(C) Copyright BBC Radio Ulster "Thought For The Day"
Rev R D Drysdale
Saturday, 26 April 2025
Sunday, 20 April 2025
What They Are Saying (1977)
In this 1977 BBC Radio Ulster broadcast, produced by James Skelly, Rev. Derek Drysdale offers a reflective account of the week-long proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. The programme marks the significant occasion of the installation of the new Moderator, the Very Rev. Thomas Algeo Patterson
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO RECORDING
Saturday, 19 April 2025
BBC Radio Ulster Morning Service
BBC Radio Ulster
Morning Service - A Service for Advent
"Waiting for Christ"
Rev R D Drysdale
Music:
America Simon & Garfunkel
I am a Rock Simon & Garfunkel
Hymn: "Lord Thy Word Abideth"
Hymn: "Fairest Lord Jesus"
ADVENT
The First Sunday in Advent. Hard to believe, isn't it? Christmas almost on top of us again, and all those gifts still to be bought, and cards posted, all those forgotten friends and relatives. Still, like it or dread it, the Advent season is with us again.
Advent, without putting too nice a definition on it, means coming. Though what, in fact, we're going to do this morning is to think more about going or seeking to be exact. You'll see what I mean in a moment.
We begin with a poem. It's “The Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot, and that should give you a clue to the overall theme of this first reflection on Advent. The poem describes the Magi, the Three Wise Men, the Kings of the Orient, whatever you like to call them, the Magi, setting out in pursuit of a star.
“A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey, the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter, and the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, and the silken girls bringing sherbet, then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting their liquor and women, and the night fires going out, the lack of shelter, and the cities hostile, and the towns unfriendly, and the villages dirty and charging high prices.
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches, with the voices singing in our ears, saying that this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness, and three trees in the low sky, and an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine leaves over the lintel, six hands at an open door, dicing for pieces of silver and feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued and arrived at evening, not a moment too soon finding the place. It was, you may say, satisfactory.”
That sets the scene.
The Magi set out in search of a king, and I like the port's description of that journey. There's a realism about it. The Magi and their search are earthed in this world.
The poem removes them from the clinical and rather ethereal image of our tinselled and fairy-lit Christmases. You know what I mean. Characters that, well, really, it's a bit hard to believe in.Eliot gives them somehow human faces, human feelings, and at the end of it all, as we'll see when we return to the poem, the object of their search leaves them shattered, unsettled, and discontent. The world doesn't simply become a lovely place because of their encounter with the Christ child. The poem isn't a happy ever after story, but more about that later.
Before we go any further, let's get something out of the way at the outset. Some people regard these nativity stories, and especially this part about the Magi, as rather fanciful legends, a slice of biblical folklore, a bit of romantic indulgence on the part of the gospel writers. Well, certainly it seems to me that it is the meaning of the symbolism of these stories that matters most, rather than haggling over their historical and factual accuracy, but there's no good reason why the Magi should be assigned only to the realm of poetic construction.
Magi, we know, were members of a tribe of the Medes, who became a priestly caste in Persia. Their religious understanding of life was based on astrology. They were, in this sense, wise men, observers of the stars.
So, there's nothing really all that unusual about the presence of the Magi in Jerusalem. They're there because they've come from the east, following the appearance of a strange star in the sky. It was a common enough feature in the events with the appearance of new stars in the heavens, and there's certainly nothing all that unusual about travellers using the stars to guide them.
Mind you, I don't want to make too much of this, for it seems to me that even if we could produce birth certificates for all the Magi, that doesn't mean they would have any real significance for us today. Here, history and interpretation, fact and symbol, are interwoven in the Christmas story. We have to, as it were, accept the whole package.
So, let's return now to the real issue, the meaning of the Magi for us in this biblical story. And incidentally, St. Matthew doesn't tell us how many there were, nor does he give us any clue about their names. For me, the Magi symbolise an essential element, not only in Advent, but in the whole of religious experience.
They symbolise a search, man on a journey, travelling people seeking a king. It's a theme, strangely enough, that's captured for me in a piece of music that I realise isn't overtly religious, but I think it is intensely spiritual in its own way. It's Simon and Garfunkel's song, “America.” In spite of the title, it's not a bit jingoistic, but it is rather a haunting expression of the strange, wistful, adventurous spirit of two young people on the road, hitchhikers and greyhound bus riders, out in search of life. A boy and girl seeking the meaning and identity of where they are and where they're going. So, as the song says, they walked off to look for America.
