Candlemas

 

This coming Sunday is a pivot-point in the year, forty days on from Christmas, when we turn away from celebrating Jesus’ birth and turn towards remembering his agonising suffering, death, and glorious resurrection, in Holy Week and Easter.

This coming Sunday we recall the occasion, forty days after his birth, when Jesus’ parents presented him before God at the Temple in Jerusalem. This coming Sunday we bless candles — the ritual lighting of which symbolises our deepest moments of sorrow and of joy; and of recognition that God, who is invisible, is with us.

When a Jewish woman gave birth, she entered niddah, a period of seclusion and abstinence from intimacy with her husband she entered whenever she bled, in menstruation or in childbirth. Niddah lasted around seven days (or, seven days after the bleeding stopped) after which she would take a ritual bath before being reunited with her husband. (In recent years there has been a renaissance of this practice of withdrawal and reunion among Jewish women, as a beautiful gift of self-care, and a means of sustaining intimacy over time.)

After giving birth to a son, a woman entered niddah for seven days, followed by thirty-three days before she returned to public life, marked by presenting her son before God. After giving birth to a daughter, the periods were doubled — fourteen days of niddah, followed by sixty-six days before returning to public life.

This much is set out in the law of Moses, though no reason is given for why it should be thirty-three days for a son and sixty-six for a daughter — leading to much speculation. My own speculation (no more than that) is this. In Genesis 46 we read about the family of Jacob — grandson of father Abraham, and whom God had re-named Israel — who went with him down to Egypt to find salvation from a lengthy, region-wide famine. Jacob had twelve sons — who would give their names to the twelve tribes of Israel — and a daughter, by four different women, his wives Leah and Rachel, and their slaves Zilpah and Bilhah. We read that the number of his offspring, those belonging to him, his sons and their children, by his first wife Leah — beginning with his firstborn son, Reuben — numbered thirty-three; and the total number by all four women came to sixty-six. (The list of names and the accompanying numbers don’t exactly match; but these are symbolic numbers, not literal ones.)

I would suggest that to wait thirty-three days before presenting a son before God, and sixty-six days before presenting a daughter, is a means of including them in the family of Israel. Every son extends the family into the next generation. Every daughter completes the family again. Thirty-three. Sixty-six. This one, too, belongs to Israel. This one, too, takes their place within the family who are saved from famine, and, later, saved again, from enslavement. This one, too, is numbered.

So, Mary and Joseph bring Jesus, forty days on — seven, plus thirty-three — to take his place within the story of his people.

And there, there will be a reversal, a pivot-point, a turning. For the old man Simeon will bless Mary with a strange blessing: ‘and a sword shall pierce your heart, too.’

This points us to the cross, where a spear is thrust into Jesus’ heart to establish that he is, truly, dead; and the blood that has pooled there, and separated out into red and white blood cells, pours forth as blood and water. And a sword shall pierce your heart, too. Mary, at the foot of the cross. Her heart pierced, in the personal pain of any mother who witnesses the violent death of her son. But also, a symbolic union. Mary, who is the Church, the family of Jesus, shares in his piercing, in his death — and in his resurrection.

Just as Jesus is brought into the story of the family of Jacob/Israel, so, now, Mary — and all future generations to come — are brought into the story of the family of Jesus (which is a continuation, and a fulfilment, of the family of Israel).

This is the story into which the Church enters, participated in, down through the generations. A share in Christ’s suffering, dying, rising in glory. This is the life we are called to live in the world, not seeking to shield ourselves from pain but to know pain transformed, to bear faithful witness to, first, evil, and then, good — and truth, and beauty — rising from the bloody ground.

This is the story we enter into, symbolically — in embodied ways — in observing Christmas and Holy Week and Easter; and in observing the pivot-point between them, this Sunday, with the blessing of candles, which we light in times of great joy and sorrow.

 

a dimly burning wick

 

Often, when we hold services at church, we light candles, as a visible reminder that Jesus is the Light that shines in the darkness of this world. At this time of year, when it is dark when the 8.00 a.m. Sunday service starts, this symbolism is especially profound.

