Tag: Jesus

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

A hymn for Trinity Sunday – ‘We cannot understand…

Sunday the 4th of June 2023 is marked as Trinity Sunday. 

I have never found the descriptions of the Trinity easy to accept – they focus on how you can have three persons in one God. My own resolution of this is less to focus on the how and simply to say that we experience something of God in and through creation, God is the ground of being, of all that exists. Jesus shows us how God would be if God was human. When our lives are an image of that of Jesus then we are living with the same Spirit. 

The thread is that of Love – in creation, in Jesus and in ourselves. And so, a hymn…

We cannot understand them,
the things we’re bid to say;
our creeds seem so confusing:
yet this is what we pray:
God’s Love was the beginning,
before all life began.
This Love became incarnate,
to last a human span.

The paradox of mystery:
the image we refine
at once divinely human,
though humanly divine.
Yet death can signal ending, 
but Love still lingers on: 
perpetual, holding Spirit
when even hope has gone.

Andrew Pratt 29/5/2023 Words © 2023 © 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: 7.6.7.6
Tune: CRUGER (Hail to the Lord’s anointed)

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

Christ the King? What sort of king? And a hymn…

The Sunday before the First Sunday of Advent is recognised in some churches as the Feast of Christ the King. We might sing ‘King of Kings, Majesty’. But what a strange King, his crown, a crown of thorns…Luke 23: 33-43.

1	A carpenter hung on a cross, 
	a rough-hewn cross of wood, 
	while people satisfied by rage 
	had never understood.
	This man had met the arguments 
	of those who sought to rule 
	with kindness, gentleness and love: 
	they marked him as a fool.

2	He challenged values, long held rites, 
	that bound the world they knew, 
	he sought to point them back to God. 
	For this they'd curse and sue.
	The trumped up charges that they brought, 
	designed to bring him down,
	resulted in this spectacle, 
	this cross and thorny crown.

3	And through the centuries that passed 
	the ones who called him 'good', 
	have tried to make some sense of this, 
	have rarely understood.
	And now we stand again to mark 
	the passing of this day, 
	to struggle still to understand, 
	love's sacrificial way.

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2016 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
CMD
8 6 8 6 D
Tune: SOLLS SEIN
As published in Seedresources http://www.theworshipcloud.com .  Art: iPad Art © Andrew Pratt 2022