It may seem to you an awkward step, but strangely enough, that song takes me back to someone else in search of a country, the Old Testament patriarch Abraham, who walked off to look for the Promised Land, his America. And in a sense, the journey of the Magi really began back there, when this old man, with nothing but the conviction of a call and a vision, left his future and secure life in Ur of the Chaldeans and set out into the unknown, believing that somewhere at the end of it all would be God's promise of a new order. Tough luck if he was wrong, but there was only one way to find out, and that was to get up and go.
We read about it in Genesis Chapter 12 and in the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11.
“Now the Lord said to Abraham, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse, and by you all the families of the earth will bless themselves.
So, Abraham went as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abraham was 75 years old when he'd departed from Haran, and Abram took Sarah his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all the possessions which they had gathered, and the persons that they had gotten in Harran, and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was to go.
By faith he sojourned in the Land of Promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
Clearly the Bible, and especially that New Testament passage, regard this search of Abraham's as a demonstration of faith, and of course that catches the spirit of Christianity exactly.
Christian discipleship is often understood as a pilgrimage, a journey in search of the kingly rule of God, and what the Gospels frequently refer to as the kingdom of heaven. And such a discipleship is based on faith. Why faith? Well, I suppose the nature of the journey demands faith, leaving behind old securities, old views, and setting out like Abraham, not knowing where he was to go.
Come, follow me, said Jesus to the astonished fishermen. That's all. No guarantees, no teasing promises, just a call containing a vision.
A journey like that needs faith, and that means decision, commitment, involvement. We don't just happen upon it. We don't just find ourselves caught up in the search unless we do something about it.
Take the first step, get up and go. To get back to the Magi again, it's conjecture I know, but presumably there must have been some point at which they decided to set out and follow this mysterious star. For all they knew, they could be totally mistaken, but there was only one way to find out, on the road. And so, they walked off to look for a king.
John Mackay, in his classic little book, “A Preface to Christian Theology,” written in the 1940s but still remarkably modern, makes this point very well through his description of two basic attitudes to life, which he illustrates through the symbols of the balcony and the road.
“By the balcony, I do not mean the gallery of a church or theatre. I mean that little platform in wood or stone that protrudes from the upper window of a Spanish home. There the family may gather of an evening to gaze spectator-wise upon the street beneath, or at the sunset, or the stars beyond. The balcony thus conceived is the classical standpoint, and so the symbol of the perfect spectator, for whom life and the universe are permanent objects of study and contemplation.
It is not necessary that the balcony, in the sense in which it is here used, be static. A man may live a permanently balconised existence, even though the physical part of him have the ubiquity of the globetrotter. For the balcony means an immobility of soul that may perfectly coexist with a mobile peripatetic body.
By the road, I mean the place where life is tensely lived, where thought has its birth in conflict and concern, where choices are made, and decisions are carried out. It is the place of action, of pilgrimage, of crusade, where concern is never absent from the wayfarer's heart. On the road, a goal is sought, dangers are faced, life is poured out.
Let us beware, however, lest we interpret the road in a purely physical sense. Many have passed their lives on the road who never journeyed very far from their desk or their pulpit, from a hospital clinic or a carpenter's bench. Others serve upon the road who only stand and wait, for the road, like the balcony, is a state of the soul.”
That's a biting illustration, isn't it? Seeking means commitment. We can't engage in the search for the Christ until we come down from the balcony onto the road, until we're ready to leave the spectator role and get involved in all the excitement, disappointments, hurt, and turmoil of participants. And that means the decision of faith, to risk one's life, staking it upon a vision, a star, and following where it leads, and with no built-in insurance clauses against error and accident.
It's not for nothing that the earliest Christian disciples were simply referred to as the people of the way. The terrible thing is, it's so easy for us to seek God, even with the Word, sacraments, and fellowship of the Church, and our own personal devotion in the middle of it all, to seek God, and yet never leave the balcony. Nothing's really threatened, nothing changes.
Faith, you see, isn't involved. Søren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher, describes how easy it is for us to delude ourselves when it comes to this business of faith. “We wade out,” he says, “a little way from the shore, and then appear to onlookers to be swimming, risking the dangers of the depths. But all the time we're careful that our feet can still touch the bottom. It's all just a show.”