This morning, the member of the congregation who was setting out the space came to light the two candles that sit on either side of the windowsill behind the altar. The first candle lit, as normal; but the other would not light. And so he spent several minutes trying to coax it into flame, trimming the wick, to no avail. It sputtered into life, only to give up the ghost. Eventually, it was time for the service to begin, and so he needed to leave it, for now, and return to it later.

This was not planned, nor had I spiked the candle so that it would not light, yet this was a visual aid to what God wanted to say to us today. In Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, our Old Testament readings mostly come from the book of the prophet Isaiah, much of whose poetic vision is rehearsed, six hundred years later, by Jesus in the role of the Servant. Today we read:

‘a bruised reed he will not break,

and a dimly burning wick he will not quench’

(Isaiah 42.1-9)

A dimly burning wick he will not quench. Rather, like Ray this morning, Jesus holds us with tenderness and compassion, coaxing the flame of faith.

And this morning it was a gift to us to have two candles, one burning brightly, the other cold. Because, there are times when our faith is sure, when we know that God loves us, loves our neighbour, and so, we are able to love our neighbour too. And there are times when our faith burns dimly, sputters and fails. When we find it hard to accept — to imagine that it is possible — that God could possibly love me, unliveable as I am.

But we do not come to God on our own, we come together. Sometimes, my faith shines bright, when yours does not; at other times, it is your faith that shines, when mine is dim. Yet there is room on the windowsill for both candles. And the one that cannot ignite today will yet be tended into flame, whether today or later.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.

There are times when we are all bruised. Sometimes by the way we witness the world handling others — overly roughly, without appropriate care. Sometimes we are bruised by the circumstances of our own lives, or the lives of those close to us. Sometimes we are bruised by those sides to our personality we find hardest to live with. We are not always bruised, but we bruise easily. And we are tempted to harden our hearts: I have been hurt before, I will not allow it to happen to me again. But this will not save us, for the more we harden our hearts, the more we bruise one another. It is not hard hearts we need, but gentle hands. And here, again, we are reminded that Jesus cares for us with tenderness and compassion.

When we are bruised, when our faith is dim, at these times and in these places may we have epiphanies of our own. May we encounter Jesus, and may the eyes of our hearts be opened to his healing love, making us whole again.

 

Image: photo shows the altar in the Lady Chapel at our 8.00 a.m. service this morning. There are two brass candlesticks on the windowsill behind the altar, one at either end with a brass cross between them. The candle on the right is lit, the one on the left is unlit. Our curate, Katherine, is seated behind the altar. The altar is set ready for Holy Communion, with a silver ciborium (holding bread wafers) and chalice (for wine) and a brass bookstand holding the Book of Common Prayer.

 

slow horses

 

Over Christmas we rearranged chairs to allow more people to sit around our table, and I rearranged bookshelves to make room for the first eight Slough House novels (to be joined by the ninth, when it comes out in paperback). Mick Herron is a great writer, consistently achieving an addictive blend of spy thriller and very dark comedy.

Slough House is (allegedly) where MI5 redeploys failed spies who might pursue legal challenges to being made redundant, with the intention of grinding them down with work so unfulfilling that they chose to walk away. By definition, the residents of Slough House — referred to as Slow Horses — are F*ck Ups (have messed up with serious consequences) or Issues (potentially compromising addictions to alcohol, drugs, or gambling; PTSD) — or both — condemned to live out their days under the infuriatingly watchful eye of the deeply (darkly comically) obnoxious Jackson Lamb.

What makes whatever happens to this unlikely combination of less-than-likeable characters compelling is that it is clear that Mick Herron loves them (even if he is willing to bump characters off relentlessly for the sake of the storyline). And though he would never admit it to them (and perhaps not to himself) and, even if he could, they (being F*ck Ups or Issues) wouldn’t be able to accept it, Jackson Lamb loves them, too.

I don’t live in the world of security intelligence-gathering. But that isn’t the point. I recognise what I am reading because almost everyone I know (including myself) is either a F*ck Up or an Issue. Seriously. And because, as a priest — and, indeed, as a (as any) follower of Jesus — I am called to love them (including myself) even so.

