Tag: incarnation

A REFLECTION AS ADVENT BEGINS

Some churches, on the Sunday before Advent, celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. It offers a high spot before we descend into the darkness as we prepare for the coming of the Light of the World at Christmas. The more I think about this, the more strange it seems.

Once the Kingship of Christ made sense. I loved to sing ‘Majesty, worship His majesty’. Now it seems a bit out of kilter with what we read about Jesus. Let me reflect for a moment.

We read that 2000 or so years ago bureaucracy uprooted people. Foreign troops occupied a country. Native politicians and religious leaders juggled their own privileges and prejudices with advancement and preferment. And common people became pawns to be taxed, manipulated according their economic value to the ruling class. People counted, and needed to be counted.

Times don’t change it seems.

If we take the story literally Mary and Joseph were subjects of a census.

Set aside for a moment the Magi and shepherds, the angels and the star.  ‘Long way from your home’, a baby was born. Within a short time, days? More likely a year or two, that baby was threatened as babies have been, and have been killed, in our own time, in our so called civilised world. Politics demand that difficult decisions have to be made.

Difficult decisions: so often a euphemism for oppression, diminution or judicial killing.

Majesty? A child threatened with death in the arms of his parents seeking asylum in another country. Not Majesty as we would recognise it, not a life-style choice.

If we believe that this child was God born among us, this is no majestic king, victorious, but a vulnerable baby trusted to parents fleeing persecution and death. And it challenges me to see Christ this Christmas, not in the palaces of the powerful but, more likely in the vulnerable and persecuted.

Remember that this baby grew up to be a man. Entrusted to those young vulnerable parents he was later to say ‘the son of man has nowhere to lay his head’. He understood poverty and homelessness. Then when he says, ‘whatever you did for the least of these, you do it for me’, he knew what it was like to be least in society. No wonder, in the title of an Anglican report some years ago he had a ‘Bias to the Poor’; not to ‘Lord’ it over one another.

Our God trusted human parents to care for him, and lived out an example for humanity to follow his example of trust, reliance and care in relationship to each other. ‘Love one another’.

So as we move toward Christmas let us hold onto something of the reality of the Biblical story, a story that is is awe-inspiring. This is much more than a time for children dressing up and playing games. More a wake-up call for us all, to realise that whenever we visit the prisoner, welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, provide water for the thirsty we again meet Christ, see God in those we greet…  It is a wake-up call, a reminder that we find God-head, not in the powerful or majestic, not in the robes and honours of politics or religion, not in places of domination or repression, but in vulnerability and love. Truly within us and among us.                                                      

May God in Christ bless us all.

Andrew Pratt (originally written for the Mid-Cheshire Circuit of the Methodist Church 27/11/2023)

If he had come – a poem for Advent and Christmas by Marjorie Dobson

If he had come …

 

If he had come as a king with a robe and jewels

and a crown of gold,

he would have been impressive.

But there would have been those

who envied him his wealth,

tried to steal his jewels,

or attempted to rob him of his crown.

 

If he had come with a sword and shield

and a following army,

he would have demanded obedience.

But there would have been those

who feared his sword,

claimed he was hiding behind his shield,

or accused him of using military force to conquer them.

 

If he had come as a priest with elaborate vestments,

sanctimonious speeches and zealous religious rituals,

he would have commanded respect.

But there would have been those

who found his vestments ostentatious,

suspected him of hypocrisy in his speeches,

or felt unable to live up to

the impossible regulation of his religion.

 

So, when Jesus came as a vulnerable baby,

grew up in a carpenter’s workshop

and walked around in everyday clothes,

meeting and talking to people about God,

it really was a revelation.

 

Jesus brought no threat of wealth, or force of might,

or blocking of the pathway to God.

He was a man and of the people

and though his robe was stained with blood,

his crown made of thorns

and his death an ignominious execution,

the power of his life has everlasting authority.

 

Marjorie Dobson © Stainer & Bell Ltd published in Unravelling the Mysteries

In the beginning was the Word – a Hymn

The Gospel according to John says nothing about Jesus’ birth. It talks of ‘The Word’ becoming flesh. We can translate that today as ‘the energy, the source of all creation becoming human’. In shorthand God becoming human. This hymn echoes John Chapter 1.

1	The logic, the life-blood, the source of creation, 
	the word that had spoken when all came to be;
	the ground of existence, of love and emotion, 
	this God is incarnate, the light is set free.
	
2	This light in the darkness could not be extinguished, 
	it shone through the cosmos, was coming to birth;
	the great conflagration of stars in their forming 
	condensed to humanity, born on the earth.
	
3	The person of Jesus who walked in the desert, 
	who argued and struggled, who hungered and wept, 
	was one with that God-head, yet totally human, 
	was growing and learning, could know or forget.
	
4	So here in this person our God is illumined, 
	the word that is spoken, the love that is lived, 
	are clues to the nature, a window beyond us 
	to things we have doubted, to One we believed. 

Andrew Pratt (born 1948) based on John 1 
Words © 2010 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Metre: 12 11 12 11
Tunes: ST CATHERINES COURT; STREETS OF LAREDO

Hymn for Epiphany – Like butterflies emerging in the cold

Around Christmas, in 2010, I was leading worship when a butterfly fluttered down and landed on the pulpit. It was brightly coloured and, in the cold of winter, utterly out of place…and so a hymn fitting for the 6th January, Epiphany…

1	Like butterflies emerging in the cold, 
	incongruous strangers punctuate this birth; 
	while snow and frosted windows paint the scene
	and God in human flesh has come to earth.
	
2	Exotic strangers, carried on the wind, 
	the wind of wisdom, fathomed by their thought. 
	Obscure and out of place, these coloured robes, 
	as out of place as all the gifts they brought.
	
3	And yet they have a place in every play, 
	in signalling God's universal grace, 
	that those who fit and others who are strange,
	are held by God in every time and place.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2015 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd
Metre: 10 10 10 10
Tune ELLERS; HIGHLAND CATHEDRAL

Advent 3 – A hymn based on Matthew 11 vs 2-11

1	God's presence was seen in the person of Jesus 
	where people found healing and wholeness and grac
	miraculous wonders and love without measure, 
	the touch of his hands and the look of his face.
	
2	So this was the answer when John asked the question, 
	was Jesus Messiah, God's chosen, the one 
	ordained to bring peace and God's reign to the people,
	embodying hope for the days yet to come.
	
3	The signs of God's being are seen in the present
	when people are living with Jesus in faith.
	The hope of God's kingdom is real when our actions 
	embody Christ's loving with freedom through grace.  

Andrew Pratt 
Words © 2010 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd
Metre: 12 11 12 11
Tune: STREETS OF LAREDO; ST CATHERINE’S COURT