When I set off on the crookedshore today it was already nearly five o’clock and we were entering the latter stages of twilight. I had headphones pinned to my ears to listen to the football on 5 Live but the batteries ran out of power barely 100 metres onto the sand and I took this as an Advent portent, to listen and watch on the way around.
At the beginning of my journey Jupiter and Venus hung suspended over Bangor and they were to my back as I walked north-east. I paused and looked back to see a red sky over the town. In the cold, cold air the sight was wondrous. And I thought of Bethlehem all those years ago and a star followed by wise men, though I bet it wasn’t this cold.
I’ve got four layers on tonight. And I’m wearing a Russian-style hat with flaps down over my ears and tied under my chin. With my thick gloves and strong shoes I’m actually quite toasty and enjoying being out.
The sea is totally still. And almost within touching distance it seems a sailing boat makes its way up the lough towards the safety of Bangor harbour. At least I think its a boat; all I can see is a collection of lights, white and red, moving quietly over the water. The sail is down. I know this because as it passes me I can see through the teepee-shaped constellation of lights on the boat, straight through to the shore on the far side.
I am astonished to notice that even in this dark winter’s night the three-quarters moon is strong enough to cast a shadow. When I turn to the south the moon is directly in front of me, Jupiter and Venus are to my right, and in the East there is a less showy, red coloured object in the sky. I think it might be Mars, but am confused by its location.
As I approached Groomsport along a particularly muddy part of the track I noticed the frosty air hanging over the buildings and lit by the street lights, looking like an orange halo surrounding the Advent blessed village.
Happy Christmas.
This Advent is a strange one at the Mission. In recent weeks we have faced a whole series of goodbyes and ‘last of..’ services. The last Harvest, the last Remembrance Sunday, the last Mission Anniversary, and now we’re looking into the approach to the last Christmas. And even the last ever service on January 03 2010.
The last of everything that we will do in this existing building before we demolish it in the Spring to make space for Skainos.
It means therefore, that Advent is a particularly poignant one this year. Ordinarily, this is the season that lasts for four Sundays, before culminating in the celebration of Christmas Day. It’s a season of waiting, of anticipation and of hope, and it comes at the blackest time of the year. It feels like a long wait which only sharpens the anticipation, like the icy temperatures that chill us and drive us indoors. Then the day comes, when our hopes are realised, and our waiting ends and the anticipation finishes gloriously in the birth of the Christ child.
Normally, it’s only four weeks.
At EBM this year we entered Advent at the regular time, but this year it won’t end on Christmas Day. This is the year of the long Advent. We leave behind our church building and enter a extended period of waiting and hoping and anticipation, which will only end when the construction work is done and we can enter the newness of Skainos. We will be ready to receive it then, like the longest hoped for gift on Christmas Day. Like the shiny bike we received that day that still sparkles in our memory.
But we must wait.
I wrote the following litany for last Thursday’s Community Christmas Celebration and Farewell at EBM.
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Lord of our days, for the long and colourful history of this place, for all the generations who have worshipped here, who have offered their children in baptism, committed their lives in marriage, or buried their dead with sadness and love. LORD FOR ALL OF THIS…
We give thanks.
Lord of our heritage, for those who had the courage to build when this place was outside the city, for those who had the perseverance to re-build when this community was visited by the terror and destruction of war, for those who found the creativity to respond to all manner of need on the doorstep. LORD FOR ALL OF THIS…
We give thanks.
Lord of our lives, for all the children who have played in these halls, for all those adults who have found meaning and support in the ups and downs of life, and for all our older people who have found companionship and the strength to endure. LORD FOR ALL OF THIS…
We give thanks
Lord of our memories, for the many ways in which this place stirs our recollections and emotions, for the many people who have passed through, some stopping for only a moment but leaving a lasting impact, some spending a whole lifetime within its walls, for the old doors and tired bricks and laboured heating, LORD FOR ALL OF THIS…
We give thanks
Whatever our connections with this place, whatever memories these walls enclose, whatever faces we see passing across our mind’s eye, holding all of them in our hands we gather this evening during Advent to remember, to give thanks and to look ahead in hope of your continuing grace towards this community and the Mission, in Jesus name. Amen.
