Advent Devotional - November 30

November 30 Hopes

“The hopes and fears of all the years”

Pray

Heavenly Father, when the world around me gives in to despair, may I find the reason for my hope in You. Amen.

Read _ Matthew 12:20-21

“A bruised reed He will not break, a smoldering wick He will not snuff out, till He leads justice to victory. In His name the nations will put their hope.”

Reflect

What do you hope for? People hope for so many different things – a lottery win, a good test result, a kiss! Often, our hopes are little more than wishful thinking. In our idle moments, waiting for the coffee to percolate or for the traffic signals to turn green, we speculate about what our life would be like – if only our numbers would come up! A contestant in a game show wins big and we think “What would I do with all that money?” And so we fool ourselves into thinking that a fistful of dollars would bring us happiness, or ease the aching in our soul. As those who have “won big” will sometimes tell you, money often creates more problems than it solves.

No doubt the shepherds, waiting out the night in a draughty field, near Bethlehem, had plenty of time to dream. Did any of them dream big enough? Do we? The hopes that God fulfilled on a Judean hillside, two thousand years ago, were for more than a financial windfall, more than the desired attentions of the village’s prettiest girl. The hopes of the ages were satisfied that night. Did a wistful shepherd dream about the coming of the Messiah? Do you?

Advent Devotional - November 29

November 29 Everlasting Light

“Shineth the everlasting light”

Pray

Thank You, Lord Jesus, for coming into my dark world and illuminating it with Your truth. Amen.

Read – John 1:9

“The true light, that gives light to every man, was coming into the world.”

Reflect

In the very beginning, when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, the Creator spoke and the earth was blessed with light. Years later, when the Israelites struggled under Pharaoh’s thumb, God sent a plague of darkness upon Egypt. Pharaoh’s false gods could do nothing for they did not exist; but the Israelites had light where they lived. Others worshipped the sun but could not find salvation; only the God of Israel could deliver His people from oppression and set them free.

Then, in the fullness of time, God sent Jesus, the “Light of the World.” Even at His birth the forces of darkness massed against Him. They tried to destroy Him. Herod did his best to eliminate the opposition; the innocent children were massacred. Once again, Judah heard the sound of weeping, but it did not endure. Herod failed. In Bethlehem, the Light stepped onto the stage, and all of the darkness in the world, though it would try, would not be able to put it out.

As in the beginning, so today the Light of the World still comes to those who will lift the shades from their eyes and respond in repentance and faith. No matter how dark your world, the Light still shines. It always will.

Advent Devotional - November 28

November 28 Bethlehem

“O little town of Bethlehem”

Pray

Father, as I begin the journey through Advent, this is my prayer: may I draw nearer and nearer to Your Son. Amen.

Read – Micah 5:2

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”

Reflect

What comes to mind when you hear the name, ‘Bethlehem’? For many of us, the word conjures up images of snow-covered fields, the crisp-clear air of a December night, an old stone barn and a curious light. For our children the word may mean Christmas carols in a hushed church, Joseph in a bathrobe and Mary blushing in blue.

Whether or not our mental picture bears any relation to the reality of what happened, long ago in Bethlehem, is not really the point. The Christmas we celebrate is about much more than the traditions we have stacked around it. Our celebration is much deeper than legend; beyond the tinseled fripperies and the secular trappings, Christmas tells us of a God who loves us enough to come into our world. From the height of glory, God reached down in the person of His Son, so that He could raise us up to glory.

In many ways, the little town of Bethlehem has become a symbol of hope, despite the simmering tension that remains there. It’s a very ordinary place, a bit of a backwater. Yet, into its dark streets came the Hope of the World. If Christ can come to such a place, surely He can come into the darkened corners of our lives. So, as Advent begins, let us prepare a Bethlehem in our hearts.

Advent Devotional - Introduction

A Song for the Season

This year, our daily devotional readings for Advent focus upon words taken from a familiar carol.

We all know “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” but have you ever really thought about the lyrics? Many of the great themes of Scripture are to be found within a song originally written for children. Let’s explore them together over the coming weeks, as we prepare for the celebration of the coming of Christ.

May the blessings of the season be yours.

Alan Trafford

Advent 2010

The Story of the Carol

There is comfort in familiar things, and there are few Christmas carols more familiar to us than ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.’ It was written in 1868 by Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), an Episcopalian minister, Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, and one of the most famous preachers of his generation.