And an awful lot of religious activity is exactly like that, isn't it? We can never find God that way. The search for the Christ must take place down on the road, where everything's at risk, down where we're called upon to accept personal responsibility for things, and where choices have to be made in the middle of the social and political conflicts of our world. The quietism of the balcony, the place of withdrawal, is not the way to Him. God redeems us as individuals, not in splendid isolation, but as we engage ourselves with the struggle for those freedoms that make redemption visible and meaningful in the world.
Dr Sheila Cassidy, an English GP, worked for four years in Chile during the time of the overthrow of Allende’s government in 1973. They were among the most traumatic and brutal years in Chilean history. Sheila Cassidy found herself suddenly flung into another world, far removed from her middle-class suburban lifestyle, a world of terrible privation, where many children die in the first two years of life, and where in one hospital she soon discovered that the vast majority of her patients lived in wooden plank houses with earth floors, no running water, and a simple hole-in-the-ground lavatory.
In her autobiography, she writes, “It was while working in this hospital that I was first forced, like Thomas, to put my finger into the wound of Chile's poverty, and thus come like him to believe.” Later, when planning a trip home to see her father, a friend advised her to go by Miami and Bermuda. It's so beautiful, but don't go to Peru. The poverty is so depressing. But Sheila Cassidy had already discovered that the road of faith runs through the ugly parts of this world, as well as through the beautiful, and through the areas of hostility, as well as those of peace and quiet.
And for us here in Northern Ireland, that means it cuts across our community divisions and sectarianism, and through the agonies of racism, oppression, exploitation and everything that dehumanises and alienates people throughout the earth. This is a Jerusalem to Jericho road where we meet robbers as well as good Samaritans. Suddenly the fairy tale atmosphere of the Magi begins to assume the harsh features of reality, doesn't it? This journey is fraught with hazards, and so in all kinds of subtle ways we are tempted back to the balcony, to the place of apparent safety and security above it all, and we miss as a result the salvation of God, for we refuse the journey that passes through the world, affirming rather than denying it.
To return to the music of Simon and Garfunkel again, for whom I must admit there's a special place, I think, in my heart, they've another song which catches this lure of the balcony perfectly. It pictures someone alone in a winter's night, hidden and insulated up in a bedroom, protected against the cold and life down on the street, untouched by the world, safe, but desperately lonely, frustrated, and going nowhere…
“I am a rock, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.”
Down on the road, however, the Magi weren't simply left to their own devices entirely. They were given a star to follow, something to look up to, a guide. Of course, it's easy to weave all sorts of allegorical and fanciful ideas around this appearance of a star, but then, as we've already said, there's really nothing all that strange or miraculous about it.
Countless travellers on land and sea have been guided by their lodestar for generations. We all need a star, a kindly light amid the encircling gloom, if you like, something that gives us direction. The search can't be carried out with any sense of conviction and hope without it.
When I was a child, I spent all my summer holidays, and any others I could manage, on the shores of the Ards Peninsula. My grandfather lived there, in the village of Cloughey, a fascinating old character, the sort of grandfather grandchildren idolise. He'd spent all his working days at sea, sometimes trafficking across the world on those magnificent old sailing ships; were he alive now, “The Onedin Line” would have been right up his street!
A lot of my time out of school was spent with him, pottering about in his boat, laying lobster creels, fishing, and now and again visiting the light ship permanently moored some miles out from our coastline. Occasionally, we'd spend most of the day with the crew, returning home in the evening when night had fallen. I remember one occasion in particular, when on the way home, darkness closed in around us, the wind rose, and the waves began to toss our little craft about like a cork.
I was beginning to get frightened, and while not daring to show it, my grandfather was somehow instinctively aware of it. He put one hand on my shoulder, and with the other hand he pointed ahead. “Look,” he said, “look, you can see all the lights of our bay yonder in the distance, and do you see that fourth light from the left, the one with the reddish glow? That's the light of our house, where we're headed. Now just you keep your eye fixed on that light.” It became my magi star, and I soon forgot all about the wind and the waves. I had, you see, a point of reference.