To love the unlikeable, to really love them, which is the only thing that transforms anyone, calls for a different kind of intelligence-gathering. One built not on ‘what disaster might we prevent (by whatever means/force necessary)?’ (sin management) but ‘what goodness, what beauty, might become possible, which we could never have imagined?’ The slow and often seemingly pointless task of getting to know what makes that person tick; their hopes and dreams, their worries and fears; their sense of self, constructed from stories, lies, half-truths. The shame they need to be freed from. The dignity that is, in fact, inherent to them, that needs to be recognised.

So, I am enjoying the slow horses and appreciating what they have to teach me.

 

Advent 2025 : day twenty-five

 

The Advent calendars I knew as a child had little card doors you prized open revealing an image and a verse relating to the story of Jesus’ birth. An online Advent calendar has no such physical doors, but might yet open onto vistas, perhaps for the first time, perhaps familiar friends.

Today is Christmas Eve, the threshold we cross-over between Advent and Christmas. The X that marks the spot of X-mas, of the Mass in Celebration of the Birth of the Christ. Today, past, present, and future coincide and we find ourselves in the presence of the One who Was and Is and Is-To-Come. On this night the angels sang/sing/hold their breath in readiness for the first note, and we press into that holy intake, as fit to burst as any child on Christmas morning.

Come, Lord Jesus.

 

Advent 2025 : day twenty-four

 

We have almost reached the end of Advent. For some of the people I have walked this Advent with, it has been their first conscious Advent. I have known more than fifty – and kept a daily online calendar for twenty consecutive years. Some years, I have had a good idea of what I wanted to say, in poetry, philosophy, biblical studies, practical rituals that reinforce faith, or simply photographs. Other years, I have had no such clarity, and inspiration has been hard-won. And yet, year after year, the same but different – and finding me in different places, on different levels – Advent speaks. Never runs out of ways to point to the One who comes as God-with-us, bringing Light to our darkness.

There is a moment, just before the dawn, when the heavens are still clothed in deepest blue and the bright morning star can be seen, ringing true as any bell, and e’en so here below below peals of rose and gold are swung over sleeping streets. Where star- and moonlight and sunlight all dance and sing. The day is near! The Day is near now!

 

Advent 2025 : day twenty-three

 

Now we have entered those out-of-time days, those days that will become especially dense between Christmas and New Year when no-one knows what day it is, cut loose from the markers and rhythms of the ‘working’ week. We have entered those days, as many people – and certainly schoolchildren – are now Off Until After Christmas, even if others will work until Christmas Eve (and still others, some by preference, some by necessity, will keep working all through the holiday season).

The working week, of course, is not the only way to mark time. There is the sacred calendar (or, rather, there are sacred calendars, of the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Churches, as well as of other faiths) whereby we (in the ‘Western’ Church) might mark the eight-day Antiphons from 17 December onward; Christmas Eve; Christmas Day; the twelve-day Feast of Christmas – from the eve of 25 December to the eve of 6 January, and themselves including the feast days of Stephen, 26, John the Evangelist, 27, the Holy Innocents, 28; the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January; and the duration of Christmastide until Candlemas on 2 February. Dark winter days and nights, punctuated by noting light in the darkness. Without in any way dismissing the darkness. Simply being shaped to see in the dark.

And this invites us to be in two realities at once: the one we can see with our eyes, and the deeper reality we can see with the eyes of our heart. Out of chronological time (chronos) and stepping into theological time (kairos) where everything – however unlovely – is caught up in the love of God.

May this transform our lives, and our life work, to the glory of God and the common good.

 

Advent 2025 : day twenty-two

 

What a day it has been.

We all know that a day is the length of time it takes for a full rotation of the Earth, in relation to the Sun: just shy of twenty-four hours.

And that a day is the span of light between sunrise and sunset. In the northern hemisphere, today is the shortest day. Where I live, that span stretches from 08:29 to 15:39 – and even then, cloud cover and sea-mist blocked out the light.