Three years earlier, Brooks had visited the Holy Land and been profoundly affected by his travels. Writing home, during Christmas week in 1865, Brooks wrote:

“After an early diner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem. It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine… Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds. The story is absurd, but somewhere in those fields we rode through the shepherds must have been… As we passed, the shepherds were still ‘keeping watch over their flocks’ or leading them home to fold.”

The carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was written for a children’s Christmas concert in Brooks’ congregation. It quickly became a favorite across the denominations. Brooks’ organist, Lewis Redner, added the original tune entitled “St. Louis,” which became the standard in North America. In England, a traditional melody called “Forest Green” was adapted by Ralph Vaughn Williams; it also remains popular.

O little town of Bethlehem,

How still we see thee lie!

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by.

Yet in the dark streets shineth

The everlasting light;

The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight.

For Christ is born of Mary;

And, gathered all above,

While mortals sleep, the angels keep

Their watch of wondering love.

O morning stars, together

Proclaim the holy birth,

And praises sing to God the King,

And peace to men on earth.

How silently, how silently

The wondrous gift is given;

So God imparts to human hearts

The blessings of His heaven!

No ear may hear His coming,

But in this world of sin,

Where meek souls will receive Him, still

The dear Christ enters in.

O Holy Child of Bethlehem,

Descend to us, we pray;

Cast out our sin, ands enter in;

Be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels

The great glad tidings tell;

O come to us, abide with us,

Our Lord Emmanuel.

Interestingly, the two halves of the second verse are sometimes transposed, so that some people begin, “For Christ is born of Mary…” while others begin “O morning stars together…”

In the original manuscript there was also a fourth verse, which is not found in modern hymnals.

Where children pure and happy

Pray to the Blessed Child;

Where misery cries out to Thee,

Son of the Undefiled;

Where Charity stands watching

And Faith holds wide the door,

The dark night wakes the glory hearts

And Christmas comes once more.

Brooks came in for some criticism over this verse. The fourth line, which he had written to refer to God the Father, was taken by some to imply the Immaculate Conception of Mary, a Roman Catholic doctrine. Brooks replaced the words with:

Son of the Mother mild.

But the verse was considered to be weaker than the others, and it was soon dropped from use.

Over the succeeding years, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” has become one of the best-loved Christmas carols. Translated into many languages, set to a variety of tunes, its appeal within the Church is universal. And, as we shall see, contained within its lines are Bible truths that teach us the story and the meaning of Christmas.

Christopher's Ghosts

I picked up a copy of Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry a while ago, and have now read it. During the Cold War, McCarry was an undercover intelligence officer operating in Europe, Africa, and Asia. He draws upon his experience in this dark thriller. The story begins in the harrowing years before the Second World War. Paul Christopher, the son of an American father and a German mother is living in Berlin and, because he refuses to join the Hitler youth is singled out for trouble. Trouble is exactly what he gets. An SS officer, arrogant and deadly, takes a special interest in the Christopher family. As one may imagine, it does not turn out well.


Fast forward twenty years and Paul Christopher is an intelligence officer working for the Americans. After a successful mission in Africa, he is sent to his old haunts. So many people are dead; but not his nemesis. The remainder of the story is a well-crafted tale of remorse, regret, and revenge.


The book feels a little like one of those spy novels, so popular in the 1960's, where the debonair agent takes on the agents of evil. But Paul Christopher is not a cardboard cut-out; his character is real and believable. Deeply wounded by the events of the war-years, yet hiding his grief behind an icily efficient exterior, his exploits are almost cathartic. His bravery, bordering on foolhardiness, is less fueled by anger than by survivor's guilt. Not until the last moments of the novel does one discover that love was an even greater motive.

Perhaps that is true for many of us. Despite the self-proclaimed amorality of our secular world, we are still a pot-pourri of emotions. Guilt and love are never very far beneath the surface. If Victorians suffered from the consequences of suppressed sexuality, perhaps our generation will be known for the suppression of guilt. Some social commentators try to establish a link between laissez faire economics and Victorian morality; perhaps there is a link between a new Elizabethan amorality and laissez faire values in society! Yet the guilt remains. Christopher's Ghosts is, in many respects, a modern parable of a man, and of Western culture, trying to come to terms with its violent past.

Deconstructing Childhood

I came across a copy of R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island the other day. It was one of my favorite stories as a child, so I thought I'd re-read it. I remember getting a copy as a prize when I was in primary school. Before beginning, I tried to recall the story. Given that I probably last read it over 40 years ago, I did pretty well! First published in 1857, the story features three young English boys who are shipwrecked on a tropical island, somewhere in the South Seas. They have adventures exploring their island; they witness some violent behavior by indigenous people who turn out to be cannibals; and the main character, Ralph Rover, is caught and taken away by pirates. I still remember being entranced by the descriptions of the island, and of the underwater cave that was to become their sanctuary. I even remembered what happened to the old cat they found, which had been left behind by a long dead castaway. It's quite a story, in the glorious tradition of "ripping yarns' much loved by bored schoolboys.