In our search for the Christ and the God who reveals Himself there, we've been given a point of reference. I suppose we've been given various lights, but I'm thinking about the Bible in particular, the Bible as our lodestar. How does the Psalmist describe it? Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
Mind you, the Bible does seem to lead us into queer places at times, up all kinds of side tracks and cul-de-sacs. I'm sure it must be a constant source of puzzlement to non-Christians that there can be so many divergent denominations and sects, and all of them appealing to the same Bible to justify their differences. Of course, being human, we're bound to see things from different standpoints, and I can think of nothing worse than everyone reduced down to one common denominator.
You know how it goes in the song, we think alike, we look alike, we act alike. But at the same time, if the Bible really is a shared point of reference, then following it ought to bring us together on the journey rather than leading us apart. So it's got a lot to do with how we follow.
Our following then will depend very much on our ability to understand and interpret the Bible. I imagine there must have been lots of other people who saw the same star as the Magi all those centuries ago, but who failed to understand its significance. The Bible guides us insofar as we have the spirit to discern its true significance, and that means, among other things, allowing the Bible to be interpreted and understood within the shared ecumenical context of the whole church.
Lose sight of that, and we are soon off the road leading to Bethlehem, and onto a sectarian byway that invariably runs into the sand, or we're back up on the balcony. That doesn't mean the Bible doesn't speak to me directly as an individual. Of course it does, but as an individual whose pilgrimage is a shared understanding, experience, and growth towards maturity within the whole Christian community to which I belong.
Within the breadth and depth of this community, embedded in the world, the Bible lights the way to Christ, bears witness to Him. If I'm allowed to mix metaphors, in the words of Martin Luther, the Bible is the swaddling clothes in which the Christ child is wrapped. Here's a hymn that I think says it all fairly well, “Lord, Thy Word Abideth.”
So, they've set out, they've followed the star, and next thing we know the Magi are standing before Herod. Not surprising, perhaps, for it’s Jerusalem and the Royal Palace where they might have expected to find the object of their search. But Herod's palace is the last place where they're going to find this king. Herod, who was out to do him in, a possible rival to the throne. In the journey of the Magi, Herod represents a diversion. The Magi get sidetracked and end up in the wrong place.
James Plunkett, in his book on Irish places and history, “The Gems She Wore,” tells a harrowing story. There was a time during his life when he lived in an isolated cottage in Connemara. He had rented the cottage from a man who, as he puts it, had an air about him which set him apart.
One night, James Plunkett sat and listened to his story.
“He said that at one time long ago his father and mother and six brothers and sisters lived together in that small cottage and were happy. Then one by one the others went to America, and he was left alone with his father and mother.
Then his father died, then his mother. He was alone. At first, he used to lie awake and alone at nights and prayed to his father and mother to talk to him.
Nothing happened. He thought at first it was God who would not allow it, so he prayed to God to let one of them come to him just for one brief moment. He asked God to have pity on his great loneliness, but nothing happened.
Night after night he prayed, and night after night in the silence between his prayers he heard nothing, only the ticking of the clock and the creak of ash in the dying fire. Until one night it became so unendurable he rose again undressed. Something drew him to the graveyard.
He stood at the grave and entreated his mother and father to speak to him. Nothing happened, nothing stirred in the little graveyard, nothing at all. It was as he listened to the nothingness that made no response, no matter how hard he implored and begged and wept.
The thought for the first time came to him that there was nothing to beg from. He was talking to nothing. If God were there, he would have let his mother or father come.
If his father and mother were there, they would have come in spite of God, because they would have known how he was suffering, and they loved him before everything. He did not blame God. He was not there.
He did not blame his parents. They were not there either. In the graveyard that night he found out that beyond the little span of years granted to each man and woman, there was only silence and emptiness.
Instead of God and heaven, there was only absence and a void.
That was the story he told me at his fireside in Connemara. He had worked it out long ago, he said, for right or for wrong, and it set him apart.
Greater than the lonely acres of bog and lake which surrounded him was the loneliness squeezed into the little space of his heart.”
It's a tragic story, isn't it? Full of Irish melancholy. I must confess I can understand this kind of agnosticism, and I think sometimes we fail to appreciate its honesty, though I suspect there's a bit of it in all of us.
I know there certainly is in me, but the real tragedy for me is that somewhere along the way this lonely man got sidetracked. In his search for God, he was diverted and ended up in the wrong place. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” And it's so easy to get off the road and wander down the dead ends of religious inwardness, or self-centred piety, or illusory holiness, of moribund laws and doctrines, to get sidetracked in the quest of God. So easy.
