Tag: Advent

Peace in Our Time

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.
Isaiah 9:6, NIV

Before we get to the Prince of Peace. I want to share a mystery with you. I have often been puzzled by the rail bridge that lies between junctions 16 and 17 on the M25 near Uxbridge. It carries the Chiltern Main Line Railway over the M25 motorway. And the mystery is that it bears the immortal line “Give Peas a Chance”.

Who does these things? Why would you risk life and limb to hang off the side of a bridge over the M25 to paint, in a reasonably interesting font, “Give Peas a Chance”?

I guess it’s a play on the song “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band. It has no doubt raised a wry smile from hundreds of thousands of motorists, because it is funny when we swap peace with peas.

As a child I had tonsillitis and blocked ears every winter. I remember being confused at Infant School, at a Christmas assembly, when I heard that Jesus was the Prince of Peas. I was less than impressed because peas in the 1970s, at least in my home, were a very singular variety, known as tinned.

It clearly makes little sense to view Jesus as Prince of Peas. But when we look at the world today, we might question what it means that Jesus is Prince of Peace. His first arrival around 2,000 years ago did not usher in a time of peace. Jesus himself did not expect that either; whatever Isaiah had said. When speaking of his return he pointed out that war, rather than peace, would continue. Jesus said this:

You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
Matthew 24:6, NIV

So, what does it mean that the promised child, according to the Prophet Isaiah, will be Prince of Peace? Is Isaiah guilty of over promising? Or did Isaiah get it plain wrong?

Part of the answer is the need to understand what Isaiah meant by peace. The word he used is shalom. This word can refer to the absence of war, corresponding to our English word peace. But it means more than this, as we will see in just a moment.

But to be fair to Isaiah, elsewhere in the Bible, the absence of war brought about by Jesus—Isaiah’s Prince of Peace—is promised and explained further. The question is ‘when will there be peace?’, rather than if there will be peace.

John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s sentiment is a wonderful ideal:

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

Jesus, the Prince of Peace, will bring an end to war, but only after his return—in what we might call the beginning of the age to come. Whilst in faith we should be grateful, in our impatience and horror at the reality of war we want this now. Who does not want an end to war right here, right now?

Isaiah’s Prince of Peace—Jesus born in a manager—can bring peace of a different sort, both here and now.

Shalom is a rich word and the foundation of the Bible’s good news. It is about wholeness, about healthiness, about happy relationships and most fundamentally of all it is about peace with God. This latter meaning—peace with God—is a possibility here and now through Jesus our Prince of Peace.

Jesus was sent to this tiny, and otherwise unremarkable planet, by God his Father to make peace with men, women, and children. The brokenness we see that haunts this world is explained in the Bible in the story of how paradise was lost in the garden of Eden. This accounts for our lack of peace, our broken relationship with God.

Whatever we might make of a primeval garden, the broken relationships it describes are self-evident all around us. Humanity in taming the Earth has created untold damage. Men and women struggle to live in harmony under the same roof. Inequality is worked out in our daily choices and can feel hard-baked into reality.

Evidence of all this brokenness, frailty, and that old fashioned idea called sin, is self-evident truth. It is broadcast in the news. Written large in newspapers. Worked out in social media. Is not every person, community, and neighbourhood on this planet blighted by weakness, frailty, bad choices, and that old fashioned addiction called selfishness?

A broken world, and the frail people who broke it, need a peacemaker. Someone who can bring humanity and God to the table to speak of peace. Until that relationship knows peace, shalom in all its other forms cannot begin. Peace with God is what Jesus brought with him in his journey from heaven to earth that first Christmas, and worked out in his life and ministry, and finally in his cross and resurrection.

That the Christmas child is the Prince of Peace is a remarkable claim. It took me eleven years from hearing that Jesus was Prince of Peas to knowing his peace personally. Why not take some time this Christmas to reflect on the possibility that peace with God might be a genuine possibility? You might just find the only present that goes beyond the advertising.

Many Christmas adverts seem to promise that this Christmas will be paradise on earth. But I’m not convinced that Tesco or Waitrose supermarkets, Chanel or Paco Rabane perfumes, Baileys Irish Cream or even Jack Daniel’s whiskey can give us ‘heaven on earth’ or bring ‘peace on earth’. But through Jesus Christ I believe we really can have peace in our time.

