Emmanuel: God with us.

Loves furnace in a little room.

Forget not Trinity holy and glorious

That heaven’s bright prince came down to bestow on us

His love, as babe, into Mary’s fair womb

For nine months, he who is angels lord

Was hidden, love’s furnace, in a little room

Humbler than all, who all adored.

A pure lamb, he stole down to earth

To free us from our sin so blind .

No city home will shield his birth

His mother a stable for bed must find;

There poorest of the poor she lay

Nor wine nor meat for hungers sting

In the rude confines of the cattle bay

Where God was born apostle’s king.

Cold and exile He did not scorn

In the donkey’s manger that holy morn.

Tadg Gaelach O Suilleabhain.

 Time zero, matter zero, energy zero, a darkness of nothing.

Yet there was everything, an eternal caring community of mutual worship and love.

A pent-up furnace of beauty and joyful creativity, waiting to pour themselves into the dark chaotic meaningless nothingness.

The loving shout of command went out. Light poured into darkness. Rainbow colours of joy creating and illuminating our dark world.

The dark nothingness hated the light, but the light was joyfully triumphant.

So, this light created every one of us but we did not have the loving enlightening knowledge of this light in our hearts, many people had had glimpses; many prophets right up to the time of John the Baptist, but we were still living in the oppressive darkness, unaware of the light.

So that furnace of creative love was hidden as a tiny embryo in Mary’s womb.  We carried on oblivious to the miracle of uncreated light, living and breathing amongst us. We were unaware of the person of the creator, living in the world that he had created.

He was living in our street, just down our road and we were too busy and preoccupied to notice He was there.

Quieten your heart this Christmas you may hear him knocking on your door wanting to come in, to your life, demanding your heart, reclaiming the life he created to fill it with peace love and light.

Listen carefully He is here, even now.

 John 1 paraphrase

I wish everyone reading this blog a very blessed, peaceful and Christ filled Christmas

King of Creation

O King of our desire whom we despise,

King of the nations never on the throne,

Unfound foundation, cast-off cornerstone,

Rejected joiner, making many one,

You have no form or beauty for our eyes,

A King who comes to give away his crown,

A King within our rags of flesh and bone.

We pierce the flesh that pierces our disguise,

For we ourselves are found in you alone.

Come to us now and find in us your throne,

O King within the child within the clay,

O hidden King who shapes us in the play

Of all creation. Shape us for the day

Your coming Kingdom comes into its own.

Malcolm Guite.

Jesus can often seem a very inconvenient king. There are many more attractive idols which we can set in the throne of our heart. Sex, wealth and power are the usual culprits, together with the all pervasive worship of self.  However these glittering objects of desire prove very cruel masters in the end, as we are entrapped and destroyed by their fatal lure. 

Jesus is no glitzy king, no Hollywood superstar, he has no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:and we hid as it were our faces from him;he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Yet this is a king who has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, a king who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. A hidden king revealed to us this Christmas season as a helpless baby, a king ready to receive us, a king ready to be very close to us if we are prepared to make room for him by throwing out all lesser kings and making a humble home for Him in a contrite heart.

For if we make room for Him he is willing to reveal himself, as lord of all creation, the risen Lamb, to whom eventually every knee will bow and every tongue confess that, he is King of glory now.

   

The day spring from on high. Christ the light of the world

This night is the long night

When those who listen await His cry

This night is the eve of the great nativity

When those who are longing await His appearing

Wait with watchful heart.

Listen carefully through the stillness;

Listen; hear the telling of the waves upon the shore.

Listen hear the song of angels glorious-

Ere long it will be heard

That His foot has reached the earth;

News- that the glory has come!

Truly his salvation is near

For those who fear Him,

And His glory shall dwell in our land.

Watch and pray that the Lord shall come.

Those who are longing await His appearing.

Those who listen await His cry.

Watch….

Wait …..

Listen….

This night is the long night.

