marramgrass

Luke 2:8-16 (NIV);

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.

According to Luke’s account, the first to hear the news of Jesus’ birth are the shepherds keeping an eye on their sheep overnight — those unlucky souls who spend their nights in the cold, and when they come into town to see the baby they bring their dirt and their sheep-smell with them.

That line, “when the angels had left them and gone into heaven” — I wonder how long the shepherds stood there, watching and listening, amazed by what they were witnessing?

(What am I doing?)

Luke 2:1, 3-7 (NIV):

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.

And everyone went to his own town to register.

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

(What am I doing?)

Luke 1:26-35, 38 (NIV):

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.”

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her.

The angel greets Mary by telling her that she is “highly favoured” for the “Lord is with you.” Why would that be troubling to her? A young girl, pledged but not yet married, on the wrong side of a military occupation, and it only gets stranger from there. Yes, I can imagine why she might be a little unsure.

Somewhere in the last two thousand years, has the Church lost sight of the way God became man? We became nice and respectable — when? What do we now value? How have we forgotten where we come from?

How can we remember?

Glenn has posted a couple of telling reflections that follow this thread more ably than I can.

(What am I doing?)

Isaiah 11:1-4a, 6-9 (NIV):

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.

The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him — the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD — and he will delight in the fear of the LORD. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

The title says it.

(What am I doing?)

Isaiah 9:2, 6-7 (NIV):

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.

This passage forms one of my favourite parts of Handel’s Messiah (yes, I am eclectic), but also a beautiful image of the coming of Messiah. A ‘great light’ on those in darkness, revealed in the birth of a child.

Here, in Advent, we wait in the dark for the light to shine.

(What am I doing?)

A promise of blessing, from Genesis 22:15-18 (NIV):

The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, “I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, and it is through this bloodline that the rest of our story unfolds.

(What am I doing?)

The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is a very British (English?) tradition, but one that I find especially meaningful. From here until Christmas Eve, I will be posting the ‘nine lessons’ of it. Perhaps I will offer some commentary on some of them, but probably not all.

We start with Genesis 3:8-15, 17-19 (NIV):

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Humanity faced with the world, and all it will throw at us. Life is hard, there’s no getting away from that. But there’s more…

Today is the first Sunday in Advent. For Western churches that follow the liturgical calendar, this is the start of the new church year.

I have mostly spent time in places where we haven’t really paid attention to that aspect of the day, but a couple of years ago I spent a short placement with a Church of Scotland congregation with a more liturgical approach to their worship than I was used to, and I was introduced to the rhythm of the year running under and through the rise and fall of day-to-day life.

The short season of Advent is a time of anticipation: of darkness waiting for light to break in (both physically and metaphorically), of the world waiting for the birth of Christ, of the world waiting for his return. There’s a tension around at this time of year, celebrating what has happened while waiting for what’s still to come.

This year I’ve discovered that it’s a reminder that we’re here, now. Living in the in-between time of the “now, but not yet”, I guess Christians have often been guilty of ignoring what’s going on around them — injustice, poverty, hunger… I know I have/am. But we are here, now, and there’s so much to see and remember and do.

Now in December, the pace has picked up over at The Mockingbird’s Leap as we’re practicing the attention that comes with being present in the world, the here and now. I’ve even been there already this afternoon.

It’s time to enjoy the tension-approaching-paradox of commemoration flavoured with anticipation, of the eye on forever that still takes in today, and to remember to look forward, and around, as well as back.

• Winter seems to have finally arrived here in Northern Ireland. We had a couple of excellently cold days, and now it’s just wet. That is the true heart of winter in this part of the world. One of the things I miss about Edinburgh is how it could get properly cold, and even snow occasionally.
• In spite of my intentions otherwise, as Christmas gets closer I only seem to get busier. It seems like I could do with it being eight weeks away instead of four. It’s probably about time I learned some time-management. That or employed a ghost-writer, along with a ghost-facilitator, ghost-trainer and ghost-student… Less than four weeks to a wee break is great and terrible both at once. And I’m horrified that the Advent has become a countdown to holiday, at least on some level.
• The iPhone interface is not hugely well-suited to inputting HTML. Finding the < and > symbols takes too many actions, and the auto-correct gets occasionally flummoxed by the tags. Yet strangely it seems quite happy with ‘flummoxed’. Still, it gives me something to do when I’m waiting on my wife and I’ve forgotten my novel.

I believe they were turning on the Christmas lights in Belfast tonight, five weeks before Christmas. Since I posted the other day, I’ve been thinking some more about the whole gift-giving thing.

Specifically, I thought about how this time of year, for my family, has been the time of the ‘big’ gift, the thing you’d really like to have but can’t get (or can’t justify getting) for yourself. There’s something cool about that, but at the same time it requires a bit of a pause for thought, and in my pause I remembered a friend from Edinburgh.

This guy did something once that raised a few eyebrows among those who know him. A guitarist, when he decided to concentrate on the acoustic instrument for a while he began to dispose of all his electric gear — guitars, amps, effects. Some got sold on, but some was given away to others. (Full disclosure: I have in my possession a couple of very nice bits of gear he gifted me. I’m still humbled by it.) Any musicians out there will know that putting your kit together can be expensive in terms of cash, of effort and of time, so this was not an insignificant thing for him to do.

I remember some wondering if he had thought it through, and the occasional muttering about these young folks not knowing the value of things, of money, of… whatever.

Then and now, I realised that the opposite was true. He got it exactly. The material value of things, of money, of… is fleeting. This guy was of the opinion that he wasn’t using the gear, and someone else could. He knew that to have the right attitude was to hold on lightly, because at the end of the day it’s just stuff, you know?

Which brings me back to the giving of gifts at Christmas. I say that the extravagant gift-giving is cool not for the “Wahey! Look what I got!” factor, but for the “Wow. Look what you gave.” factor. Only one of the many ways we try to express care and love for each other as we celebrate Christmas in the West, this is maybe where we’re most prone to getting sidetracked by the medium and forgetting the message. Its meaning and beauty is in the sacrifice and intent of the giver.

Now where’ve I heard that before?