Everyone saw the big clock tickin’, nobody knew the time: Habakkuk 2

Habakkuk’s Watch
I am not one for dinner parties, but I often wonder who the famous or infamous people are I’d enjoy meeting over a meal. People who could share something of their passion, wisdom, or expertise. My list frequently changes but there is one constant and that’s David Attenborough. I have been watching David Attenborough’s TV output for many years—way before he became the national treasure and world champion for environmental issues he is today. I remember the 1979 TV series Life on Earth when so enchanted I wanted the book for Christmas. But even before that, David Attenborough was teaching me about fossils in a 1975 children’s programme called Fabulous Animals.

I admire him as he is so focused, passionate, single-minded and tireless in his passion for creation. You might say he is a prophet. Behind his programmes there lie same patient and equally tireless people. People who wait for weeks, even months, to get 30 seconds of footage. What sort of patience and singlemindedness must you need to watch day-after-day for that perfect shot? What single-mindedness must you need to be David Attenborough? Watching not just the world but noticing first-hand the warning signs that things are not right.

Habakkuk was single-minded like this. He watched, as we see at the start of Habakkuk 2. He sought God’s answer to his prayers. He was a true prophet. False prophets ignore the signs and celebrate a happy status quo in the face of the impending judgement. Prophets read the time properly, false prophets are in a different time zone. As the singer Sting recognised of Jeremiah’s time:

It was midnight, midnight at noon
Everyone talked in rhyme
Everyone saw the big clock tickin’,
Nobody knew, nobody knew the time.

Habakkuk, like Jeremiah, in late 7th century Jerusalem, was watching, seeking, and hearing. As true prophets they saw the big clock was ticking. At the start of Chapter 2 we read:

I will stand at my watch
    and station myself on the ramparts;
I will look to see what he will say to me,
    and what answer I am to give to this complaint.
Habakkuk 2:1, NIV

Habakkuk’s watching is poignant because the very ramparts of Jerusalem where he stands as prophet will be destroyed by the Babylonians.

Yahweh’s Five Alarm Bells
Habakkuk is given five woes by Yahweh. Every prophet hopes to have some blessings to bestow, but here Habakkuk only gets woes that ring in his ear like the shrillest of alarm bells. Some 600 years later, Jesus would also have the job of imparting similar woes in Matthew 23. The five timely woes that Habakkuk hears belong together. There is a disturbing repeating refrain that unites them:

For you have shed human blood;
    you have destroyed lands and cities and everyone in them.
Habakkuk 2:8b and 2:17b, NIV

The judgement in these alarm bells is aimed fair and square at the Babylonians, the very nation that Yahweh has raised up to judge his people and Jerusalem. Yet they also act as a warning for anyone who promotes such injustice.

Woe 1 is for those who are made wealthy by extortion and violence. Alarm bell 2 is about feathering your nest at others expense. Taking things, even from the poorest, so as to become wealthy to the point of heedless excess. Woe 3 is for those who show indifference for right and wrong. The ability to serve one’s own needs without recourse to a higher authority of justice or fear of the living God. Woe 4 seems to be concerned with leading the nations astray, seducing them to their detriment. This is Babylon at its most insidious—breaking nations as a voyeur not caring for their being stripped bare of their assets of wealth, culture and even people. The fifth and final alarm bell is that most insidious problem of nations and people: idolatry. The stupidity of swapping fear of the living God for a deaf stick or a blind stone.

Babylon-the-arrogant will sweep in and so will judge injustice. But she like Judah, will know judgement.

The Metronome of Faith
Whilst woes dominate this passage in terms of length, for us on the brighter side of Easter, verse 4 dominates in terms of theological weight:

“See, the enemy is puffed up;
    his desires are not upright—
but the righteous person will live by his faithfulness.
Habakkuk 2:4, NIV

The desires of Babylon make it God’s instrument of judgement for seven decades, but those same desires make it a passing ‘failed state’ like countless other regimes whose fate is as certain as their injustice. It is the second half of this verse that lies at the heart of Paul’s account of the Good News of Jesus as he quotes Habakkuk:

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
Romans 1:17, NIV

It was this same part-verse that lay at the heart of Martin Luther’s bombshell in the Reformation. His 95 theses had words written through them like those in a stick of rock. Those words were The righteous will live by faith.

For Luther, as for Paul, it is not the Church, not any commandment, no practice, no works, and certainly no money that can buy new life. This is purchased solely by Christ on the cross. Only faith in the Son of God’s person and actions is necessary for salvation.

