Month: December 2023

Isaiah 61.10 – 62.3, Luke 2.15-21

The First Sunday of Christmas, 31 December 2023, Keasden

‘But Mary treasured all the words of the shepherds, and pondered them in her heart.’

New Year is a good time for pondering. For going over what has been, and considering what is to come. It’s a good time for re-setting ourselves if we think that life has bent us out of shape. It’s a good time for putting life in context, and remembering the larger reality which may otherwise be crowded out.

And church is a good place to ponder that larger reality. For in church we hear words we rarely find outside; our shared time of worship frees us to express ourselves in ways we seldom otherwise can. The words we speak and sing help us find our place again in the world, and re-set our heart.

Consider Psalm 148, a wonderful song of creation. (Take a look at it again). 

It begins above the skies: ‘Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights’; it continues with the same divine company who visited the shepherds on that Judean hilltop: ‘Praise him, all you his angels; praise him, all his host.’ And then, in echoes of the creation story in Genesis 1, the Psalm comes to earth, where sun and moon, the waters, the mountains and weather systems, all that grows, the creatures of land, sea and air, the lowliest and the most powerful people, women, men, old and young, are all entreated to do what, together, we are created to do: to Praise the Lord. 

We may find it surprising to be reminded that the most fundamental purpose of our lives is to praise the Lord. We are created to praise God. And to do this, never alone, but hand in hand with everyone and everything else in all creation, from the deepest depths to the highest heights.

And if we do find it surprising, that’s probably because this larger reality has been obscured from our view by the substitute story which crowds in on our everyday lives, which tells us that there are irreconcilable differences between women, men, old and young; which tells us that the gaps between the lowliest and the most powerful people are inevitable and must only grow; which tells us that every created thing is ours for exploitation for the increased wealth and comfort of the few; which tells us that even when the mountains burn and the weather systems combust, when creatures and communities die off, we must continue in this way of destruction, for there is no alternative way; which, finally, puts a price on each of us, determining how useful we are in solely financial terms. This story persists despite our knowing just how much it diminishes us and separates us from the world, from others, and ourselves.

‘But Mary treasured all the words of the shepherds, and pondered them in her heart.’

And there are many like Mary, whose ponderings have led them to conclude how flawed is this substitute story which crowds in on our everyday lives, how destructive it is of all that is most valued in the larger reality of God’s care. 

These many who ponder are the spiritual ones; among them are artists and the poets; the writers creatively exploring the possibilities of other ways of living, and the community leaders trying them out in practice; among the many who ponder are the ones whose lives are rooted in the land, connected with the life of other creatures and the turning of the seasons, and who thus understand themselves to be part of a conversation as deep as time and as rich as the good soil itself. 

The late writer Ursula Le Guin in 2014 said that in the hard times which are coming, we’ll be wanting those ‘who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.’ [1]

The world-system which dominates our lives will keep insisting that this way of domination and destruction is ‘the real world’. Those who prosper from it will persist in trying to persuade us that it is ‘just how things are’, and that any visions of an alternative way of life are untenable. 

But this is not so; and how crucial it is to see that a better world is not only possible in the future, but that it is alive, and active, already in practice: it is the larger reality within which we live.

How crucial it is that we who have an inkling of this reality, keep praying our Psalms and singing our Magnificats, and growing our veg, and tending our animals, and loving our neighbours, and protesting the military-industrial ways of the world which repeatedly and always fail us. How important that we do so for the sake of the ‘more than 70% of young people who now feel hopeless about the climate crisis, and the more than half who believe that humanity is doomed’ [2] 

Where there is an invisible barrier to new kinds of thought and action then young people are left to imagine only extinction. [3] Thank God then, for the Psalmist and Mary and all those other poets and visionaries of freedom, who occupy a world they affirm as being the true and real world, a world which is here and now, and vibrant, and is revitalised each time we absorb their words and follow their examples. This is the larger reality within which we live, inside which all other world-systems, including our own, will come and go. 