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7
If you asked me for my definition of the church I think I would describe it in this way: the church is the community of God which, following the pattern of the founder, chooses to be outside for the sake of those who are outside through no choice of their own.
As such we are the community which readily identifies with the poor and the marginalized, the outsider. The community which gives shelter to the homeless, food to the hungry, clothing to the naked and companionship to the lonely and isolated.
We do so after the pattern of Jesus who, we are reminded this time every year, chose a lowly position for the sake of those the world had despised.
But this is a hard truth to us, for here is the uncomfortable lesson of the first Christmas, here is the stone in the shoe of the church, that irritable hard reality that upsets us.
The unborn jesus, in the womb of Mary and in the company of Joseph, comes home, to the place where he can reasonably expect a welcome, and there is no room.
Jesus comes to his own, who have been reading and studying and preaching and worshipping about him for generations, and his own do not welcome him. There is no room.
Here in Advent in 2009 we must face again the possibility that WE are the ones who have no room.
We are the ones who do not receive him. Because he does not fit our pre-conceived theologies, our understandings of how he must be and how he will act and who he blesses.
And so he finds his place among those who are not welcome here with us. Our equivalent of the blind, the lame and the sinners. Jesus is out there among those who are being crucified by the world – perhaps because they don’t conform, or their preferences are other than ours or what we would like. While we continually lament his absence and spend fortunes seeking him in conferences, books, church services and projects. And all the while he is calling us, as he does again this Advent, to go out and to meet him where he already is. On the outside.
[photo from here]
Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore.
Heb 13:13
In the book of Hebrews in chp 13 we have this summary statement of the Gospel we proclaim:
11 The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. 12 And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood. 13 Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. 14 For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.
Here is one accustomed to the outside whose life and death were shaped by his outsider status. Rejected, despised, exiled from his home town, no place to lay his head. Ultimately crucified outside the civilised place, where the respectable people gathered.
And in turn he calls us to go to the outside. To leave the place of privilege, power and influence. To take the risk of stepping outside the bounds of respectability and there to risk something and to find that Jesus is already there.
Among the outcast and the refugee, with the homeless person and the prisoner.
I think this is why this chapter opens in an unusual way.
1. Love the Family: Community
Hebrews 13:1 Keep on loving each other as brothers.
The opening words of this collection of closing instructions is directed towards the community. For the foundation of all that follows is a loving community of brothers and sisters.
2. Love the Stranger: Hospitality
Hebrews 13:2 Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.
Christian love should never be confined to the brothers and sisters of the family it must extend to the stranger.
Love the Christian family, but don’t forget the stranger. Don’t forget the stranger…the outsider. For in so doing we double their exclusion.
And we welcome the stranger in the confident expectation that they will be a gift of God to us.
What does entertaining angels mean? Well I don’t fully know. But surely it means at least this, that as we reach out to the stranger outside, as we welcome them inside, we may find in so doing that we are in effect welcoming an angel inside. That in acting like Jesus, reaching out to those who have been exiled from their home and bringing them near, by stepping outside the walls we have built round ourselves and our families and our churches, going outside where the crucified are, we find that Jesus is already there before us. Crucified along with them and for them. And in acting as he did we meet him in them.
We meet angels and are blessed. Aren’t they always present in the Christmas story?
[photo from here]
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7
There was no room.
One of the oldest hymns of the church is preserved for us in the book of Philippians. There the descent of Jesus is recorded for us in the lyric which says he did not consider equality with God something that should be grasped, but he left what was rightfully his, taking on the form of a human being, humbled as a servant, humbled even to the point of death on a cross.
The substance of this hymn is unwrapped again and again in the stories of the life of Jesus beginning even before his birth.
Here in Luke’s Gospel we see it.
A mass movement of people on the way to register. But Joseph makes his way to Bethlehem, the house of David, to the very place he belongs. He goes to the ancestral homeland with his heavily pregnant partner. The story is told in recognizable terms. The time comes for the child to be born and she gives birth to a son and wraps him gently. But then the camera pulls back and the scene widens and we see something that leaves us uncomfortable – the baby is laid in a manger.
