Living Wittily

TFTD Dec 9-15: Advent Hymn Verses: Some we Sing, Some We Don't.

Monday

Christ whose glory fills the skies,

     Christ the true, the only light,

Sun of righteousness arise,

     Triumph o’er the shades of night:

Day-spring from on high be near;

Day-star in my heart appear.

All around us are signs of God active and moving by his Spirit. The first fingers of dawn announce every single day the light that God commands, and the light that is God’s gift in Christ. Charles Wesley plays the theme of light like a virtuoso. He knows his Bible inside out! “The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in his wings.” (Malachi 4.2) Think about it. Advent is when we celebrate the healing of darkness, all kinds of darkness, by the coming of the Light that is Christ. That last line, is an Advent prayer that Christ will be light within us, glowing outward in faith, hope, and love.

Tuesday

 Our God, heaven cannot hold him,

     Nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away

     When he comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter

    A stable place sufficed

The Lord God almighty –

     Jesus Christ.

 

‘In the bleak midwinter’ remains for many of us the most evocative and poignant of carols. Tune and words combine to express the longing and wonder of human hearts. Why can’t heaven hold Almighty God, the Holy One? The answer is love. The stable is as humble as it gets. That’s where God in Christ goes, into the bleak midwinter of human sin, suffering and lost-ness. The coming of God’s Christ child, into the world’s bleakness for love’s sake. That is Advent. Not even heaven’s glory can hold Him back!

Wednesday

King is He, yet born a servant, Lord of all in humble guise,

Truly man, yet God revealing, God as love to mortal eyes;

God with man, He leads and feeds us, He the power and He the prize.

This is verse 2 of “Let all mortal flesh keep silence”, an ancient hymn about the world struck dumb with awe and wonder. The paradoxes tell us why; the servant king, the humble Lord, and this One who is truly human yet fully revealing God. In all the unavoidable trivialities of Christmas, this hymn insists we shut up! Just for once, silence the noise of our greed and need, and pay attention with fear and trembling to who God is. God is for us! God is with us! At cost beyond imagining or calculating, God comes amongst us in love, in the noisy presence of a human child. Advent is an invitation to awe! And awe is the signal to worship – He the power, and He the prize! 

Thursday

Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!

Hail the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all he brings,

Risen with healing in his wings.

Mild, He lays his glory by;

Born that man no more may die;

Born to raise the sons of earth;

Born to give them second birth.

Hark! The herald angels sing

Glory to the new-born King.

This is a mosaic of biblical phrases from Isaiah, Malachi, the Gospel of John, Romans, Philippians, and of course, Luke’s choir of angels. The great Messianic titles come at the climax of the carol, drawing our eyes to behold his glory, full of grace and truth. The eternal glory of the Son is laid aside in obedience to God.  And notice, that word ‘risen’. It’s one of those trigger words for Christians. It refers to the rising of the sun of hope and the in-breaking light and life of God. But ‘risen’ also anticipates the resurrection when “Light and life to all He brings.” But first, Bethlehem. Advent is about a child being born; Wesley tells you why. Three times. Born! Glory indeed!

Friday

Lo, within a manger lies

He who built the starry skies,

He who throned in height sublime,

Sits amid the cherubim.

Hail thou ever-blessed morn!

Hail redemption’s happy dawn!

Sing through all Jerusalem

Christ is born in Bethlehem!

However simple we like to think the Christmas story, the Christmas gift comes wrapped in theological mystery and complexity. The One who constructs and commands the teeming galaxies is somehow “born for us on earth below”. One poet described this as “Infinity dwindled to infancy.” The loving condescension of God is revealed in the coming of the Christ-child, and it is that gracious self-giving act of God that turns up the volume of a four line refrain requiring three exclamation marks!!!

Saturday

Still the night, holy the night!

Son of God, O how bright!

Love is smiling from thy face!

Strikes for us now the hour of grace

Saviour since Thou art born.