Days are not just measured by clocks, but also by hearts. For some, this day has been a time of celebration, of a birthday or anniversary, a day of ‘many happy returns,’ perhaps even so joyous that time stood still. For others, this day, short though it has been, has dragged on unbearably, almost immeasurably, slowly, held back by physical pain or emotional heartache. For others again, nightfall comes as a saving grace.

Days are not simply units of time, but layers of existence, possibilities of awareness of what the ancient Hebrew poet Isaiah named Emmanuel – God is with us. In the days that are too short, too long, too dark, too unbearably bright.

May you now God with you today.

 

Advent 2025 : day twenty-one

 

In China Miéville’s 2009 speculative novel, ‘The City & The City’ the two cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma exist in the same grosstopography but belong to separate jurisdictions, neighbouring states. Unlike divided cities, such as Berlin after WWII, Besźel and Ul Qoma overlay and in places crosshatch each other. But from childhood, the citizens of each state are taught to unsee the people, and civic artefacts – architecture, vehicles, clothing, language, etc. – of their topolganger. That is, to see (so that you do not walk into them, do not get hit by their cars) but not see; to register but not register. To studiously not look at what is right in front of you, for fear of swift reprisal. It is an interesting allegory of our ability to see only what we want to see, and to police what others see.

While a political novel, it can also be read theologically, and in particular in the light of Advent, that season of waiting in readiness for the return of Jesus, who first came into the world in the event we celebrate at Christmas. A season of learning to see realities we have been taught, from childhood, to unsee: faithfulness, lovingkindness, justice, events that have no place in a world shaped by rapacious greed and self-interest, by the oppression anyone branded ‘the other’ by powerful men. To believe that the state we have been told is superior is, in fact, only one side of a whole, and drab when compared to the vibrancy that is all around us yet prohibited. To not fear transgressing borders, in the hope of unification, while recognising that what is good news for many is an existential threat to those most actively invested in (benefiting from) the status quo.

 

Advent 2025 : day twenty

 

It is traditional to spend time in Advent reflecting on the four great themes of Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. These may not sound especially promising, and yet, they are precisely what we need at this time.

Hell is separation from others, from God and from our neighbour; also from ourselves as an intended integrated whole. Hell is not a place, geographically speaking, but a state of existence, in which we all live – even as some of us also live as citizens of heaven.

Sometimes we are separated from others by our own choices – by our actions, or our refusal to act. Sometimes we are not the agent, the actor, but rather the one on whom hell acts. Jesus told a story of a poor man, Lazarus, who lived for many years in hell at the gate of the rich man Dives. Both men died, and from Sheol – the Grave – Dives lifted his eyes and saw Lazarus far away, being comforted by Abraham. Dives – narcissist, sociopath, incapable of empathy or honest self-evaluation – demands that Abraham send Lazarus to him, to bring him comfort in his torment; and Abraham informs him that this is simply not possible, for a great gulf lis between them that cannot be bridged, even should one wish to do so. I cannot rescue you from the hell you have created for yourself, in distancing yourself from others. I cannot bridge that gap. Only you – and only then strengthened by God – can bridge that gap. And you cannot bridge the gap I have created between myself and others. Only I – again, necessarily strengthened by God – can do so.

The Babe of Bethlehem grows up to be the Harrower of Hell.

Advent invites us to gaze on hell, to recognise our surroundings – to recognise the Other at our gate; to recognise that the gate of hell has been removed from its hinges – and to return from the Grave.

 

Advent 2025 : day nineteen

 

It is traditional to spend time in Advent reflecting on the four great themes of Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. These may not sound especially promising, and yet, they are precisely what we need at this time.

Heaven is not a place, geographically-speaking. It is a positioning of the heart, an acknowledgement of the sovereign reign of a good Lord of the universe. This is why it is possible that prophets – those with eyes to see – can find themselves caught up into heaven, while at the same time being rooted in space and time in exile in the Wilderness of Sin(ai) or Babylon, or Patmos, or Rome. In the last places you would expect to find God, the least likely places to go looking. This is also why as soon as the archangel Lucifer, and a third of the angels with him, disavow the goodness of God they find themselves exiled from heaven, not as punishment but as inevitable consequence of their decision.