In a time of darkness Martin Luther recovered the metronome of faith that was there all along. God’s mercy is made effective via our faith. An Old Covenant truth made firm through Jesus Christ as Paul explains in Romans. The metronome of God’s heart beating as God’s grace is worked out through his people who live by faith.

Telling the Time Today
We are all prophets. We might not share Habakkuk’s, Jeremiah’s, or Martin Luther’s fame. But we are called like them to tell the time. We are to wait and watch for the living God:

I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits,
    and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord
    more than watchmen wait for the morning,
    more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Psalm 130:5–6, NIV

Waiting means discipline in this age of distraction. Waiting requires patience. It requires the singlemindedness of faith. It is prayer rightly understood as persistence.

The Lord is in his holy temple;
    let all the earth be silent before him.
Habakkuk 2:20, NIV

This verse invites the action of faithfulness. Faith is imbibing God’s word. Faithfulness is living it. Faithfulness is bringing God’s word to people desperately in need of life and love. It is bringing Good News. Not the shallow good news ‘There, there, all will be fine’ but the richer news that amidst darkness we await the dawn of a day ‘when all will be well’. Not the sickly sweet, good news that people want to hear, but the savoury wholesome good news that sin and injustice will be judged and dealt with once and for all in Christ.

The Lord is in his holy temple;
    let all the earth be silent before him.

 

Advent: Love

In our modern world there are those that would challenge the very notion of love. Sadly, we see regular evidence of the failure of love. We know of, and perhaps experience first-hand, damaged relationships, broken vows and ended marriages. In the news we see celebrities, and the famous, failing to model true love in this age. Too many people can testify to the darker side of love. For some love is just a synonym for lust or sexual coercion and abuse.

In the 1980s the pop duo Eurythmics captured the darker side of so-called love in a song which claims to define love. In the words of Love is a Stranger (1982):

It’s savage and it’s cruel
And it shines like destruction
Comes in like the flood
And it seems like religion
It’s noble and it’s brutal
It distorts and deranges
And it wrenches you up
And you’re left like a zombie

Such a view of love might match some experiences of modern relationships, but it’s also a parody of the Bible’s most famous passage about love:

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
1 Corinthians 13: 4–7, NIV

Both Eurythmics and the Apostle Paul describe love. I know which definition I prefer. For Christians, Saint Paul has the final word because his understanding of love is its truest form – for it is a view of love defined in the very nature of who the God of the Bible is. As the New Testament claims elsewhere: God is love (1 John 4:16).

It is perhaps in worldly love that we see most clearly the damage of humankind’s selfishness. As broken human beings when we aim at patient-and-kind love it is only a matter of time before we fall into savage-and-cruel love. Which of us has not said something to our dearest in the heat of the moment? Sometimes such words cannot be forgiven and even if they can, they are seldom forgotten.

Of the estimated 107 billion people who have walked this Earth, it is only Jesus Christ who continually eclipsed selfishness with selflessness. Though we might want to fix our eyes on the baby Jesus as we think on the noble theme of love. To fix our hearts requires a broken Jesus on a cross.

As Jesus knew all too well:

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
John 15:13, NIV

Advent: Joy

Why are children so much better at showing joy than adults? We are accustomed to seeing regions of the world marred by war and poverty on our TV screens. Sometimes we see behind the reporter, conveying a story of woe and suffering, children playing with expressions of laughter and joy. I am not pretending that children do not suffer daily in such contexts but rather drawing attention to a child’s ability to make the best of a situation and find joy where we jaded adults would not bother to look.

Children unwittingly know the truth of R. S. Thomas’ poem The Gift:

Some ask the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me

only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.

So why is it we adults find joy so elusive? Do we all ask the world? So much of being an adult brings barriers that prevent us enjoying the simple things of life. Joy requires a sense of abandonment to something – this might be playing a game, enjoying being with friends, holding a tame animal, or making time to notice the beauty of creation.

As adults, worry, responsibility, selfishness, and dissatisfaction can be the things that form an impermeable barrier to joy. Perhaps the ultimate death knell of joy is that all too adult concept of cynicism. As adults our experiences in this life can enable us to become either wiser or just plain cynical.