 That middle line could have been written by John the Apostle. “For God so loved the world…” “God is love.” “Here is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son…” The coming of God amongst us in the incarnation is a mystery made accessible, and a miracle made believable, only because God in grace opens our minds to truth that is beyond us, and prepares our hearts to recognise and welcome God’s presence in Jesus. Advent is a season for adventurous imagination. Listen, and you will hear distinctly and clearly, filtered through the din of a noisy and clamorous world, the striking of the hour of grace, by the Son of God. Then look, with eyes that see in the bright light of divine revelation, God’s love smiling from the face of Christ.

Sunday

God of God,

Light of Light,
Lo, He abhors not the Virgin's womb’
Very God,
Begotten, not created.
       O come, let us adore Him

       Christ the Lord.

Advent is our annual call to hope, when we emphasise expectation and give words to the deep longings of our hearts for peace, and a more positive future. This whole hymn is an invitation to “Come, let us adore Him. Christ the Lord.” Adoration is the true spirit of worship, combining love, gratitude, wonder, awe, and a deep humbling of the heart. This verse explains why, with its insistent “O come…” Huge arguments about how Christ can be divine and human lie behind these words. But it is in words such as these that he Church proclaims its faith. Through prayer and wonder, and inadequate words, adoration is the heart’s welcome to Christ the Lord.

Advent and Book Endings 5: When in Romans. An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel According to Paul. Beverly Roberts Gaventa.

"A related and final question is, where is the ethical imperative in this universal horizon? Where is the incentive to behave? What good is the Gospel if people don't behave better?...In the gospel, God does not simply instruct and exhort. God releases humanity from its inability and, indeed, recreates humanity (2 Cor. 5.17; Gal. 6.15). This new creation is able to hear an admonition as people who have received an empowering gift (Rom. 12.1-2).Paul is fully aware that even this new creation is only the very beginning of what God will accomplish (Rom. 8.18-25). The numerous problems he addresses in his letters reveal that Christians are very much capable of sinning, but the admonitions carry with them the promise that God will not leave humanity to itself (as in Rom.15.6,13; 8.31-39)

These comments will likely provoke sharp dissent. Again I want to insist that I raise this question of the universal horizon of Romans not because I have an answer for it in just a few paragraphs. It is not at all clear that Paul was consciously addressing that question in Romans or elsewhere. Nor would I claim, even if I were certain I understood Paul's answer, that his answer is shared by other biblical witnesses. My reason for pressing this question is once again to put before us the vastness of the gospel. What we need to hear is that the gospel encompasses the cosmos, the whole of creation -- all the way out and all the way down in each of us.

I hope this volume will prove useful to those who have had similar experiences. [Of finding the letter hard to follow, at times impenetrable]. I hope a real letter will come into view now, one over which we will linger. Beyond that, I hope that we catch a glimpse of God's vast love and longing and determination for all of us. I hope that, with Springsteen, we imagine a train capacious enough to hold us all."

(When in Romans. An invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul. Beverley Roberts Gaventa. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016) Pages 127-8. 

This short book was a precursor to Professor Gaventa's major commentary on Romans, published earlier this year. That commentary had been eagerly awaited by fellow scholars, students and pastors as a highly significant treatment of Romans. Gaventa was seeking to provide a reading of Paul that takes seriously the apocalyptic element in Paul's gospel, a revelation of God and God's purpose in the person and mission of Jesus Christ that called all else into question, and reset the relation of God to creation and to humanity.

It is immediately evident in reading the commentary that Gaventa has wrestled long and hard with this text and its context. Out of such study comes a message of immense contemporary import for the Church which, especially in the West, is facing major crises of confidence in its gospel, its ways of expressing faith, and its capacity to bear witness to the transformational message revealed in and through Jesus Christ.