To hope in heaven is to position oneself in receipt of God’s faithful lovingkindness, in the face of a world that is not consistently faithful, loving or kind. It is to say ‘yes!’ to God’s intervention, as Mary embraced the ‘eucatastrophe’ (JRR Tolkien’s word for the decisive, unrepeatable, interventions of grace that transform a world we cannot transform in our own strength or through our own wisdom) of conceiving Jesus.

There is nothing escapist about believing in heaven. Indeed, it will cost you everything. Yet this is what is asked of us.

 

Advent 2025 : day eighteen

 

It is traditional to spend time in Advent reflecting on the four great themes of Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. These may not sound especially promising, and yet, they are precisely what we need at this time.

What we need, more than anything else, is to be seen – and to see ourselves – rightly. That is, a matter of Judgement. And to be seen – and see ourselves – rightly requires seeing with the eyes of both justice and mercy. Seeing through what we want to see, to what actually is. And seeing the one we look on as one we are committed to, in faithful lovingkindness. This is how God sees: accurately and lovingly.

This is God’s judgement: that his people, weakened by sin, are unable to save themselves from its tyranny – and so God will intervene, decisively, in a way that cannot be earned, that changes everything, that cannot be (and does not need to be) repeated, that cannot be undone.

Jesus comes – the one in whom the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity are united, for ever – comes as the judgement of God, the one through whom and in whom God’s judgement is given. First, for a particular people in a particular moment – ‘first century’ Jews under the weight of the Roman empire – then for the families of the earth God intended to bless through the descendants of Abraham, those who shine like stars in the night sky, lights in the darkness.

And in his judgement we might come to see ourselves rightly, as he sees us.

 

Advent 2025 : day seventeen

 

It is traditional to spend time in Advent reflecting on the four great themes of Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. These may not sound especially promising, and yet, they are precisely what we need at this time.

Our lives are lived in the long shadow cast by Death. This is clear to us in these days, in which we find ourselves instantaneously connected to everyone everywhere all at once, where a shooting – always utterly tragic – on the other side of the world affects us all. But that shadow is not the exception that proves the rule of human goodness. It darkens our own hearts. How often, if we are brave enough to be honest, have we found ourselves faced with a dilemma and knowing the right thing to do – that is, to choose faithful lovingkindness – only for our will to die, or at least faint, in the terrible face of doing what is expedient, of taking hold of a moment that might not come our way again? Such is the reasoning of all temptation. Perhaps you cannot even admit it now, in the face of the temptation to be the stronger man, the wiser woman.

But the coming of Jesus transforms the role of death entirely. It remains part of our daily reality, of course. But whereas before death separated us from hope, now death prises our fingers from the life we have grasped hold of that we could never keep, that could never, ultimately, satisfy us. From the life that is itself a shadow, an illusion: the affair that is an outlet for our passion; the nation made Great again by the expulsion of those who defile it by their very being in our midst.

If I would follow Jesus, I needs must die to self – to the false self – that he might animate me with his life.

 

Wake Up Dead Man

 

Jo and I watched ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’ last night. It is excellent (and very long: we took a tea break part way through) and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The attention to liturgical detail is exceptional for Hollywood.

Some thoughts, hopefully not much by way of spoilers.

[1] The Whodunnit and How are pretty obvious to anyone with eyes in their head and a familiarity with misdirection. This is not a plot weakness. The Who and the How are always fairly banal in a good detective fiction. The real interest lies in motive, or motivation.

[2] While presented in the style of a cosy murder mystery, the story is more than a little inspired by JRR Tolkien’s majestic fantasy, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (don’t let this put you off if you aren’t a fan of fantasy).

Monsignor Wick is a Saruman, a man who is — inevitably — corrupted by the burden of institutional authority, amplified by the ways in which questioning voices that might hold him accountable are silenced by such hierarchical structures. A man who has come to believe that the only way to defeat evil in the world is to play by its own rules.

Father Jud is a Gandalf, a man who possesses no structural authority and who is shielded from its corrupting influence by the repeated humiliations of needing to persuade unwilling others of his insight into the times they find themselves in. A man whose experience tells him to love the little people. A man who is, ultimately, powerless to save himself; who loses his priestly vocation only to have it restored to him by a ‘eucatastrophe,’ (Tolkien’s word for) the unrepeatable intervention of grace.