The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart encourages us to ‘Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things… God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.’ [4]

God is at home on this earth. Those whose lives are steeped in rural patterns of life, and in the gentle rhythms of the Church year, understand this. We already deeply sense that ‘As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease’. [5] We comprehend that we are created in love, with the purpose of living in harmony with the rhythms of the seasons, with the land, the creatures and all the peoples of this world; at the deepest level we appreciate that we are created not in competition with, but in celebration of this joyous gift of existence. [6] 

May our ponderings draw us ever closer to the One who holds all of this together; the very One who gentle Mary held in her arms.

 

Notes

[1] Ursula K. LeGuin, Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 19 November 2014.

[2] Matt Gallagher, ‘Children of Men’ – 17 Years On: A Grave Warning to a Nation Adrift. BylineTimes, 29 September 2023.

[3] Matt Gallagher, ‘Children of Men’ – 17 Years On: A Grave Warning to a Nation Adrift. BylineTimes, 29 September 2023.

[4] Elizabeth Roberts, Elisa Amidon, eds, Earth Prayers: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations from Around the World. Thanks to Robert Gallagher for sharing the complete text:

Apprehend God in all things

                    for God is in all things.

              Every single thing is full of God

                    and is a book about God

Every living thing is a word of God.

If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature–   

even a caterpillar–

I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God

                 is every creature.

Earth cannot escape heaven,

Flee it by going up,

                 or flee it by going down,

heaven still invades the earth,

                 energises it,

                             makes it sacred.

All hiding places reveal God.

If you want to reveal God.

              S/he runs into your lap.

For,

God is at home.

                It is we who have gone out for a walk.

[5] Genesis 8.22.

[6] John Davies, Seeking well-being with Zimbabwe’s dry and dusty soil. 15 May 2022.

Titus 2.11-14, Luke 2.1-20

Christmas Eve, Austwick

Peace on earth starts within

Titus 2.11-14, Luke 2.1-20

Christmas Eve, Austwick

 

It’s Christmas. And we keep on hearing about ‘peace on earth’. Despite all the terrors of war in the world which trouble us, this seasonal, scriptural message persists: ‘peace on earth, goodwill to all’.

Is peace on earth an impossible dream? It seems so elusive to us that we might be forgiven for treating it with the same levity as we do Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. 

But, even after two thousand years of war and strife, still this gospel message persists. ’Peace on earth’. We still want it. We long for it. In the Middle East. On our city streets. In our living rooms and as we lay our troubled heads down at night. We long for it. 

Is it possible to achieve it? Is this partially what draws us here to worship at this improbable hour, because deep down we have an instinct that God, in Jesus, shows us how, and can help enable us, to live together in peace?

We must acknowledge all the violence done in the name of Christ over the centuries, and the bloodshed and militarism which is still sanctified by the Church: and ask hard questions of it.

Because significantly, when the Bethlehem baby grew up, Jesus put an end to the poisonous fiction that God is ‘vengeful’. He demonstrated his good news by persistently befriending the poor, the outcasts, the little people of his day, including those who seemed his enemies. He listened to them and ate with them. Some he healed of maladies that diminished their lives. He kept on like that until he fell victim to the  powerful. Even then he responded not with vengeance, threats or self-interest. Rather, he went calmly toward death, stopping along the way to heal a slave’s ear, to comfort the women who wept for him, to ask forgiveness for his murderers and to bless his fellow condemned. [2]

Jesus’ message and his self-giving life announce that there is no place for vengeance in God’s peaceable kingdom. No need for Christians to take history into our own hands to wage war on God’s behalf, for the ultimate battle between good and evil has already been fought and won in the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. 

Believing that God’s kingdom embraces all, thus abandoning the idea that nationalism or sectarianism had any part in their practice, the early Christians renounced violence and refused to serve in the military. Many in today’s churches continue in that ethical practice, whilst recognising that peacemaking in the real world is complicated and messy. We have to dig deep to realise a pacifist vision. To live peaceably we have to first recognise the violence we each carry in our hearts, and work to overcome it. Then to build peace substantially, hawks and doves must listen and talk to each other, and learn together. 