The final words of When in Romans, noted above, conclude her shorter 'invitation' to read Romans as a real letter, from one struggling Christian (Paul) to Christian communities (in Rome) facing their own struggles and issues. Romans is much more than, and indeed very different from, a hard to follow theological treatise with a hefty moral and ethical appendix. Gaventa argues that Romans is much bigger, its ideas far more expansive, and the gospel it seeks to explore much further reaching than any mere treatise on the theological mechanics of salvation or the norms and rules of ethics.

Why I chose this book ending for Advent is because it demonstrates Professor Gaventa's sense of the scale, and reach and scope of the gospel as the eternal purpose of God revealed by the historic inbreaking of divine love determined to redeem, renew and restore. The gospel is inherently transformative of God's creation: "What we need to hear is that the gospel encompasses the cosmos, the whole of creation -- all the way out and all the way down in each of us."

Not only so, but her aim in exploring and explaining Romans as she does, is so that readers of Romans, that historic hinge-point in Paul's correspondence, will "catch a glimpse of God's vast love and longing and determination for all of us." Gaventa's Romans commentary is a full-on exposition of God's initiative of love in Christ, confronting the powers that have threatened and broken the relations of Creator, creation and human creatures, and overcoming them by reconciling power and self-expending love. Christ is the revelation of a love from which nothing can separate, nothing in all of creation. The pivotal verses of Romans 8.38-39 are more than the climax of an argument; they are the stated realities of God's ultimate purpose in Christ, revealed as "the power of God unto salvation."

To borrow from another of Paul's letters, Romans is a spelling out of the full consequences of saying, "In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself", and "If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, the old has gone and the new has come." (2 Cor 5.17-19) Advent is the anticipation of all this, a reminder that in the very human birth of the Son of God, a new creation was underway, a healing of creation's brokenness, a reconciliation to God of all that frustrates, opposes, resists and seeks to spoil God's purposes of light, and life and that fullness of fellowship between God's creation and the eternal exchange of love that is Father, Son and Spirit, one God, world without end.

It may well be that Charles Wesley's much edited hymn which we now know as "Hark the Herald angels sing", is the best Advent tilted commentary on Paul's very personal and passionate letter to the small Christian communities in Rome, describing to them the apocalyptic inbreaking of God for the rescue of creation:

"Peace on earth, and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled."

"Late in time, behold him come, offspring of a virgin's womb."

"Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate deity."

"Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die."

 

 

Advent and Book Endings 4: The Epistle to the Hebrews, F. F. Bruce.

“Christians are Christians by virtue of certain acts of God which took place at a definite time in the past, but these acts of God have released a dynamic force which will never allow Christians to stick fast at any point short of that divine rest which in this life is always a goal to be aimed at and never a stage which has been reached. The faith once for all delivered to the saints is not something which can be caught and tamed; it continually leads the saints forth to new ventures in the cause of Christ, as God calls afresh…

To stay at the point at which some revered teacher of the past has brought us, out of a mistaken sense of loyalty to him; to continue to follow a certain pattern of religious activity or attitude just because it was good enough for our fathers and grandfathers – these and the like are temptations which make the message of Hebrews a necessary and salutary one for us to listen to. Every fresh movement of the Spirit of God tends to become stereotyped in the next generation, and what we have heard with our ears, what our fathers have told us, becomes a tenacious tradition encroaching on the allegiance which ought to be accorded only to the living and active Word of God.

As Christians survey the world today, they see very much land waiting to be possessed in the name of Christ; but to take possession of it calls for a generous measure of that forward-looking faith which is so earnestly urged upon the readers of this epistle. Those first readers were living at a time when the old, cherished order was breaking up. Attachment to venerable traditions could avail them nothing in this situation; only attachment to the unchanged and onward moving Christ could carry them forward and enable them to face a new order with confidence and power.

So in a day when everything can be shaken and is being shaken before our eyes and even beneath our feet, let us in our turn give thanks for the unshakeable kingdom which we have inherited, which endures forever when everything else to which men and women may pin their hopes disappears and leaves not a wrack behind.”

