Advent hope:

Anticipating.

Waiting.

Looking.

Searching.

He’s coming.

Advent peace:

Soothing troubled hearts,

Relaxing furrowed brows,

Calming anxious frowns.

Wholeness.

Well-being.

He’s coming.

Advent joy:

Bubbling from within,

Tremulous at first,

Just the occasional bubble,

Then overflowing like a lava lamp,

Light and colours,

Lightness and ebullience.

He’s coming.

Advent love:

Arms holding us,

Cuddles,

Warmth.

Everlasting Father,

Everlasting love,

Wrapped in swaddling cloths in a manger.

He’s here.

God with us.

Jesus,

Born to save us.

We have waited so long for this moment.

We tiptoe to the manger.

We peer in anxiously,

And hope, peace, joy, love make sense now.

You’re here.

All will be well.

Once more, we looked at different decorations for our Jesse Tree, which help us to understand better the significance of Jesus’s birth and how this fits into the bigger picture of God’s story. The first decoration this week was a scroll, symbolising the prophets who spoke out God’s word to people. Isaiah told them that the Saviour would be born of a virgin and that he would be a light in the darkness. One of his prophecies said that a new king would appear among the descendants of Jesse ‘just as new shoots sprout from the stump of a tree.’ (Isaiah 11:1-2)  The scroll represents these prophecies and show us God’s amazing foreknowledge and planning.

The second decoration was a house, symbolising Bethlehem, the place where Jesse and his family lived. Not only does this remind us of Jesus’s ancestors, but it also reminds us that Bethlehem was chosen to be the place of Jesus’s birth, to fulfil a prophecy in Micah 5:2. God was able to organise world events so that Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem for the Roman census! Such is His power and majesty; nothing ever takes Him by surprise!

Next came a harp, to symbolise worship and praise, especially relating to Jesse’s son, David, who became king of Israel (probably the most famous of them all!) When young, David would play the harp to soothe King Saul; he would later write many songs, some of which are recorded in the book of Psalms. Singing and music have always been ways people worship God joyfully and this harp (made by Garry’s 3D pen!) reminds us that it is good to sing to God and praise Him for all He has done.

Finally, the crown reminds us of the kings of Israel, including David and his son, Solomon, who was renowned for his wisdom and for building a magnificent temple for the Lord. Most of all, however, the crown reminds us that Jesus is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We celebrate His birth as a helpless baby at Christmas time, but we must never forget His true identity.

Acts 21:17-36 demonstrates to us once again the ongoing opposition which the presentation of the gospel aroused. Jewish opposition had been evident from the beginning of the book of Acts and has been a constant theme throughout:

• The Sanhedrin imprisoned Peter and John and then all the apostles and forbade them with threats to teach in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:1-5:42)

• Stephen’s martyrdom (Acts 7:54ff)

• Jewish persecution of the church in Jerusalem (Acts 8:1ff)

• Jewish opposition to Paul (following his conversion) began with an attempt to lynch him in this section (Acts 21:27-36), continuing with a hysterical demand for his death (Acts 22:22-23) and concluding with the secret plot under oath of more than forty men to murder him. (Acts 23:12ff)

Paul seems to have regarded this opposition as inevitable (after all, Ananias was sent to him after his miraculous conversion with the message ‘I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’ (Acts 9:16)), so perhaps we should not be surprised by his later words to Timothy that ‘everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. (2 Tim 3:12). Our attitudes tend to be very different. Paul’s message of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus aroused much opposition, to the point of masses seeking to kill him. Ongoing opposition may not always be a sign that we are wrong, but rather a sign that we are doing something right. Paul was not deterred by opposition. As he wrote to the Corinthians, ‘We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.’ (2 Cor 4:8-9) This can be our testimony too.

Paul’s arrival in Jerusalem (Acts 21:17-36) provided him with an opportunity to tell the believers there about all God had done on his missionary journeys; he reported ‘in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.’ (Acts 21:19), reports which brought praise from his audience.

It’s important always to dwell on what God has done through our ministries rather than focussing on the ministries themselves. It has been a difficult year in the life of churches locally as we have been forced to close our doors to many things which normally make up the life of a church (including our Parent & Toddler group and youth club for much of this year) and have had to adapt to online services and to different ways of doing things. But as always, at the end of a year, it’s good to look back and to see what God has done in our area and beyond.

• We are grateful for the technology which has enabled us to livestream services to a wider audience than would usually attend meetings. Although the passive nature of livestreamed services (particularly on Facebook Live) is not at all representative of church as it should be, we are grateful that this is a way of reaching out to people with God’s good news and are thankful that God has put it on people’s hearts to watch and listen to His good news.

• We are grateful for every means of staying connected with people, including video calls, phone calls, text messages, social media and not forgetting Royal Mail! We have sent out countless cards and parcels of craft activities to local families and church members and believe that God uses these things as a reminder to others of His love and care.