Committed to that practice, whilst Head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt said, ’Neither brute violence nor naïve forms of pacifism on their own can tackle the toughest issues of our times. We must cultivate empathy with something far bigger than ourselves, something bigger and deeper than we can imagine or rationalise for ourselves.’ [3]

This is what many have been doing throughout the decades-long conflict in Palestine. The Parents’ Circle Families Forum, comprised of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost children, or family members, in the ongoing violence, continue to come together ‘to do the slow, deep, necessary work of talking, listening and building relationships – in order to get to know the personal and national narrative of the ‘other’ as an important step on the way to reconciliation’. [4]

In Jerusalem and Haifa, Jaffa and Kfar Saba, in Wadi Ara and Galilee, the Hand in Hand schools teach Israeli and Arab pupils together, studying in both Hebrew and Arabic in classrooms where two teachers – one Arab, and one Jewish – each teach in their mother tongue, developing bilingualism, immersing students in the stories, songs, and symbols of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions. [5]

All work of this kind requires courage and commitment, and will often begin with a change of heart. Ultimately, peacemaking starts within. The Northern Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mairead Corrigan Maguire said that ‘The spirit of nonviolence begins within us and moves out from there. As our hearts are disarmed by God of our inner violence, they become God’s instruments for the disarmament of the world’. [6]

Christmas gives us an opportunity to hone our peacemaking skills, when seasonal social occasions sometimes place us alongside people, some of whom we may struggle to get on with. What role do I play when family tensions run high? When conflict comes is it my instinct to fight, or to take flight, or to seek the light?

If we admit to ourselves our reluctance to let old wounds heal, or our strategies of avoidance of people we disagree with, or of sidestepping uncomfortable conversations, then we are at the start of building peace on earth. For the beginning of making peace from within is to ask ourselves why we act that way, and prayerfully, carefully, begin to work out what we might be able to do to change.

My friend Joe Campbell, who for years worked as a mediator in Northern Ireland’s conflicts, says that ‘Jesus invites us to pray for enemies. Usually we pray that the other person will change, and usually over time they do. But I understand Jesus to mean also to pray about my attitude towards them, asking for grace and strength every day to love more and more.’ [7]

Peace on earth, goodwill to all – the one born in Bethlehem showed us the way this can be done. It’s in our power and in our hands to fulfil it.

 

Notes

[1] This sermon draws on my earlier Peace on earth? Starts within, preached in Sutton Montis, Christmas Eve 2017, John’s Revelation Trumps Empire’s Apocalypse, Corton Denham, 17 December 2017, and Among you stands one whom you do not know, Clapham, 17 December 2023.

[2] Fred Niedner, Living by the Word: Taking the Good News home, The Christian Century, Jan. 3, 2001, quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Notes, Girardian Lectionary, Year C, Epiphany 3c.

[3] Alastair McIntosh, ‘A Nonviolent Challenge to Conflict,’ 2010, in David Whetham (ed), Ethics, Law and Military Operations. An offprint of McIntosh’s essay is downloadable from Alastair McIntosh’s website [pdf]. p.16.

[4] Parents’ Circle Families Forum.

[5] Hand in Hand.

[6] Alastair McIntosh, A Nonviolent Challenge to Conflict, p.3.

[7] Joe Campbell, Refined in relationship: Handle with care. Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 14 January 2022.

Isaiah 61.1-11, John 1.6-8, 19-28

The Third Sunday of Advent, 17 December 2023, Clapham

Have you noticed how, at the beginning of their lives, Jesus was always one step behind John. John’s birth was announced first; Jesus was born six months after him. Whilst Mary’s song of praise, the Magnificat, is the one we most remember, her cousin Elizabeth earlier sang her own song of praise which was also about God favouring her, among women, with the child John in her womb.

And when the boys grew into men it was John who led Jesus into a life of missionary activity. For Jesus was a disciple of John. Jesus was among the crowds who gathered at the River Jordan to hear John entreating them to make way for God to come into their lives, to straighten them out, to set them on a new path. Jesus was one of the great unwashed who stepped into the waters to receive John’s ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. [1]

And there, the Baptist told the crowds about Jesus, saying, ‘Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.’