(F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), Rev. Ed.) p.392.) 

First published in 1963, I bought F. F. Bruce's commentary on Hebrews in 1976 with money I received for the Duncan B. Herriot Prize in Church History. I didn't know it then, but in 1984 I became minister in Crown Terrace Baptist, the home church Dr Herriot. I have used Bruce's Hebrews ever since, and while scholarship on Hebrews has moved on in the 60 years since Bruce wrote it, this commentary remains a personal favourite. All of Bruce's exegetical common-sense is on display, built on deep learning in historical knowledge and skills in textual and classical criticism, showing Bruce's characteristic sympathy with the theology and spiritual experience of the New Testament writers.

The particular copy I now have was one of several volumes given to me in 1996. It came from the library of Dr Eleanor Walker, a gift from Eleanor's father, the late Dr David Walker, one of the leading educationalists of his generation. So I received it as a precious gift in memory of one of the finest medical missionary doctors I've ever had the privilege of knowing. I was Eleanor's pastor, and her friend. For most of her professional life Eleanor was an anaesthetist who also specialised in psychiatry at Nazareth Hospital, in Israel, working in an inter-faith environment, often enough while under threat from the hostility and at times violence that erupted in the region.

In 1992 Eleanor had come home after over 25 years of service to do theological study at New College, Edinburgh, to prepare her for ordained in ministry. In 1996 she graduated B.D. Honours with Merit, and was awarded best student of the year, and licensed to preach. Throughout her course Eleanor had been fighting a losing battle with cancer, and she was unable to move into that next stage and completion of her remarkable life.

She had asked me to speak of her at her funeral because she knew I would be honest and not make her out to be a saint! Which she wasn't, except she was! Not knowing then that I would receive her own copy of F. F. Bruce on Hebrews, I finished with words from Hebrews 12, about running with patience, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, and looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of her faith.

The last page of Bruce's commentary, quoted above, is such a clear and succinct summary of why the message of Hebrews remains of first relevance for 21st Century Christians. Bruce's own background in the Christian Brethren provided a further layer of attachment and insight into the warnings and encouragements of this text, it being a favourite source of Gospel exposition and exhortation within that spiritual tributary of the evangelical tradition.

As a piece of writing for Advent, Bruce's conclusion turns us forcefully to the future urging upon us "a generous measure of forward looking faith...our only attachment to the unchanged and onward moving Christ..." Faith looking forward, looking to Jesus as the pioneer, refusing to play safe by staying where we are, persevering as people of faith in an age where such commitments are dismissed - Hebrews is a call to perseverance in running the race, and trust in the One who pulls us forward into a future to us unknown, but where He is ahead of us.

The tradition from which F. F. Bruce came was steeped in that form of biblical study that sees types of Christ in the Old Testament texts, and for that reason loved the contrasts of old and new, then and now, and Christ as the fulfilment of all God's covenant promises. The first verses of Hebrews, in the language of King James are distilled essence of that spirituality:

"God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high..."

          

Advent and Book Endings 3: Ravished by Beauty. The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality.

"The Holy Spirit, like the flight of the wild goose in Celtic lore, longs to sweep over the waters yet again. It cries high above the place where the wild geese once soared...summoning the earth to a beauty forgotten, but not lost. In the haunting sound of that cry, says Mary Oliver, we fret at the mess that we've made of things. We embrace a harsh repentance, a new awareness, and a readiness to act. Meanwhile the world continues in its wild and glorious determination to sing, with or without us.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again. 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

The world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild gees, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Accepting our place in the family of things means doing everything necessary to assure our mutual delight and well-being. It comes ultimately as a gift, a shared longing, a consciousness that we all are one. We recognise it, at last, in the desire of the geese for exuberant song, the desire of the creek to flow unrestrainedly to the sea, and the desire of human beings to join in God's own deep longing for beauty. May it be so."