• We are aware that God has used local churches to bless others at these difficult times, through different means of outreach, such as gift bags, food parcels, symbols of hope (Advent angels), debt advice, counselling and support.

• We are grateful that we have been able to support ministries at home and abroad, such as the Salvation Army food bank, local schools through the 4FrontTheatre pantomime ‘A Very Merry Covid-Cancelled Christmas’, Fredrick and Reeba’s ministries in India, the Christmas shoebox appeal and our ongoing support of Bedline, Innocent and Amshika in Haiti, Uganda and India respectively. Such support allows ministries to continue in what has been a very challenging year logistically!

We are looking to God to show us new ways of ministry, to show us how we can resume some of the areas which have seemed so fraught with difficulties because of the pandemic and to continue to work through us as we seek to bless our area and show others that we are ‘with God in the community, with God for the community.’

Docudramas are highly popular art forms these days, and there is much that is entertaining and informative about these series which are based on real-life events. Nonetheless, we have to understand that truth and lies are diametrically opposite and be careful to learn to sift fact from fiction.

At Christmas time, we are faced with a blurring of boundaries between fact and fantasy. Much of this may well seem harmless to people, who view it as mere entertainment. I personally have grave reservations about this attitude. My concern is that the baby may literally get thrown out with the bath water, that as children grow up and leave behind their childish beliefs about Christmas, they may also leave behind Jesus Christ, relegating Him to the same level as the other fantasies. After all, if what our parents and families have told us about everything else connected to Christmas is based on fiction, why should we believe that what they have told us about the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ is fact?

This is not a popular view, but I am deeply concerned about how we allow fact and fiction to co-exist happily in our lives with no real sifting of the two. Jesus is not fantasy or fiction. The Bible is adamant that His birth, life, death and resurrection are rooted in history and in reality, that these are the most important truths in the world. Why adorn them with elves and bunnies and anything else which detract from who He is and what He has done?

People tell me that Christmas is ‘for the children’ and it’s not right to take the magic away from this season. I love Christmas as much as anyone, but it is not just for the children. It is for all people, for we all need a Saviour to rescue us from the dominion of darkness and bring us into God’s family and God’s kingdom. I’m all for wonder and awe and eyes lighting up with joy. I just don’t believe we need anything other than God to do this. I do appreciate children have a wonderful capacity for discerning truth and for distinguishing between fact and fantasy (my granddaughter will often say to me, ‘I’m just ‘tending, Grandma!’), but I am not so sure adults retain that ability as well!

I love fiction. I have hundreds and hundreds of novels in my house and on my Kindle and can’t thank authors enough for their imaginations and the wonderful world of words which they create. I love novels which can also teach me things (much of what I know about glass-blowing, merchant banking, gemmology, geography and history comes from novels which incorporate these subjects into the works of fiction), but I have to remember that fiction is not fact.

The present series of ‘The Crown’ on Netflix has created a stir recently in re-telling the story of the Royal family in the UK in the 1980s with a disarming combination of facts and fiction. The problem is that we, the general public, don’t know which is which and also we can be remarkably influenced by fiction that is presented as fact. Fake news, another current topic, is another area where it can be hard to discern fact from fiction. How can we know what is true and what is invented?

This problem is not new. In Acts 21:17-36, we see Paul finally arriving in Jerusalem. There, he faces the dilemma of being viewed suspiciously as a man subverting people from following Jewish rules and customs. People ‘have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs.’ (Acts 21:21) This was not true, as Paul’s subsequent actions indicate (he was willing to undergo Jewish purification rites and to pay the expenses of four others who wished to do this; he recognised the differences between Jews and Gentiles even if he taught that the way of salvation was the same, through faith in Christ Jesus.) Later, problems occurred in the Temple area because Jews, having seen him with the Greek believer, Trophimus, in the city assumed he had broken the law by taking him into the inner Temple area, from which Gentiles were barred. (Acts 21:28-29) All of these problems were rooted in the simple truth, ‘why let facts get in the way of a good story?’ The Jews didn’t care if what they were saying was true or not. It made a good story, a good basis for outrage and disapproval.

Ultimately, we can see that it is extremely dangerous to build our lives and actions on fiction. Generally speaking, we call people who do this insane and, in extreme cases, lock them up to protect society from them. Paul’s very life was in danger because of these mob assumptions, half-truths and misinformation, and it took the intervention of the commander of the Roman troops to stop murder by the masses. (Acts 21:30-36)

What will it take today to make us sift the truth from fiction? It’s so easy to be swept up in the rumours, the gossip, the assumptions which mingle fact and fiction with no regard for the difference between the two. We need to be rooted in the truth of God’s word and in the truth of God Himself. Jesus said He was the Way, the Truth and the Life. (John 14:6) Every fact and every fiction needs to be measured against this plumb-line.