However, the Magi were nothing if not dedicated to their search. So, they came at last to Bethlehem, to the place where the young child was, and entering the stable presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
But it's about here that I begin to feel uneasy. It's this ipso facto happy ending. The Magi, finding the King, returned to Persia and lived happily ever after.
The search ended, the journey over, certainty secured, and everything rosy. But that doesn't ring true, does it? Life, the search, the Christian pilgrimage, human experience, just aren't like that. Follow through the story in St. Matthew, and scarcely have the Magi left Bethlehem than the town and region round about it is soaked in a bloodbath, when Herod, in his rage and determination to dispose of any possible contender, slaughters every male child under two years of age.
“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children. She refused to be consoled, because they were no more.”
No, it's not just a lovely story about going to Bethlehem and finding the Christ, and going away again, and everything is right. Nothing really changes, except that now there's a Christmas Tree in the corner of the room, and for a few days every year people are nice to one another. No, no, there's something revolutionary here, something we haven't really understood yet. How does the Gospel put it? “This child is for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and a sword, a sword will pierce your own soul also.”
That's why Eliot ends his poem, with which we began, as he does, and I have a feeling he's a lot nearer to the biblical meaning of this journey of the Magi, than perhaps a lot of our Christmas romance.
“All this was a long time ago, I remember, and I would do it again, but set down this, set down this, where we led all that way for birth or death. There was a birth, certainly, we had evidence, and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different. This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death. We returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.”
I'm reminded of two other travellers at the very end of the Gospel story. They had set out too to search for the Christ, and for a short time they thought they'd found him, but it all seemed now a terrible, sick joke, for they'd seen all their hopes and beliefs nailed with him on a criminal's cross on the garbage dump outside Jerusalem.
Now they were on their way back home along the road to Emmaus, utterly dejected, a violent and bloody end this to everything, “Where we led all that way for death. Faith, you have made fools of us!” But as the evening dusk gathered, they became aware of another presence with them. The stranger began to explain to them the events of the past few days and offered an amazing interpretation of them within the light of the Old Testament. As the darkness deepened, so too the light increased. They began to understand something of the meaning of this crucifixion, and something about the person of this stranger who walked with them, until at last in their village home he broke with them, and they knew him to be Jesus.
Suddenly faith revealed it secret. This death was birth. This end was the beginning. Their search for the Christ ended to begin with this, the experience that the Christ had found them. The meaning of the journey then is that as we seek Him, we discover ourselves to be found by Him. We've been walking in His company all the time. He's on the road with us.
To come through faith to see that is to find God.
Blaise Pascal, that French genius, sums up this paradox of the seeker with words that spring from the centre of his own spiritual pilgrimage.
“Thou wouldst not seek me hadst thou not already found me.”
And now a prayer.
“Our Father, we thank you that you have revealed yourself to us in Jesus Christ, your Son, so that we don't have to seek you as those who are without light, but rather as those for whom the light has shone into the darkness, and the darkness hasn't overcome it.
And we thank you that our search itself is an intimation of your presence with us.
Son of our souls, abide with us throughout our lives until the light becomes greater and the shadows depart.
Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Amen.”
Friday, 18 April 2025
McMaster Street
Fragment of private, autobiographical recording by Rev R D Drysdale, remembering his childhood in East Belfast.
McMaster Street, Belfast
Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing, testing…
I grew up in East Belfast. Our house was in McMaster Street on the lower Newtownards Road, in the heart of Ballymacarrett.
We considered our street superior over the other streets around, because we had houses with attics. McMaster Street opens onto the main road, opposite St Patrick's Church of Ireland parish church. Our family, however, were Presbyterians, and had little contact with the big church at the end of our street.
We lived under the shadow of the shipyard gantries, now sadly gone with the decline in shipbuilding in Belfast. Almost every working man in the local area was employed in Harland and Wolff Shipyard, or the aircraft factory at Short Brothers in Harland. My father worked at Short’s, but being paid off seemed to hang like a cloud over the workforce in those days.
It was hardly surprising, because a worker in the yard or at the aircraft factory could be given their cards at a moment's notice. They could go out in the morning to their work and come home in the evening redundant. Workers had fewer rights in the 1940s and 50s than they do now.