Dr Nat is a Frodo, a fundamentally decent man weakened by the pain of great loss; a ring wearer who, in the final instance, and despite having a greater insight into the corrupting power of the cursed talisman than other characters, succumbs to the temptation that in his hands it can be welded to restore the world that has been lost. A man who is only spared that fate by another eucatastrophe.

Benoit Blanc is a Tom Bombadil, a clown character, who has no interest in taking power (and so is free) but only in the beauty of truth. A man who sees the goodness in others (in stark contrast to the cynicism of many fictional detectives, and an even greater proportion of real detectives) and who strengthens them to do what is right.

[3] I have seen some reviews that suggest that the film is anti-Christian — or, at least, anti the Church — but pro-Jesus. This is not the case. It is pro-Jesus and pro-Christian, pro-Church. A thoughtful exploration of grace, that avoids simplistic or sentimental understandings of how grace works, does not spare us the wounds that remain.

What we are also given is a thoughtful exploration of the Church as institution and as community. The Church is full of complex characters. People who come in search of hope, of inspiration, of re-birth, of healing, of a place to belong, of community, of acceptance, of identity and purpose, of certainty in an uncertain world that has left them disappointed, of somewhere to find significance through service, in search of God. So many motivations, all compromised, some considerably less healthy than others.

And the Church welcomes all. Welcomes all; but hopes for their transformation. Hopes for their transformation; but cannot make it happen. (When we attempt to, tragedy is at hand.)

Transformation involves ‘poio’ — choices we make — and ‘pascho’ — that which is done for us that we cannot do for ourselves, only submit to being done to us, or resist. And it is that capacity to resist — both the choices we know we must take, and the grace we must welcome — a resistance that is a deep survival mechanism — that leaves the Church a deeply flawed community.

This is its greatest weakness, and, in the end, its saving grace.

 

Advent 2025 : day sixteen

 

Some days are dark days. You were never supposed to carry the weight of the pain of the world; but you can be a stargazer: one who looks, intently, for signs of light in the darkness – and who redirects their life to follow the light, and so to carry the light.

Whenever we are rudely reminded that we dwell in the long shadow of death, may we seek, follow after, find, revere, and point others to the light that came into the world in the incarnation of Jesus, God-with-us.

 

Advent 2025 : day fifteen

 

The Third Sunday of Advent has long been associated with joy. On it, we read the poet Isaiah’s joyous vision of a parched land transformed by the coming of the rains:

‘The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing…

‘Then…the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water…

‘A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God’s people;
no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.’

Isaiah 35.1-10

About thirty-five years before the birth of Jesus, Herod the Great built a fortified pleasure dome a parkrun’s distance (5 km, 3 miles) south-east of Bethlehem, with commanding views over the ancient road known as the Way of the Patriarchs. On a man-made hill, he raised four towers, the largest being his penthouse. Beneath them, a great reception room, and Roman-style bathhouse. Below that, an enormous pool – Hollywood did not invent the pool party – and ornamental gardens, the edge of the desert transformed by water brought in by aqueducts (‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’). At a superficial glance, this was a fulfilment of Isaiah’s vision, the burning sand become a pool. (I have stood in the bottom of that pool, now long dry, the burning sand reclaiming its own.) But Herod co-opts the vision of Scripture – of holy writing – to justify absolute power. It will become an early warning system against ambassadors sent from a distant court to pay homage to the ‘newborn king of the Jews.’

The co-opting of faith in service of authoritarian control, in favour of wealthy men who play out obscene excess behind closed doors while the common people struggle under the weight of injustice, can never bring forth joy. Joy is that profound experience of being caught up in something bigger than ourselves – of a deep sense of connection with our neighbour, with strangers, with nature, the universe, God. It is impossible to know joy whenever we intentionally separate ourselves from other people, from those who are different – inferior to us in our own eyes.