(Ravished by Beauty. The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. Belden C. Lane. (Oxford, 2011) page 246) 

 This is one of those books that opens long shut doors in the mind. It is about Calvin, Puritans and Jonathan Edwards. It majors on desire, longing, beauty, and love of diversity in God and in human hearts. Lane is passionate about ecology and theology, love for the natural world and love for God, and especially insisting that these two ways of looking at the world absolutely must be held together in a robust conception of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all that is. 

Belden Lane's first book was similarly unusual, with the tile The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. It's a study of the desert and wilderness as places of encounter with God. I had an email exchange with Belden Lane 10 years ago about his books, and the importance of upholding a strong doctrine of creation as the anchor point of a balanced Christian spirituality that is at once BOTH passionately in love with God AND lovingly protective of all that God has made.

I've included Lane's conclusion to Ravished by Beauty in this Advent series because he offers a theologically informed argument for care of creation, and a passionate plea for a world in ecological crisis. His main resources for his argument on behalf of human curatorship of the natural world are Calvin and Jonathan Edwards - here is one of Calvin's celebratory remarks about the world as theatre and masterpiece of God:

Correctly then is this world called the mirror of divinity; not that there is sufficient clearness for man to gain a full knowledge of God, by looking at the world, but...the faithful to whom he has given eyes, see sparks of his glory, as it were, glittering in every created thing. The world was no doubt made, that it might be a theatre of divine glory. (Commentary on Hebrews 11.3, quoted in Lane, p. 71-2)

Advent is a season of hope and expectation in a world where hope seems at times overwhelmed by the volume and noise of bad news. Wars rooted in ancient enmities and a sense of grievance requiring lethal violence against others; a global climate in imminent danger of collapse with catastrophic consequences for all the world's inhabitants, including humans; and these two clear and present dangers fuelled by economic rapacity, myths of endless growth, and the consequent destruction of natural resources and world sustaining environments.

The problems are beyond our mere human ingenuity even if we were capable of collaborative and mutual unselfishness in fixing the brokenness we cause. Advent is not, however, a spiritual, intellectual or theological escape mechanism. It is a time when we look to the light that shines in the darkest corners of God's creation. God's investment in our world is full and final in the coming of Christ, the Light of the world - "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." That is Advent, hope, expectation, but with eyes wide open in the darkness.

Belden Lane's book, Ravished Beauty, is a healthy and important reminder that this earth belongs to God. Its beauty in diversity, its life-giving properties, its purpose as home of God's creatures, these are all in the sovereign gift of God. When Lane finishes his book with the image of the Holy Spirit brooding over the world, surprisingly that image can also pull us towards Bethlehem, where by the gift of that same brooding and creative Holy Spirit, "unto us a child is born." 

I don't suppose, left to the meditations and machinations of my own mind I would easily make the connection between Advent and climate change. But once hinted, it's hard to ignore, and surprising that I hadn't thought it before. As a final comment on this fine book, one of his brilliant excursuses is titled 'Biodiversity and the Holy Trinity.' 

In this essay Lane combines a sobering account of the breakdown of the biosphere, so much of it our own doing, and a plea that we model our behaviour on the Holy Trinity. No, he isn't saying the economic Trinity is the model of human social and political relations. He is arguing that the biodiversity of God's creation carries the fingerprints of the artist, or put another way, "if we are to survive as a family of species in this biosphere, we will have to imitate the exchange of love and reciprocity that characterizes God's own inner being." 