What I did not remember was the racism. Coral Island is not an easy book to read nowadays. There is an imperialism about the tale which may have been acceptable in the days of empire, but today it is simply embarrassing. For example, shortly after arriving on the island, the boys debate how to get home. One solution they consider is to find local people and get involved in the running of their tribe. Being white, they reason, they will naturally rise into positions of leadership and will soon be able to dictate affairs to their advantage. The natives will be only too willing to help them, recognizing them as natural rulers. What nonsense! Ballantyne's ripping yarn is full of stereotypes and false value judgments that would make even the most uninformed person squirm. No school would think of giving it as a prize today; it's probably not in many school libraries, except as an example of racist prose.

And yet, there are other assumptions in the book with which I heartily agree. The boys are Christians. They count the days so as not to work on Sunday. Ralph tries to lead a repentant pirate to faith, dredging up Bible verses to bring comfort and hope to the dying man. Towards the end of the book, a native Christian leader is shown to be an honest, industrious, and brave man. The advantages of the Christian life are stressed, repeatedly. When the horrors of 'savagery' are contrasted to the effects of Christianity, there is no doubt in Ralph's mind that the islanders need to accept his religion. In place of violence and falsehood, Christianity brings peace and honesty. To Ralph, there is no doubt that religion is a civilizing influence, and that it is to be commended.

Modern secular readers of Ballantyne's story will doubtless reject his religious views along with his racism. Like others, they will probably talk about the 'noble savage' whose pristine way of life was corrupted by the moralistic views of Westerners intent only on raping the resources of the land. In fact, William Golding's book Lord of the Flies was written (in 1954) as a direct attack upon the themes of The Coral Island. In it, Golding's shipwrecked Europeans become the savages, destroying the paradise they have found as they destroy one another. But this, too, is nonsense. There was no paradise. Some South Sea Islanders were cannibals; many lived in poverty throughout lives that were "nasty, brutish and short." If the eradication of violence is the standard, then Christianity did have a profound influence for good. It's all very well for modern historians to object to the activities of the missionaries as defacers of indigenous culture, but to do so is to ignore the bravery of those who, very often, gave their lives for the furtherance of the Gospel and the release of the oppressed. And, while we must accept that the worldview of some of those Victorian pioneers may have been tarnished by racism, we are not obliged to judge their intentions as totally flawed. Perhaps more to the point, if their perceptions were clouded by their assumptions, is it not true that ours are also, as are those of the commentators who now sit in judgment upon them?

A broader view of the importance of missionary work will reject cultural imperialism, but it should surely emphasize the centrality of the saving work of Christ for all people. When we give our faith away, we should be careful not to wrap it in cultural assumptions. That was Ballantyne's mistake - he equated the vision and growth of Empire with the Great Commission. For the islanders to become 'civilized' they had to become both Christian and, well, British. Their huts had to be whitewashed and set in rows; their gardens had to be well-tended. He assumed that Christianity would make them behave like Westerners. He was wrong. But we need not to throw out his assertions of the benefits of Christianity, just because he failed to see that Samoan Christianity need not look like that practiced in Southend or Suffolk.

I wonder, sometimes, whether denominational officials do not continue to make the same mistakes. Will future generations re-read the pronouncements of Louisville and shudder at the arrogance and the imperialism that insists that our view is always right? We all wear blinders. We all have assumptions that we find it difficult to discern. That's why we must always bring ourselves, our worldview, and our society into the blinding light of Christ.

Download a free copy of The Coral Island at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/646

Cathari and the Quran

Various groups have been called "Cathari" over the last two thousand years, but Sean Martin's book, The Cathars deals with the medieval sect which was given that name in the second half of the twelfth century, in Germany, and which flourished, briefly, in Southern France and Northern Italy a hundred years or so later. The name comes from the Greek katharos which means 'The Pure.' In France, the group were also known as the Albigenses. Doctrinally, they were similar to the Manichaeans with a pronounced Docetic influence. Basically, they were dualists who understood the world in terms of a cosmic battle between the forces of darkness and light. Their experience led them to believe that this world is governed by Satan, the ruler of darkness. They tended also to deny the ultimate reality of the world, as a mere shadow, which led them to also deny the full humanity of Jesus. Yet, those who knew them generally regarded them highly, as sincere Christians seeking moral purity. When they rejected Catholicism and came to look upon the pope as the anti-christ they found themselves in political hot water. Persecuted without mercy, first by overzealous churchmen, then in the infamous Albigensian Crusade, and finally under the Inquisition, the movement died out when all of its leaders had been burnt at the stake.