Author unknown.

the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
 to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace. Luke 1

It is little wonder that the peoples of the Northern hemisphere would have chosen Dec 25th as the day to celebrate the birth of Christ. Slowly they had watched the light disappearing from the land as the days grew shorter and the nights grew longer. In a time before artificial light the nights would have seemed long and dreary. So the coming of the Winter Solstice and the eager anticipation that in the coming weeks and months, the days would slowly lengthen  and Spring would again come; the time of resurrection and new birth.

Shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem would have eagerly awaited the dawn, the sight of the morning star heralding the end of their long night vigil. One night they experienced more than a bright dawn. They were frightened by the blinding glory of the very presence of seraphs of God heralding a new dawn for all of mankind. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. That uncreated light that spoke into the darkness and blazed forth a cosmos of light was coming as a small baby, to grow up into the man, who would take the whole world's sin upon His shoulders by His death on the cross. However the darkness could not extinguish the light so He blazed back into glorious life, to shine into the life of everyone who accepts Him into their life.

So once again this Christmas, as we light the Christmas candles, let us allow the light of Jesus to shine into our lives, to drive out anything that is dark and hidden . Then we can enter the New Year, enlightened and on fire with all that Jesus wants us to do, to shine His light of love into a sad dark world.

Release to the captives

O Clavis

Even in the darkness where I sit

And huddle in the midst of misery

I can remember freedom, but forget

That every lock must answer to a key,

That each dark clasp, sharp and intricate,

Must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard,

Particular, exact and intimate,

The clutch and catch that meshes with its ward.

I cry out for the key I threw away

That turned and over turned with certain touch

And with the lovely lifting of a latch

Opened my darkness to the light of day.

O come again, come quickly, set me free

Cut to the quick to fit, the master key.

Malcolm Guite.

Each one of us to some extent is still in Captivity. Enslaved in our own private Egypts. The old habits, which refuse to die, enchain us, We may be stuck in the miry swamp of depression, fear or guilt; each one fearsome gaolers . Or perhaps in some more tangible prison like the citizens of Bethlehem walled up by a regime where fear has extinguished compassion.
So how does Jesus release the captive? Perhaps Thomas Lovelace had the answer.

Perhaps the greatest  freedom that Christ gives is the freedom to forgive. The freedom to embrace your enemy.
Christ held out His arms of love on the cross, to empower us to be able to embrace the stranger, the enemy, the unlovable other.

The root of Jesse

O Radix

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,

Rose from a root invisible to all.

We knew the virtues once of every weed,

But, severed from the roots of ritual,

We surf the surface of a wide-screen world

And find no virtue in the virtual.

We shrivel on the edges of a wood

Whose heart we once inhabited in love,

Now we have need of you, forgotten Root

The stock and stem of every living thing

Whom once we worshipped in the sacred grove,

For now is winter, now is withering

Unless we let you root us deep within,

Under the ground of being, graft us in.

Malcolm Guite.

It will also come about in that day
that the root of Jesse will stand
    as a banner for the peoples.
The nations will seek for Him,
and His resting place will be glorious.
11 It will also come about in that day that my Lord will again redeem—a second time with His hand—the remnant of His people Isaiah 11:11

There is a glorious line that stretches from Adam to Christ, from the first to the second Adam. All the while the serpent has been trying to destroy that line, by one ploy or another but always he is frustrated a remnant remains. He remembers the prophecy that: 
  On your belly will you go,

    and dust will you eat all the days of your life. I will put animosity  between you and the woman—between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will crush his heel   .

Cain murdered Abel, but God replaced Abel by giving Eve another son, another seed, Seth.

So a pattern was set right down the ages through to Christ. That wily old serpent always busily at work through the hands of wicked men and women. Trying to wipe out the chosen seed. Causing such evil on earth that God is left no option but to wipe out that evil. However He still finds one righteous family the obedient Noah who is cast out on the flood in the very precarious ark, the remnant that remains to repopulate the world, through righteous Shem.

Finally the people of God demand a king and Handsome Saul is chosen, but sadly not the man after God's own heart who would be that chosen root.