 

Advent and Book Endings 2. Jesus Remembered. Jesus' Female Disciples

 "The story of the suppression of women in the Church is a sorry tale that still has repercussions today. Women have been silenced, marginalised, refused entry to theological discussion and blamed for it. As we have seen throughout this book, however, there is a wealth of evidence that tells us that in the earliest period of Christianity women were highly active as disciples and teachers, prophets, missionaries and midwives of the faith. Texts could later be edited or forgotten and memorials obliterated, but the fact is that the story of Jesus began with a woman who gave birth to him and ended with a woman who witnessed him alive after his death. Jesus was not one to follow social convention, and openly challenged social norms and regional authorities. Women disciples of Jesus were a vital part of his movement, and women spearheaded the growth of the mission in the decades that followed. 

Yet women were a liability as the faith spread around the world, at a time when any groups led by women would be ridiculed by (male) opponents. Stories about women in the Gospels and the letters of Paul could make certain men feel uncomfortable and leave the movement open to attack. Three centuries after Jesus, Christianity would be remade to sit comfortably with Roman imperial rule, as the religion of the rich and mighty, at home in the military. Perhaps the first step to unmasking some of the changes is by the power of memory. For this we need not only evidence, but also a firm grasp  of the ancient context, and a good dose if informed imagination. 

We hope we have set the women disciples of Jesus in their rightful place, close to Jesus in his mission in Galilee, and active in establishing, serving and leading Christian communities as the faith spread around the Mediterranean and the wider ancient world.

The question is: once these women are truly remembered, where will we go from here?"

Women Remembered. Jesus' Female Disciples, Joan Taylor & Helen Bond. (London: H&S, 2022) pages 183-4.

This is one of several recent books ¹ which examine closely the ancient social and cultural context within which Christianity emerged. The writers are both Professors of Christian Origins, and amongst the leading scholars of the New Testament world and the first centuries of the Christian Church. They closely examine the NT texts in which women are featured in the ministry of Jesus and the life of the early church. The result is a fascinating peeling back of the layers of interpretive presuppositions, miss-steps in historical detail and analysis, and offer plausible accounts of the real and decisive role of women in the origins, growth and development of the Christian movement and its mission.

In the context of Advent, this book is more than a mere reminder that women played some part in the Gospel story!  Luke tells of the annunciation, composes the Magnificat as a theological hymn of God's great reversals of power and privilege, and gives the fullest description of the birth at Bethlehem that moved heaven and earth. And yes, the chapter on Mary the mother of Jesus is a robust examination of the texts, their reception and possible interpretations.

But the point of this book, and why it matters as an Advent perspective, is to rehabilitate in our informed imaginations the active, responsive, initiating and game-changing roles played by women in the story of Jesus and beyond into the Christian mission. Matthew comments, "Mary kept and pondered these things in her heart." Perhaps, thirty years before Paul and all those other male witnesses, Mary is our first Christian theologian, working out the significance of the child she carried and bore, for the future of her people, and a new hope for the world. 

^{1. The other I would recommend is by Nijay Gupta, Tell Her Story. How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church (IVP Academic, 2023).}

Squadrons and Troops of Angels at Christmas.

This afternoon I shared in a Zoom meeting of the Aberdeen Theological Circle. We were sharing our favourite Christmas Carol or poem. It was a thoroughly enjoyable mix of theology, spirituality, liturgy, testimony, music (several unaccompanied solos, one in German another in plain chant) showing such a variety of what matters to each of us as essential to our experience of Christmas.

One of the highlights was the discussion about the controversial practice of updating, dumbing down, pc editing and other liberties taken with other people's literary legacies!

 

The case in point was "Behold the great Creator makes Himself a house of clay." One of the verses changed to suit modern tastes is verse 3. Below is the original followed by the modern improvement.

 

This wonder struck the world amazed,

It shook the starry frame;

Squadrons of spirits stood and gazed,

Then down in troops they came.

 

This wonder all the world amazed,

it shook the starry frame;

the hosts of heaven stood to gaze,

and bless the Saviour's name.