Among you stands one whom you do not know. Interesting to consider how, towards the premature end of his life, John questioned who Jesus was. Remember how, whilst in Herod’s jail, John sent his disciples to ask Jesus, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?’ [2] It was as if he didn’t know him, or at least, that he’d lost confidence in who Jesus was.

Among you stands one whom you do not know. What seems to have happened is that, from having always been one step behind John, Jesus had now moved one step ahead. And John was having trouble recognising, in Jesus, the Messiah he’d been expecting, because of the surprising ways Jesus was going about things.

John wasn’t the only one. You remember when Jesus stood up in front of his family and neighbours in Nazareth and quoted the prophet Isaiah: as a statement setting out his intentions for his ministry. Compare the start of today’s reading from Isaiah, with what Jesus said on that occasion:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ [2]

Among you stands one whom you do not know. Why did the home-town crowd turn against Jesus at that point? Was it because he, one of their own, was suggesting that God loved people from outside their tribe just as much – if not more – than them, that the good news for the poor wasn’t just for their poor, but for all poor, everywhere. Or was it that they noticed, as we may have, what phrases Jesus significantly decided to leave out of his quote from the prophet?

Jesus’ statement combines two passages, in Isaiah 61 and 58. [3] What is notable about Jesus’s selection is that he leaves out the bits about vengeance and nationalism. You’ll notice that Isaiah 61.2 proclaims, ‘the day of vengeance of our God’. But Jesus stops short of this, and also excludes Isaiah’s later claim that Israel shall have for itself the wealth of the nations, while the other nations  will end up with nothing but God’s vengeance heaped upon them. [4]

Those things were – and are – the conventional messianic dream of oppressed people. When we take over, we will be on top. Those who have oppressed us will be on the first track out. Jesus wants no part of that. He would demonstrate his good news by persistently befriending the poor, the outcasts, the little people of his day, including those who seemed his enemies. He listened to them and ate with them. Some he healed of maladies that diminished their lives. He kept on like that until he fell victim to the rich and the powerful. Even then he responded not with vengeance, threats or self-interest. Rather, he went calmly toward death, stopping along the way to heal a slave’s ear, to comfort the women who wept for him, to ask forgiveness for his murderers and to bless his fellow condemned. There we see Jesus’ messianic mission, the epiphany of God’s glory in action. [5]

Among you stands one whom you do not know. Now we begin to see why John came to question what Jesus was doing. Because no messiah in history had ever before renounced vengeance. Only Jesus. No saviour in history had ever extended salvation to those outside his nation. Except Jesus.

John was wrapped up in the world of vengeance. Witness his conflict with Herod which resulted in John’s cruel execution in the king’s palace. John had preached about a Last Judgment where the Judge would come carrying tools of destruction, wielding lethal fire. John’s Judgement provoked in his listeners a fear that motivated their good works and virtuous behaviour. John had seen the light coming in the form of Jesus, but he found it almost impossible to comprehend. [6]

Among you stands one whom you do not know. The early Christians lived in small communities devoted to mutual care and support, and refused to serve in the military. But it wasn’t long before the institutional church began to turn its back on the peaceful Christ, as in the Fourth Century the Roman Emperor Constantine assimilated the Christian faith, generating the ideas that Christ’s ‘everlasting kingdom of love and peace’ could be brought about through conventional power politics; and that human beings could be induced into the kingdom of heaven by force. 

So Christianity came to accept the very vengeance and nationalism which Jesus deliberately excluded from his Nazareth mission statement. And this acceptance prompted the violence of the Crusades, the Pilgrim Fathers’ brutal subjugation of the first peoples of America, and the aggressive missionary activity which was an essential arm of colonial empire-building.

This is our inheritance, described by Ivan Illich as ‘the troubled legacy of Christendom … the terrible perversion that comes of love and truth when these are underwritten by institutional power.’ [7] This inheritance, this forgetting of the peaceful Christ, explains how, in our place and time, industrial chaplains can sanctify the manufacture of fighter jets which bomb civilian populations to extinction; how bishops can stand beside monarchs in military dockyards applauding the launch of nuclear submarines; and how patriarchs can address warmongering presidents as being the saviours of their people. [8]

This is our savage inheritance. It is powerful, yet, although it is hard to resist, it is not impossible. For still, among us, stands one whom we do not know. He will prevail, for all the love in the world is his. Among us stands one whom we do not know: and who longs to reveal to us ever more fully the breadth of his love and the strength of his peace. 