 Samuel is sent to Jesse's sons to anoint a true king but is disappointed by all where is that root that will carry redemption? Out in the fields feeding sheep. David spent most of his life evading people wanting to destroy him but miraculously manages to escape on every occasion. Towards the end of his life David offers to build a temple for God but his request is denied in favour of Solomon who would succeed him. However he receives a promise that one of his descendants would sit on his throne forever. Solomon's reign started started on a high note but sadly his love for foreign wives and their God proved his ruin and sadly the kings following him with some notable exceptions went from bad to worse bringing in the worship of foreign gods.
Finally God lost patience with His wayward people and the only way to bring them back was fifty years of exile in Babylon.
That was the end of the kingdom and the king the serpent had won the kings sons were killed before his eyes which were then burned with hot irons and he went blinded into captivity.
However God looked after his people in Babylon and God had not forgotten his promise, there was to be a return to the land under king Cyrus the Persian who overthrew the Babylonians and established his own empire.

 Once again root of Jesse is renewed under Zerubbabel to be the Lords signet ring.
Finally the root springs up into a fertile tree in Mary and Joseph, but Oh the fury of the serpent then as he sends a massacre down on all the babes in Bethlehem, but once again the root hides in Egypt to suddenly appear heralded by John as King of Kings Lord and Saviour.

O Adonai The handmaid of the Lord

O Adonai

Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue,

Unseeable, you gave yourself away,

The Adonai, the Tetragramaton

Grew by a wayside in the light of day.

O you who dared to be a tribal God,

To own a language, people and a place,

Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,

If so you might be met with face to face,

Come to us here, who would not find you there,

Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,

Who heard no more than thunder in the air,

Who marked the mere events and not the myth.

Touch the bare branches of our unbelief

And blaze again like fire in every leaf.

Malcolm Guite

How can the finite fathom the infinite,  the small imagine the unimaginably large?

Yet look, see, here he is, walking the garden in the cool of the evening.

Draw near to the bush which burns and is not consumed, but take off your sandals for you tread on holy ground.

Listen to the still small voice, after  the fiery earth quake and the thunder, "peace, be not afraid".

Kneel with Mary before the angel, and say, "behold the handmaid of the Lord".

Come weeping from the empty tomb, to grasp the gardener, and discover you are hugging the risen Lord .

    

The Magi

O Sapientia

I cannot think unless I have been thought,

Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.

I cannot teach except as I am taught,

Or break the bread except as I am broken.

O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,

O Light within the light by which I see,

O Word beneath the words with which I speak,

O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me,

O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,

O Memory of time, reminding me,

My Ground of Being, always grounding me,

My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,

Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,

Come to me now, disguised as everything.

Malcolm Guite 

Who were the Magi? Strange mysterious people from the East.

 To the East of the Roman empire there were the Parthians one of a series of kingdoms, we can learn something about them in the book of Daniel , half a century before. There were a series of rulers coming down from the Asian Steppe, men such as Darius and Cyrus, advised by wise men who made a deep study of the stars a wisdom which formed a mixture of astronomy and astrology. Stars were important for a nomad people to navigate over the featureless steppe. For them the sun moon and stars were important deities that needed to be studied and worshipped. 

 Hence the writer of Genesis 1 had to emphasise that the sun, moon and stars were created entities subservient to the one true God.

So why is the story of these wise men so important to Matthew and what is it saying to us today?

What do we know about the wise men? Only two things, they were wise, and that they were humble. All of their combined wisdom pointed them to a stable containing a very poor and very un-royal couple with a very ordinary baby, yet they were humble enough to bow down and worship this baby who in fact was the creator of the star they followed and every star which they had studied.  

In Proverbs Ch 8 we see wisdom personified as the wise woman created before anything else calling out to people who have the humility to hear her; calling out through our best  and most humble endeavours to point us to the creator God.

Just as the Queen of Sheba came with humility and wonder, bearing gifts to marvel at the God given wisdom of Solomon, so these wise men come bearing their most precious gifts  to the Infant King.

We see the wisdom and humility of these wise men contrasted with the deadly pride and  selfishness of the puppet king Herod, who seeks only to hang on to the illusionary trappings of kingship by a ruthless determination to exterminate the true king and saviour of his people through heartless genocide.   