 

Now of course there is uneasiness about the military imagery of squadrons and troops. But the author, Thomas Pestel (1585-1659) was a minor 17th Century poet, and one of the chaplains to King Charles I. No love was lost between him and the Puritan upstarts, and indeed in 1646 he was sequestrated from his living by the Westminster Assembly! In those conflicted decades, military terminology had its own familiar and rhetorical force. But need we use the same militarised imagery now? Hmmm.

 

Pestel's last verse expresses a weariness of conflict that is almost Isaianic in its hopeful longing:

Join then, all hearts that are not stone,

And all our voices prove,

To celebrate this Holy One,

The God of peace and love.

TFTD Dec 2-8: Isaiah the Advent Prophet.

Monday

Isaiah 9.2 “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.”

There are different kinds of darkness within which we sometimes have to walk. Many of them can feel like living in a land overshadowed by despair, anxiety, grief or loneliness. These bring an accompanying loss of motivation and appetite for life. Often life in our world these days is like walking in darkness, living under deep shadows of foreboding and uncertainty. Advent interrupts our pessimism. Isaiah declares the coming of the light of God’s coming! Against a horizon of despair, hope dawns, as God says “Let there be light!” God is on the move and hope is rising.

Tuesday

Isaiah 9.6a “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.”

I can’t read these words without hearing them set to Handel’s music with its outspokenly joyous chorus! It’s an irresistible Advent earworm! These words were first spoken to broken hearted people who could see no good future. Government was Empire, and Empire was about force, control and loss of freedom. The sign of the new born child was God’s promise of a different future. This Advent, when you celebrate the birth of the Christ child, and open yourself again to the gift of God’s Son, do so looking forward to the coming of God’s Kingdom, in God’s good time.

Wednesday

Isaiah 9.6b “And he will be called, Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

The Advent story is full of name giving. Matthew who quotes the prophets dozens of times, writes at the very start “You will call his name Jesus” and “they will call him Emmanuel.” Together with Isaiah’s fourfold descriptor of the Son who is given, all these names expand the horizons of our hopes and the range of our imagination. Jesus is the personification of wise planning, purposeful power, protective care, and lasting peace. The rule of Jesus is not aimed at self-promotion, but saving his people, being the presence of God amongst our humanity. Why not use this verse as a one line praise-prayer throughout Advent.

Thursday

Isaiah 9.6b “And he will be called, Wonderful Counsellor…,

“Great God of wonders, all thy ways / are matchless godlike, and divine.” God’s plans are wonderful in their detail, scale and in God’s power to make them happen. Isaiah more than once says God’s words will accomplish the purpose for which they are sent. Even more so God’s saving purpose in sending his Son, the Word made flesh. This is the wonder of wonders, God’s strategic plan for salvation, redemption and renewal of his covenant through Jesus, who is Immanuel, God with us.

Friday 

Isaiah 9.6b “And he will be called, Mighty God…,

Isaiah 9 was written in the dark days of the crushing power of Assyria. What Israel needed was a new king who would deliver them. Isaiah’s words of comfort are like an arrow into the future when hundreds of years later, in Bethlehem, a child is born and a son is given. Against the might of Herod, Pilate, Caesar, and all other kingdoms, God came, not in annihilating power, but in the purposive persistence and mercy of the mighty God, who saves and forgives human sins, who redeems and renews a people for himself. His rule and reign are assured because the government will be upon the shoulders of God and of his Christ, whose name is Jesus, Immanuel.

Saturday

Isaiah 9.6b “And his name will be called Everlasting Father…”       

In the Old Testament the father is the one who holds full authority and is to be respected by the whole household. The father is also the one who guards, supports and provides for all who are under his care. It isn’t hard to see why Isaiah chooses that image to speak of God’s protective care for his people. In the coming of Jesus the world will see, once and for all, the Fatherhood of God, the full authority of the Redeemer over the powers that be, and the protective care of all who come in trust and obedience to live under the kingship of Christ. Advent is for always, and Immanuel is God with us, here and now, and “even to the end of the age.” Those are the very last words of Matthew’s gospel!

