Dear Friends,
The year I was ordained, Julie Gold released a single called ‘From a distance’ – it was re-recorded by Bette Midler a couple of years ago as a Christmas release. It’s meant to be a song of hope…
From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the land.
It’s the voice of hope, it’s the voice of peace,
it’s the voice of every man.From a distance we all have enough,
and no one is in need.
And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease,
no hungry mouths to feed.
The lyrics are seemingly true. When we watch things from a distance, it’s hard to accurately make out what is going on – all we can do is make assumptions.
When we get to the chorus, the lyrics caused me to ponder. We are told, God is also ‘watching us…from a distance.‘ However, that simply is not true! We do not believe that God is watching us from a distance; at the very heart of our faith is the belief in a God who entered into our world in a very physical way, in Jesus Christ – the Word made flesh.
As a community of faith, this Sunday, we celebrate the Advent hope – that God will come again to make all things new, just as he did 2000 years ago in the child born in a cave in a backstreet of Bethlehem. Bethlehem – still a place of tension where the story of ‘no room at the inn’ takes on new meaning because of the wall that has been built near it and the check points that limit entry and exit for a, now, fragile Christian community in the Holy Land.
When we get to Christmas, the stories and the feasts of the time remind us that this is not a scene from some fairy-tale. The birth of Jesus is surrounded by danger and risk; the journey to Jerusalem forced because an occupying power wanted to have a census. The birth is marked by homelessness – a young pregnant woman not considered vulnerable by most of the people of Bethlehem; by gifts and prophecies that refer to death and sorrow; by the slaughter of the innocents; by the flight into Egypt when Jesus and his family become refugees. Even the day after Christmas Day, the church chooses to celebrate its first Martyr, St Stephen.
Advent is a time for the opening of our ears to the great judge who, rather than shouting for justice, is often whispering in the wilderness. The busyness of our preparations for Christmas and the noise of our busy streets can often drown out that that whispering voice of God gently cajoling us to make even the smallest qualitative change to our lives.
Some words of Michael Ramsey:
Come to Bethlehem once again. See the stable, see the child. And knowing that he is God and Man, knowing that he who was rich has become poor for us, we can kneel in the darkness and the cold which is the symbol of our blind and chilly human race and say with a grasp we may never have had before the doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever.’
(Christmas Sermon in Canterbury Cathedral 1973)
Affectionately,
Your Priest and Pastor,
Carl