We live in days when, on both sides of the Atlantic, we see agitators promoting the anathema which is Christian Nationalism. This is the false fulfilment of Herod the Great (Make Herod Great Again). But joy has always waited to be found, just as clouds wait to pour out their precious rain on the desert.

 

Advent 2025 : day fourteen

 

Tomorrow – the third Sunday of Advent – we will hold our annual Nativity at St Nicholas’ church. We have invited everyone to come dressed as their favourite character from the story – it does not matter whether we have one Mary or fifteen (the Gospels are full of women called Mary) because there is room for everyone.

Nativities – retellings of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus, usually pitched for children and popular in primary schools – remain reasonably familiar, and poorly presented. Famously, they involve Mary & Joseph turning up at Bethlehem on the very night she will go into labour, desperately going from inn to inn seeking a room, being turned away by innkeeper after innkeeper, until a kindly one, deeply apologetic at having nothing better to offer, let’s them sleep in his stable. Nothing could be further from what the Gospels actually portray.

Jesus is born in the home of a relative of Joseph, who, some time earlier, has returned to Bethlehem with his bride Mary, from her father’s home in Nazareth. In keeping with custom, a newly married couple (that is, having completed the legally binding contract of betrothal) would expect to live with the bride’s parents for the first twelve months of their life together – Joseph may well have been working for his father-in-law by way of a dowry – before the bride was taken to live in the home of the groom’s parents (marked by what we would recognise as a wedding feast). There is not space in the room allocated to the couple – Luke uses a term we might translate as ‘guest room’ and definitely should not translate as ‘inn’ – for Mary to give birth, attended by female relatives and town midwives, and so Jesus is born in the main, shared living space. He is then washed and wrapped tightly in bands of linen – all he has known so far is the confines of the womb – and laid in a stone depression hollowed out to form a manger in the dividing point between the lower end of the home, where animals slept at night, and the upper end, where the humans slept. Luke makes a point of describing he manger in detail, perhaps because it is a relevant detail for the shepherds (possibly a particular manger in a home known to them) but also because he is foreshadowing the stone shelf in the tomb where Jesus, wrapped in linen strips, will be laid following his crucifixion. The whole town of Bethlehem – the ‘city of David’ – rejoice that God has at last restored the fortunes of the house and line of David – though their joy will turn to sorrow within a couple of years, when Herod orders the massacre of every male child of two years and under in and around Bethlehem.

This, then, is a story set firmly in history, in the history and cultural practices and hopes and expectations of a particular community. It is a story of hope and of joy, albeit a story that will not run smoothly, because there will be powerful others who contest the story.

And the invitation is, where do you find yourself in the story? Not as a shepherd or as townsfolk or relatives, but where does the story resonate with your life – lived in a very different culture?

Where will the God who broke in there and then, break into your life here and now?

 

Advent 2025 : day thirteen

 

Once upon a time, many years in the past, there lived a young man, in a valley in a city built on seven hills. Each Sunday, he would get up bright and early and make the short walk to the house of the young woman he loved, stopping on the way at the boulangerie, to pick up two fresh-from-the-oven pains au chocolat, and at the tabac, to collect a Sunday paper, stuffed with weekend supplement sections. Then they would sit and drink coffee and eat their pains au chocolat and read the supplements, before walking up the hill to church. [1]

On a street between where the young man and the young woman lived, a street that ran parallel to the one with the boulangerie and the tabac, there was a gift shop. The kind of shop you could not walk past without looking in the window, for something new. The kind of shop you might turn into, at any time of year, and find the perfect gift to hold onto, to give a friend or relative when Christmas came around. The kind of shop that has, in cities up and down the land, been put out of business by online shopping.

These days, it is perhaps harder to find the perfect gift, in good time in advance, not only because we have withdrawn from the physical world but because the virtual world shapes us for immediacy. But the perfect gift might be in your hands: your own, undivided, presence the best present you have to offer (and, you don’t need to give a gift to everyone you know or have ever met; don’t need to be run ragged by the season of More Invitations Than You Can Possibly Accept).