So how will we react to the baby king this Christmas will we follow the wisdom of the Magi, and the humility of Mary to worship, or will our pride and self centeredness cut us off from the mystery of the entry of the Creator into His creation. 

Will we make the discovery that this baby is our Saviour and our God.

Where will you find Jesus this Christmas

He did come, to that simple peasant house in Palestine, sharing sleeping quarters with the precious animals.  He was there just down our street, very close, a blazing fire of uncreated light pent up in the womb of a humble poor girl, but where is he now?
He was there with the refugee desperately fleeing bloody persecution, seeking a safe haven in the storm, but where is he now? 
He was there, feeding hungry families, healing the blind beggar, weeping over Lazarus's tomb before calling the dead back to life, but where is he now?
He was there, nailed to a cruel cross, giving new life to all who find Him.
Do not look in the cold tomb, He is certainly not there!

Listen, He is knocking on the door of your heart. He is calling each one of us, wanting to come in to be a living presence, to have a loving relationship with each one of us.
Look with the eyes of faith, He is there wanting to come in and live in you.
He is there, just humbly invite Him in, find Christ this Christmas.

The coming of the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a wise man, I would do my part;

Yet what can I give Him?

Give Him my heart. 

Christina Georgina Rossetti

One of my lasting images from a childhood on a farm was coming down stairs one morning to a wet and cold lamb being revived in the warming oven of our old Rayburn stove, with a pervading smell of wet wool filling the kitchen. Another early image was being pushed into the garden in my pram where a very large white sow would snuffle curiously around the pram wheels. We may not have shared our kitchen with the cows but we did share their flies! Even today in Rwanda the house and stable are often shared. So it is important to understand the Christmas story in its historical and cultural context, very ably done HERE. Jesus was born into the home of a poor but very hospitable family in Bethlehem, because the upper room (Greek: kataluma usually translated inn.) was crammed with guests already, they were squeezed in with the family into the communal living accommodation downstairs.

 As John says in his gospel, “the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”. Remember this Christmas that Jesus came into the very midst of us, if you invite Him in, he is there, right in the middle with your family and friends sharing the feast, sharing in all the joys and all the sorrows.  

The shekinah glory had not been seen, since Ezekiel had seen it depart from the East gate of the Jerusalem temple, before its destruction in 586 AD. Revealed not to the priests in Herod’s temple but to humble, despised shepherds in the Bethlehem hills, who were treated to the most beautiful and terrifying revelation of the glory of God that has been seen. 

Calmed by the angel’s message they would have rushed down the hill into town to find the Saviour King, born in humble helplessness into a family home just like the ones in which they lived.    

They may have mused here was someone like one of them; could He be the servant shepherd, the one who would feed his flock like a shepherd; and would gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep; as Isaiah had prophesied in the fortieth chapter of his writings. Would He be the one prophesied in Jeremiah who would gather His flock still scattered in exile?

Jesus, however, was more than this, He was the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for the sheep, as He declared in JOHN 10:11-18 .

One of the little rituals I did as a child was to sneak quietly into the cow shed on Christmas eve to look at the cows who it was rumoured still knelt to the baby Jesus. Let us remember the living Jesus and invite Him again into the very centre of our lives.    

Abraham

 “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

Like Abraham we are all called to be pilgrims through life. It is up to us if we respond to the call; are we willing to go through separation and hardship to pursue a distant goal and achieve a prize?

This week I went to a book signing for a book, “ Walking to Jerusalem ” by Justin Butcher. Last year we had the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour declaration. A source of joy to the Jewish nation who were seeking a homeland, but sadness to the Palestinians who were largely displaced ending up in refugee camps. This was a pilgrimage and penance for all the injustices which have occurred since. The all way walkers had to commit to taking a 9 month slot out of their life and suffering all the blisters and hardships along the way.