Because there was no room.
Joseph came to his familiar place, but there was no room where he should have expected it.
John’s Gospel unfolds it in a similar way. He came unto his own, he says, and his own did not receive him.
Both Gospels tell a story that begins in a rejection and as we read on, that rejection shapes and colours all that follows.
Jesus enjoys the company of the prostitutes and other undesirables. He heals the blind and the lame and those with skin conditions, all of whom were excluded from the faith life of the community. He tells stories of ungrateful sons who are welcomed home again and of a banquet where the rich and powerful are excluded and the poor and lowly from the roads and country lanes are invited to dine. He rescues the woman caught in adultery and sends the rich lawyer away disappointed.
Always, always, the one who found himself on the outside from the time of his birth reaches out to those whom society has kept on the margins. This is his ministry. This is the Gospel.
God in the person of Jesus is walking this earth and wrapping the outsider, the rejected, the scorned into the love of God, while those whom the rest of the world might have reasonably expected to have been his own, reject him.
[photo from here]
This is not on their new album, but what a beaut. Picked this up on the ever excellent I am Fuel. Hasn’t the solo singer in the audience a wonderful voice? I’m just getting into the album, Strict Joy. The young woman in the record shop raved about them for ages as we discussed music and gigs and she tried to charge me £4 more than the ticket price. But I forgave her.
Abusing the Truth – the Dublin Archdiocese and ‘mental reservation’
My wife told me of a cartoon she remembers from years back. The vicar’s wife answers the parsonage door to an unwanted caller. She informs said caller that the vicar is ‘in the bath’ and thus unavailable. The second panel had the clergyman, fully dressed standing in the bath. Oh how we laughed! The comedy is the the technical telling of the truth.
I was reminded of the perennial challenge to answer the question of whether another’s bum looks big in whatever piece of clothing. Sometimes a little lie is necessary.
I thought again about all this when I read reports in the media emanating from the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. Like the Ryan report earlier in the year it makes deeply disturbing reading, and particularly about the doctrine of mental reservation or mental equivocation. As Patsy McGarry said in today’s Irish Times,
nothing quite as perfectly illustrates the moral rot at the core of institutional Catholicism in Ireland as the concept of ‘mental reservation’.
Under such theological legal genius, clergy are permitted to mislead another person without, in the eyes of the church, being guilty of lying. Thus, as the report says, if a troublesome parishioner comes to the parish priest to make a complaint, and the PP sees him coming, he can tell a curate to answer the door and tell the parishioner that the PP is not in. Whilst this is manifestly untrue, the curate is not guilty in the Church’s eyes if he mentally reserves the words ‘to you’.
This sophisticated casuistry, allegedly developed by the Jesuits in the Middle Ages (so it’s not new), means that truth is constructed partly in speech and partly in the mind. Strictly speaking mentalis restrictio is considered unjustified without grave reason for withholding the truth. That this is so makes the deceit over child abuse utterly horrific, because successive leaders considered the preservation of the institution and it’s assets and the avoidance of scandal an overriding priority, even higher than the preservation of the innocence of children. Utterly outrageous.
It is almost inconceivable. To try and enter the mind of someone who could make this argument in justification is too distressing. And they did it not just once, but over decades, and successive archbishops in the diocese, and even when the problem became structural and institutional.
There can be no equivocation now. No legalistic gymnastics. If there is to be a future for the Catholic Church, indeed for any church, then it must lie in the direction of truth and the willingness to see the institution die rather than compromise it. As I have seen it and experienced it, there isn’t an institutional church on the island who wouldn’t sacrifice an individual, even one of it’s clergy, on the altar of self-preservation. I’ve said it before, all human institutions survive on human sacrifice.
But now I must also look to my own truth-telling, lest I become a hypocrite.
Tonight, Ireland play France in Paris in a world cup play-off game, 1-0 down from the first leg. Irish people take solace where they can, so how about this.