Sunday

Isaiah 9.6b “His name shall be called Prince of Peace…”

With Assyria’s military machine in full swing against them, Israel had no chance. Isaiah spoke to their panic, and contradicted those resigned voices of despair. Never discount the Advent of God! The coming of Immanuel for Christians is the reality of God come amongst us in Jesus. The final revelation of God is the Word become flesh, the living embodiment of God’s grace and truth, full of glory. Not the glory of military might, whether Assyrian, Roman, or empires of any other age, including our own. This Advent we celebrate Christ incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended, the Prince of Peace, the peacemaker par excellence. “On earth peace to all the people, on whom God’s favour rests.” For that we wait, and pray, and hope, this Advent.    

(The window photo is from a good friend's window overlooking the firth of Clyde. The green wreath is the very fine colouring work of my friend Ben.) 

Advent and Book Endings 1. The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer.

"He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer, (A. C. Black. London: 1911) Page 401

This is such a poignant conclusion. At the end of one of the most thorough, painstaking, and frankly at times tedious books ever written on Jesus, these beautiful words. Hesitant, revealing remarkable intellectual humility, yet the person who wrote this was one of the greatest organists of his generation, a respected professor of philosophy and science, later a medical doctor working in remote parts of French Equatorial Africa, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and much else.

New Testament scholarship has moved on in the century and more since the publication of Schweitzer's Quest. The fourth Quest of the Historical Jesus is currently underway, examining the evidential value of the Gospel of John and its relations to the other Gospels and early Christian documents.

As a first reading in Advent, Schweitzer's words pull us back to those moments in our lives when we too heard the call of Jesus, when we were met by God in ways we still barely comprehend. Sure, Schweitzer's great book has equally great false steps here and there. But the passion of his quest, his belief that Christ moves amongst us as a compelling and commanding presence, still rings true to the experience of many who still come across his words at the end of his most famous book. 

My reading of Schweitzer, both his writings (only some of which I have read), and his life as it is told in various biographies, is of a man overloaded with gifts and the great sense of personal responsibility they brought. More than many, (and many of his critics) he exemplified obedience to the categorical imperative of the call of God with radical thoroughness. His medical work was in response to his understanding of Jesus' call to him personally, to leave all and follow Him.

Schweitzer's final sentences of his genuinely epochal book are as much personal testimony as evangelistic pointer to others. When I read them at the start of Advent 2024, I too hear again the echo of that first summons, and the invitation to follow him in the fellowship of that ineffable mystery in which we learn, in our own experience, who He is. 

Advent, Books and the Sense of an Ending.

During Advent I’m planning a series of daily posts. I’ve done this before for Advent towards Christmas, and Lent towards Easter. This series has the unpromising and admittedly odd title “Advent and Book Endings”!

The last paragraph, or the final few sentences of a book can often be the culmination of what a writer has been trying to say, argue, suggest, or explain. Whether it’s the final verses in a collection of poems, concluding thoughts of a long scholarly thesis, the resolution of a novel, the parting shots in an argument about theology, history, ethics, or whatever; conclusions matter, and the final words of what an author wants to convey to the reader are seldom superfluous.

Over the years I’ve learned to pay attention to how a writer finishes. Several such endings are famous, and if I’ve read the book I’ll include it. Otherwise this is a near random selection from the book shelves.  

Here are the guidelines I’ve set myself.

1. Each extract will have a brief explanation of why I’ve chosen it, and how the passage leads us into a deeper understanding of Advent as a season of waiting hopefully, longing for light as we wait in darkness.
2. The explanation of each ending and its relation to Advent will be around 150 words. They are not essays, they are notes aimed at offering food for thought throughout the Advent season.
3. Each is a stand-alone post, so they can be read or skipped and those interested can come and go if one every day is just too much!
4. The aim is to encourage us in heart and mind as we are pulled into the rhythm of the liturgical season.