My wife, Mary and I took part in two segments, it was a very moving experience, as we entered into a deep fellowship with our fellow walkers along the way. Walking through the battle fields of Northern France where so many lives had been pointlessly lost. Later we set off from Thessalonica walking the same roman road on which St Paul had walked , as he answered the call of the man from Macedonia to make his own journey to bring the good news about Jesus to the people of Europe. We were certainly walking in the footsteps of giants.

However back to Abraham, he obeyed the call. The original call had been from Ur where he set out with his father, Terah, however they only got as far as Haran where Terah died. God renewed His call to Abraham who obeyed and received the wonderful promise that all the families on earth would be blessed through him and his descendants would be as many as the stars in the sky.  This was the wonderful promise that directly, through his descendants, would come Jesus, born to redeem and save all nations worldwide.

So God appeared to Abram, as he was then called, when he arrived in the land which God had promised him and made a solemn covenant  with him but after many years of trying still no son and heir he must slowly have come to the realisation there was no way the elderly Sarai was going to bear him a son, so they decided to take matters into their own hands by Abram sleeping with his wife’s slave girl. This only caused more problems as his son by this liaison was not the one God had promised.  Finally, one day, he received three mysterious visitors, thought by some to be the three persons of the Godhead.  God once more renewed His promise and they were given the son through whom, all the amazing promises would come to pass.

 Abraham had slowly learned to patiently trust God, but this famous person of faith was going to be tested one more time, the request to sacrifice the very one who was so precious to him. He reluctantly obeyed and must have walked with heavy heart up the mountain, but at the last moment, as his hand was raised with the knife, a voice stopped him and as he prophesied, God did "provide a lamb" for the sacrifice, prefiguring the Father’s own precious son, Jesus, who took our place and died that we might live forever.     

Exile

Is there no balm in Gilead?
    Is there no physician there?

O that my head were a spring of water,
    and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
    for the slain of my poor people!

On a first visit to Rwanda tears are never that far away, in a country where 10 million people were massacred in a hundred days, as you visit schools turned into open mausoleums, where bodies of school children are preserved in lime and laid to rest on the benches where they were slaughtered. My saddest moment came in a vision of extreme beauty looking down on three countries: Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo, over a vast green forest where you could imagine somewhere hidden from human view the very lost Eden of God The very garden of delight where God first walked with Adam and Eve, now barred from view by fiery Cherubs. Now is only left the slaughter of Abel repeated by so many people, many times, over the years and still ongoing in Congo, although Rwanda is experiencing something of a return to joy as we visit happy churches with young people joyfully singing and dancing in worship to God. Deep in the heart of all of human-kind is a deep longing to go back to Eden.

Jeremiah is a book of deep emotion, it is difficult to separate the words of Jeremiah from the words of Father God as they are so empathic and in tune. As Jeremiah weeps so does God in heaven, at His wayward children who were given so much, but always turned their backs on His infinite kindness to pursue other Gods and puff up their own pride. Despite sending prophet after prophet to bring them back, they always rebelled. The threat of exile was always present as they refused to return to worship only the one true God, many times God relented and sent them yet another chance, a powerful prophet or a king with a reforming heart turned towards Him. Eventually God was forced to act decisively and send His people into 70 years of exile. Withdrawing His shekinah glory from the temple which was then utterly destroyed by the Babylonians along with the rest of the Holy city. His people were deported to Babylon where they sat down and wept besides the waters of a foreign land.

Exile was not only a punishment, it was the tool of a loving God to turn his people back to him. With all the props of religion gone, and pride crushed there was room for a new love affair with the living God. Such was the fiery passion of the three young men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, whose flaming love was not crushed by the fiery furnace, but rather a meeting place for an intimate encounter with their saviour in the midst of the flames.

We eventually have a return under Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel; however, the temple was never rebuilt to its former glory and occupiers never left the land so in the time of Jesus the Jews were still pining for a Messiah to drive out the romans and accomplish a true return. However, Jesus was a very different kind of Messiah. He did bring his people back into a relationship with the three persons of the Trinity if they believed and trusted in Him, and eventually all His redeemed church, will be joined together and welcomed as a bride into the new heavens and the new earth to dwell united with the triune God.