And so, whilst some religious people will aggressively oppose it, his everlasting kingdom of love and peace will continue to grow, through those who have seen the light coming in the form of Jesus, and who will follow it, however difficult it may be, at times, to comprehend.

Notes

[1] Luke 3.3.

[2] Matthew 11.2-6.

[2] Luke 4.18-19

[3] Isaiah 61.1-2a, Isaiah 58.6

[4] Paul Nuechterlein, Notes, in Girardian Lectionary, Year C, Epiphany 3c  

[5] Fred Niedner, Living by the Word: Taking the Good News home, The Christian Century, Jan. 3, 2001, quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Notes, Girardian Lectionary, Year C, Epiphany 3c.

[6] See my earlier sermons, Christmas is really for the children, Somerset, 2014, and The judgement of Jesus and the judgement of John, Devon, 2012.

[7] Marcus Peter Rempel, Life at the End of Us Versus Them: Cross Culture Stories, p.13, 19ff; Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire, p.119. Rempel engages with Ivan Illich’s writings on “the troubled legacy of Christendom … the terrible perversion that comes of love and truth when these are underwritten by institutional power.” (p.12). As quoted in my sermon, John’s Revelation Trumps Empire’s Apocalypse, Corton Denham, 17 December 2017.

[8] Campaign Against the Arms Trade, ISRAEL: The UK has consistently sold arms to Israel, in spite of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem since 1967; Launch Of The Royal Navys Newest Super Submarine, Getty Images News, 8 June 2007; Gleb Bryanski, Russian patriarch calls Putin era “miracle of God”, Reuters, 8 February, 2012.

Isaiah 40.1-11, Mark 1.1-8

The Second Sunday of Advent, 10 December 2023, Austwick

Talking about the consumer chaos which is Christmas, a sage old friend of mine said to me, ‘We’ve got it all. What more do we want? Save what we need?’ He told me that his daughter had asked him what he wanted for Christmas. ‘I’ve got too much stuff as it is,’ he said, ‘of  ‘toys’: books, music, video – some of which I’ll probably never read, hear, or watch again, at 77 years old’. Robert’s answer to his daughter’s question was, ‘Affection’. What he really wants for Christmas is affection. We might sympathise. Or we might add that what we really want, is belonging, or security, or comfort.

We are living through a deeply uncomfortable time, like so many generations before us, with world-changing wars in Europe and the Holy Land, the underlying nuclear threat, and the challenges to life caused by the world’s accelerating overheating. And we come to worship, each of us, with our own stories of discomfort, those bereavements, those personal tragedies which have shattered our lives, and from which we daily seek recovery.

We come to worship at Advent, and these are the first words we hear: ‘Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.’ After a time of suffering and pain, the most uncomfortable of times, when the grass has withered from the earth, the world’s flower has faded, God wants us to know that he is coming to create new beginnings.

And, to tell the world that this good news is coming, God is commissioning his messengers. Today we hear from Isaiah and from Mark. The book of Isaiah and the Gospel of Mark were written in, and describe, deeply uncomfortable times. They are both books of prophecy, for, as the Muslim guide warmly told the pupils of Austwick School on their recent visit to a Bradford mosque, like Isaiah, Jesus was a great prophet of his time. [1]

The prophets used picturesque language to describe moments in history of terrible loss and grief and discomfort. But from which a turning-away would be possible, a turning towards comforting new beginnings.

Focussing on Mark’s portrayal of Jesus, which we will be following all the way through this new church year, it’s important to understand that Jesus wasn’t merely predicting the future. He was prophesying. There’s a huge difference. Predicting tends to mean something will happen without a doubt, that there’s nothing one can do to change it. To prophesy is to show someone that they are on a path that will bring likely consequences. Doctors prophesy to us when they tell us that our current bad habits will likely lead to times of illness and poor health. Through their prophesies, they try to get us to make more healthy choices.