Advent invites us to slow down enough to be present. But also, to plan in advance. Not for the Christmas that is upon us, but for the days and years and times ahead. Advent reminds us that the first coming of Christ – his incarnation – was a plan set in motion from before the creation of the world: God’s desire to be one with us, to be one of us, to unite heaven and earth. To savour the anticipation of seeing our surprise and delight. Might we rediscover this for ourselves?

 

[1] I know the young man and the young woman, though they are no longer young. They married, and he brings her coffee before she gets out of bed each morning – not only on Sundays – but they no longer live close to a boulangerie where people queue out the door waiting patiently for the oven to be opened.

 

Advent 2025 : day twelve

 

Is your Christmas tree up yet? At this time of year we make room for Christmas trees in our homes, gardens, businesses and public squares. As I have walked around my parish delivering Christmas cards, I’ve seen Christmas trees of all styles – including stylish minimalist branches, painted white, with a few brightly coloured baubles – and sizes.

In the symbolic universe of the Bible – in the imagination of the poets who wrote much of what has been handed down to us – trees stand for a person or people.

The poet Isaiah imagines a creative act of God – of the god who first created the world and everything in it – establishing a whole, diverse ecology of trees in the wilderness: cedar and acacia and myrtle and olive and cypress and plane and pine (Isaiah 41:17-20). It is a vision of a new way of being human, rooted in quietness and rest, in trust in the God who waits to meet with us, who waits for us to grow weary of the noise, the drivenness, the distraction of the city – of our physical and virtual, external and internal architecture.

And it isn’t a monoculture, this new way of being human – this vision of the Church. There are many different types of tree: some tall and thin; some spreading out a broad canopy providing shade; each with its own properties – this one is good for burning, for fuel; this, for building; this one, for food; this, possessing healing in its bark, or leaves.

This year, I have witnessed something of a fulfilment of Isaiah’s vision – biblical prophecy, biblical sense of history, is both cyclical and linear; its poetry speaks to events down through the ages – this year. Men and women seeking something that the world cannot give, searching for it in the wilderness of our long-abandoned churches. God is planting trees, creating something beautiful in its diversity.

And this Advent, the trees we make space for in our homes might just point us to this joyful reality.

 

Advent 2025 : day eleven

 

‘Are you feeling Christmassy yet?’ If not, that’s quite alright. Christmas – as Rend Collective sing* – is not a feeling. Christmas celebrates a truth – a reality that Advent points to – that ‘In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.’** In Advent we hold on to the hope that the dawn is on the way, and at Christmas we celebrate that it came and will come again. The dawn tells us that the darkness in our lives does not have the final word; but it does not deny that the night can be bitterly cold.

 

*We are playing Rend Collective’s ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen / Hallelujah’ before all our Christmas services this year. Check it out on your music streaming service of choice.

**vv. 9&10 of The Benedictus (The Song of Zechariah) which is ‘normally said’ at Morning Prayer.

 

Advent 2025 : day ten

 

One of the great themes of Advent is joy. (It is especially associated with the Third Sunday of Advent, also known as Gaudete Sunday; and this year,  JOY is the overall theme for Advent across the Church of England nationally.)

The author Brené Brown describes ‘joy’ as ‘sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and high intensity. It’s characterized by a connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon.’

(Atlas of the Heart, p. 204)

I know too many people whose marriages have fallen into messy divorce. (That is not to pass judgement: marriage is hard. I am aware that singleness is also hard, but the point is not comparison; the point stands: marriage is hard.) I know far too many people whose lives have been touched by the death, by suicide, of someone close to them. I know people who are living, this Christmas, with end-stage terminal illness. People who have lost a much-loved family pet. (this is no small thing.) And this is not to look for the wider catastrophes of climate collapse or war that uproot and remove families from their lives and confront the watching – perhaps receiving – world with our own in/humanity. It is common to the human condition that we dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Joy does not deny or dismiss this reality. Rather, it is under these conditions that joy is utterly essential, strengthening us to face our lives. For we do not face life alone, beneath a dispassionate void, but with the God who chose to become God-with-us in the birth of Jesus. He is the light that shines in the darkness, the light that grows, incrementally, to noon-day sun. But the dawn, the dawn sky, will take your breath away.