A few days ago, we saw the first people being vaccinated against Covid-19. The UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, was seen to shed a tear of joy on national TV. Some of the press and a well-known satirical TV show have questioned the genuine nature of these tears. We might do well to avoid such cynicism. Perhaps we might heed the biblical proverb:

The heart knows its own bitterness,
and no stranger shares its joy.
Proverbs 14:10, NRSV

This is one to chew over. It seems to allude to the difficulty in sharing another’s joy. And it is a warning that too often there’s a binary choice between a path characterised by bitterness or one on which joy is found. In this way it seems that joy is part of the choices that we make. Such choices are all to seldom made consciously. The Bible does more than just offer wisdom on choosing the path of joy, it promises that joy can come from a relationship with God. Paul puts it like this:

. . . the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control . . .
Galatians 4:4–5, NRSV

As we approach Christmas we remember the one born in the stable who makes such a relationship possible, the one who is truly Joy to the World.

Advent: Peace

In our culture, peace means, above all, a cessation of war and conflict. This prevails over the wider idea of peace that the Bible presents, captured in the Hebrew and Greek words, shalom and eirene. They include wellbeing, friendship, harmony, and vitality.

In terms of the more general meaning of peace, we all share a desire that war would cease. There are by some counts ten wars currently taking place around the world. If we factor in civil unrest and local armed conflict this number is much much larger. The results of war are not just the obvious fatalities and injuries of combatant and civilians. One result of large conflicts are refugees in their millions, and all the pain and suffering that comes with the displacement of entire populations.

The age to come which Jesus will bring with him is a time of peace. The Bible pictures this in its dramatic conclusion—The Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse of John. But what of peace here and now? Well we can pray for peace. We can give support to humanitarian relief organisations. The sceptic might ask what difference does this make? The person of faith wonders just how much worse things would be without our prayers and actions.

Isaiah prophecies of the infant Jesus:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. [Isaiah 9:6].

The end of war, civilian deaths, refugee camps, and atrocities, is only part of the reason that Jesus Christ is known as Prince of Peace.

Advent is a season of waiting for the Prince of Peace who has already enabled countless millions to find shalom over two millennia. Jesus firstly brings peace between God and humanity. He invites us to see that we all share a frustrating habit of building a wall between us and God; sometimes choosing open hostility to our creator. Jesus brings down this wall, not just in the age to come but here and now.

The wall of hostility between nations is also addressed now by Jesus. Jesus showed the way during his short life on Earth, by building a bridge between Jews and Samaritans in their centuries-old sectarian dispute. Whilst few of us can make a contribution to world peace that will be remembered two thousand years later, we can all contribute to the demolition of the walls that divide us, one from another. And if you can’t demolish a wall today can you at least reach or look across one, as a small step here, and now, to a world free of hostility? Such baby steps are a foretaste of the work of the Prince of Peace born two thousand years ago in Bethlehem.

Advent: Hope

At this time, even more than is normally the case, hope is in the air. Even the UK government is aspiring to offer us hope. The hope of a vaccine for Covid-19, and the hope of a Christmas in which family, friends, and hugs will be especially cherished. Perhaps this year a love of stuff and stuffing will be eclipsed by a love to be with others, and a love for others. Such a hope for the festive season, although encouraging, is not biblical hope. Although, of course, the love for family and friend accords with the love and relationships which are central to Christian hope.

So, what is this greater hope? The Apostle Paul said:

Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction. [Romans 12:12]

The hope that Paul says we must await in joy requires patience because it lies way beyond Christmas. This hope is characterised by love, but it lies beyond the earth. It is a hope in a new heaven and a new earth—a new reality—a place where love abounds, and friendship encompasses God, as well as family and friends. Perhaps we see the value of such things clearer after the events of 2020. Perhaps this is the gift of 2020 vision.

Such a hope is sometimes described as a sure and certain hope because of its foundation. It is founded on Christmas in as far as Christmas concerns God’s Son made flesh to dwell among us. It is founded on Easter too, in that the same Jesus was found to be God’s Son when he rose to life. The sure and certain hope of resurrection is our future hope.

In this way, our hope, is a future beyond our current earthly reality. Yet it is founded in the past events recounted in the Bible. But what of the present? The future hope, founded in the past, changes everything here and now. Christian hope provides new glasses, a God-given prescription to see the world anew.

No more tears. No more death. No more worries. No more frailty. No loneliness. Such a future hope puts the, all to obvious, fragility of our present into perspective. We can live life to the full now sustained by such a glorious future hope. This is the sort of 2020 vision we always need but we perhaps see it afresh this year.