The first time Eire, or the Republic of Ireland played France in France was in 1937, in the same stadium where Harold Abraham’s deeds inspired Chariots of Fire. In 1937 there were two football associations on the island of Ireland, as there is today, but the Northern Ireland football team was, at that time, known as Ireland. Players from the island could play for either team.
On May 23, 1937 Eire played in front of nearly 17,000 fans and took the lead on 52 mins with a goal from Belfast man Davy Jordan who had moved from Ards to Wolves. Six minutes later Johnny ‘Jackie’ Brown met a dropping ball on the volley and drove it home. The game ended 0-2 to Eire, and Jackie Brown headed home to the Castlereagh Road in Belfast. He was a Protestant, from the heartland of Protestantism in Belfast – the East. He had worked in William Ewart’s linen mill before becoming a footballer. And after retiring in 1951 he got a job down in Harland and Wolff, and died tragically young.
When he and fellow Belfast Celtic player Davy Brown were transferred to Wolves thousands accompanied their horse-drawn carriage to Belfast Dock where they boarded the boat to England.
How things have changed.
Here’s hoping the spirit of Johnny ‘Jackie’ Brown haunts the French again tonight.
Given all that we know about the story that unfolds in the history of the descendents of Abraham, the reference to going ‘down to Egypt’ (Gen 12:10) is ominous, surely.
The covenant promise had been restated in 12:6, with the first direct reference to the actual land that God had intended in the first promise. And it wasn’t Egypt. The text also leads us to understand that Abraham has some sort of a religious experience and worships God between Bethel and Ai.
And yet at the first sign of lack he emigrates. He leaves the land of the promise for the land the engineer, and in so doing he takes to himself the task of engineering his own security. Seeking only self-preservation and he effectively sells Sarai to secure his own safety.
So many times I’ve heard this story referred to and preached but only as a bump in the road that leads inexorably to Abraham’s sainthood. This was a challenge to faith in which he didn’t cover himself in glory but thankfully he learned from the disobedience.
Never once have I heard this story from the perspective of Sarai. What did it feel like to be chattel? To be involved in an abusive relationship where one’s personal integrity could be traded so callously? What was it like to be utterly at the whim of someone more powerful who was not slow to exercise that power in self-interest?
In order to get around the moral difficulties this passage poses, I’ve heard all sorts of explanations for what ‘taken into (Pharoah’s) palace’ (Gen 12:15) means. Even some of the commentators explain it as ‘she was introduced’ to Pharoah – like Pharoah had a garden party and Sarai’s reward for trading her virtue was an invite to meet a powerful man.
The word ‘taken’ is often used in the context of marriage and of all that follows, and though it is not explicit in the passage surely this is the intent. Pharaoh had sex with Sarai. Sarai was forced into an adulterous relationship by her husband, but who is really being unfaithful here?
Abraham’s moral cowardice is staggering, and it begins when he packs up and leaves the Promised Land, and the ‘going down’ to Egypt describes a moral and ethical descent to terrible depths.
And Sarai’s helplessness and powerlessness is heartbreaking.
Then we’ve got to cope with something else in the story. Abraham profits hugely from his deception.
Not only that, but Pharoah’s household suffers terrible diseases. (Pharoah does too, but then we might argue that he also exercises power callously, taking a woman just because he could. But at least he thought she was unmarried.)
Where is the justice in the story?
Abraham emerges embarrassed but with greatly enhanced material wealth. Nothing is said about Sarai (though Jewish tradition fills in a little bit, adding that whilst in Pharaoh’s harem she met Hagar – but more of that later).
What was it like in their bed the first night out of Egypt and heading back to famine-ravaged Canaan? What ground did the conversation cover? How was Sarai’s spirit damaged by the experience of being bought and sold by wealthy men? Can it go some way towards explaining her later behaviour towards Abraham?
There are a lot more layers to this story than might be realised. And they’re real layers. It’s not the first time a man used a women to his own ends. Not the first time spouses were faithless. And the reality is also that when this kind of things happens the consequences are not confined to the principal characters. Many innocent people suffer the impact of my faithlessness, my inability to hold to a covenant.