Martin's book is not at all sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church; he makes light of serious theological error; and he fails to unravel the political forces that were at work, particularly in France. Land and property were seized from Cathars often for the most secular of reasons. Not all of the blood-letting was religiously motivated. And yet there was a great deal of blood-letting. It seems incredible, at this distance that Christians can have deceived themselves to such a degree that they were willing to use torture and violence in order to defend the Faith. It does the Church no credit to be associated with such monstrous mass-murderers as Simon de Montfort. Though the officers of the Roman Catholic Church were most to blame, even the Cathars, in the end, adopted the methodology of oppression, resorting to murder and revenge in order to get their way.

Looking back at a dark period in the history of the Church, and seeing how committed Christians could come to conclusions radically opposed to those that we would reach, makes me wonder about what we misunderstand today. No doubt there will be those who would answer that our rejection of alternative lifestyles and our opposition to global syncretistic understandings of the nature of religion are examples of violence done by Christians today. I don't think it's as simple as that. The adoption of postmodern universalism could well turn out to be far more arrogant and destructive than a straightforward defense of historic Christianity. I don't believe that exclusivism is necessarily more conducive to violence than the worldview that brings everything down to its lowest common denominator. In short, I don't think that peace is best served by forgetting differences and just saying "Why can't we all get along?" The fact that Mediaeval Catholicism went too far in defense of the Faith does not mean that we are not allowed to make any kind of defense. So, should we burn the Quran? What is served by burning copies of the Quran, beyond the creation of yet more enemies? What happened to the way of peace?

We don't need more enemies. Mutual respect does not need to be an act of compromise. Defenders of the Faith do not need to become warriors (except, perhaps, in self-defense, or more properly, in defense of the defenceless). We need to ask the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to the ways in which we have been fooled into accepting the morality of the world. And we need to change to overcome evil not with more evil but with good. Maybe then, if we stand for all that is good and noble and upright and true, a day will dawn when we are known as 'The Pure.' After all, don't we have to be pure in heart if we are to see God?

La Querencia

Last weekend, Lesley and I had the privilege of wandering around Yosemite National Park for the best part of two days. What an absolutely amazing place! The crowds were not as bad as we had feared, though there were hundreds of people in the park. We entered from the East on the Tioga pass, and were simply stunned by the scenery. However, when we reached the Yosemite valley it rendered us (almost) speechless. Without actually being there, it's difficult to appreciate the sheer immensity of the cliffs towering above. Looking down on the valley, from the tunnel viewing area, the trees obscured the cars and the campsites. No wonder John Muir was enthralled by Yosemite, and spent so much of his life striving to protect it.

I bought a small book of Ansel Adams' prints, and saw some of his original photographs in the small gallery that bears his name. Included in the book Yosemite is a quote from Adams, taken from Charlotte Mauk's book of selected writings Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada. Adams writes: "That first impression of the Valley - white water, azaleas, cool fir caverns, tall pines and stolid oaks, cliffs rising to undreamed-of heights, the poignant sounds and smells of the Sierra, the whirling flourish of the stage stop at Camp Curry with its bewildering activities of porters, tourists, desk clerks, and mountain jays, and the dark green-bright mood of our tent - was a culmination of experience so intense as to be almost painful. From that day in 1916, my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth-gesture of the Sierra."

Then, in his introduction to the book of photographs, Michael L. Fischer, quotes Barry Lopez on the Spanish concept of la querencia. This is, he says, "a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one's strength of character is drawn." Fischer goes on to describe Yosemite as Adams' la querencia, a place of strength and of connection to the infinite.

It struck me that this is exactly what the Church is called to be - a place of strength and security, where we can be inspired to serve purposes beyond ourselves, where we see ourselves as small yet far from insignficant, a place where God bends down to touch our souls with eternity.

Interestingly, when speaking of the need to defend Yosemite, Fischer quotes the father of American environmentalism, John Muir, who was of Scottish Presbyterian stock. "National Parks have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial. Thus, long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer... ".

Defending the sanctity of the Church is no less noble a task than protecting the wilderness of the Sierras. If the gathering of God's people is to be la querencia for a new generation, it must have less to do with the pursuit of personal esteem, and much more to do with sitting, silently, in awe and wonder at our God.