’s hope they survive.

Christmas is lovely. Sometimes we do get all Scrooge-ish about it, and mutter and grumble about the commercialisation of it. John Betjeman, that great poet of the 20th Century, wrote back in 1955:

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound -
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out 'Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.'

And how, in fact, do we prepare
The great day that waits us there -
For the twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ? For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards, And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know -
They'd sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell'd go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
'The time draws near the birth of Christ'.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

That's the point, isn't it? “He still would be a distant stranger, and not the Baby in the manger”. But He did come down, he isn’t the stranger. We know Him. He dwells in our hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our ways of preparing for this may be “extremely odd”, but they are fun anyway. But I think we do need to prepare ourselves, to remind ourselves that the feasting, the presents, the parties, the decorations are only part of the story. We, too, need to prepare the way of the Lord. Amen.