We could say that the ghosts in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, are prophets. They are trying to get Scrooge to change the path he is on, a path leading him into a despised life and a lonely death. They are prophesying to him the path he is on, not because it is unchangeable, but precisely because it is. He can choose another path. He can become a different sort of person. He can… and, thankfully, he does.

Jesus was coming to his people of Israel, the Jews, to help them see that God has a wholly other path for them in the world. They are to lead by showing others how to serve. They are to be mighty among the nations by showing the other nations how to favour the least: the poor, the sick, the left-out. Above all, they are never to use violence. Those who live by the sword die by the sword, he taught. If they choose to go down the path of other nations, seeking greatness and power like them, they will end up as other nations do eventually, when someone bigger and more powerful comes along.

Jesus prophesied the terrible events which took place for God’s people, the Jews. Beginning in the year 66, about 30 years after Jesus’ resurrection, a majority of Jews launched into a rebellion against Rome. It ended badly: in the year 70, Rome destroyed and burned Jerusalem with its temple and slaughtered much of the population. This is the terrible reality that is still fresh to Mark, as he writes his Gospel in the aftermath.

So why does Mark’s story about Jesus become the first of its kind to survive and be kept? Why do we have this new kind of document in the world called a Gospel, that we’re still reading 2000 years later? 

The first reason is because Jesus was a prophet who, unfortunately, was right. His fellow Jews continued down the same path and were met with the disaster he prophesied. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that 99% of scientists today are correct and that we are heading into a global warming. They warn us of undesirable events that will take place if we don’t change some of our lifestyles. And then let’s imagine that ten, twenty, thirty years down the road, those terrible events are fully upon us and are wreaking havoc in our world. Whose writings might we turn to? Won’t it be those who prophesied correctly about these events and told us what we could do to change the path we’re on?

That’s why we have the Gospel of Mark. Jesus was correct, not just about his own people, but he is correct about what makes for human beings to live in peace at any time and place. Over and over again Mark’s Jesus teaches us that true power and might comes through caring for the weakest among us; that true leadership comes through serving the least among us, not in seeking to be served; and the most important one: that, in Jesus, God is showing us precisely this kind of power and leadership coming true in the world. 

How do we know? Because God has shown us the powers of this world doing their very worst to Jesus, but then raising him to new life, as the promise that God’s way is the true way to peace. ‘In this world you will have trouble,’ Jesus tells us. ‘But take heart! I have overcome the world.’ [2]

This is so crucial! That we see, even when we fail to heed his prophesies, that God comes to us in our weakness. This is the good news with which we can be comforted: that God comes with forgiveness, not vengeance, with the power of life rather than more death. This is the comforting reality which we can know: that God comes with the power to take our struggle and our mess and begin to turn it into gracious life.

What is the good news Isaiah brings to the discomforted people of Israel? That God will feed his flock like a shepherd; that he will gather the lambs in his arms, carry them, and gently lead them into a new way of life.

And what is the good news John proclaims to the people of Judea? That through Jesus God will sow the seeds of new life, and will open up to us the promise of the true way of peace.

In Mark’s gospel we hear Jesus telling his disciples to ‘Keep awake’, to ‘Watch and pray’. He’s not telling us to bunker down and wait for the apocalypse. He’s giving us the tools through which we can face the traumas of life with faith, the challenges of the world with hope; through which we can be comforted and comfort others; through which we can flourish and help others to flourish. [3]

‘Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.’ So let us keep awake to what God is doing in the world; let us watch for signs of his presence in our everyday; and let us pray, keep praying, for in so doing, we will draw ever closer to the one who walks with us on the true way to peace.

 

Notes

[1] This talk draws substantially on Paul Nuechterlein, MARK’S GOSPEL AS FULFILLING THE WAY OF PROPHECY, delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran, Portage, MI, November 30, 2014. Paul’s words, lightly edited, are in the italicised section. Also acknowledging the help of Paul’s notes in Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Advent 1B. My Advent Sunday talk, Watch and Pray with the Prophet of the True Way to Peace, 3 December 2023, also uses this material.

[2] John 16.33.

[3] Mark 13.33, Mark 14.38.