At one end of our street was the Masonic Hall, still there today. As children we played football with goalposts chalked on the Masonic wall. Too often we missed a target and ended up putting the ball through a window.
The caretaker would emerge and send us scattering for home with dire threats of what he would do to us if he caught us playing there again. The next day we were back playing as usual. He never caught any of us. He had no chance against fleet-footed youngsters.
Outside our house was a streetlight. As evening drew in, the lamplighter came along to light the gas mantle which gave a pale-yellow glow in the dark street. We had to dodge the lamplighter too, who threatened us with all sorts of punishments. The reason we also made an enemy of the lamplighter was because a favourite game was swinging on the lamp with a rope. This shook the lamp's standard and often broke the fragile glass mantle.
Advent Rev R D Drysdale (Personal Recording)
At home recording of a sermon on the theme of Advent.
Rev R D Drysdale (Circa 1979)
Advent
Well, I don't know what it's like in your part of the world, but here in Northern Ireland it's spring, a marvellous, resilient, sappy time of year. For I live in Belfast. Along these streets and avenues, the cherry blossom trees are in full bloom and the gardens are coming alive again after the harder, colder days of winter.
Mind you, I don't feel quite as romantic and poetic about it all when the weekly chore of cutting the grass around my own house has to be done. Spring, alas, also has its drawbacks.
The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells a story that seems to me to capture this springtime miracle perfectly.
During a period of his life when he was exiled to a remote part of northern Russia, he together with others was set to felling trees and then chopping them up into logs. For a whole year some of the logs had lain out, exposed to the bitter, cold winter months. But come the Spring, when the men returned to saw the logs into smaller sizes, one elm log they discovered hadn't given up.
In fact, there was a fresh green shoot sprouting from it, a sign of survival, of hope and of promise, a whole new tree even in the making. The men placed the log on the sawing horse, but somehow even those tough and hardened prisoners couldn't bring themselves to cut into it. “How could we?” asked Solzhenitsyn. “That log cherished life as dearly as we did. Indeed, its urge to live was even greater than ours.”
Faith in God, it seems to me, is always a bit like that. It has to struggle for survival.
Faith in the sense of a providential care over our lives, a sense of knowing ourselves to be grasped and held by something which is not of ourselves, and which we also recognise to be for our good. Such faith in a world like ours isn't easy. It must struggle towards growth, like that tender shoot on the elm log.
It has to grow through many winters of doubt and the unanswered and unanswerable questions constantly being thrown up by our human experience, an experience which has to wrestle with the mysteries of life in this world, with man's inhumanity to man, with terminal diseases, with the yawning gap between rich and poor, with tragedies like Bhopal and the starving multitudes of North Africa, and with the unproven and unprovable existence of God in the middle of it all. But faith in God is the courage which says again and again, nevertheless, “I believe.” And without faith, struggling to grow within our souls, what have we? What are we? Physical husks, eating, sleeping, making love, working, competing, getting older, and dying at last, dust to dust.
Faith in a goodness, a divine love, at the heart of things is often, as Jesus described it, like a tiny seed struggling to grow, and yet capable of becoming a flower that splits the rock. For faith is the tender shoot born of the conviction that we are something more than just flesh and blood, that we're not just children of humanity, but children of God.
At the heart of Advent then, as I've said, we come up against this great paradox, this apparent contradiction, the Creator revealing himself in an obscure birth, in a remote corner of this earth, at a place called Bethlehem.
The message is staggering. Little wonder our words fall apart when we try to describe it, or our minds just give out when we try to understand it. Yet it can grasp us, this thing that we can't grasp.
And so, for just a little while now, I want us to allow that to happen, to simply allow ourselves to be confronted and addressed by this supreme paradox, that in Jesus Christ we encounter both the God who remains hidden from us, and yet drawn near to us. So, let's hunt this paradox for a little while and see where it leads us.
In Jesus Christ we meet with both the mystery of God and his accessibility.
If we had lived around Galilee all those years ago and had, let's say, followed Jesus down the street or along the lake shore, we'd have noticed nothing exceptional about him. Lots of people didn't. And if we'd ask someone, who's that man over there? Do you imagine anyone would have said, that's not a man, that's God.
And even if they had, would we have believed them? “Old Ezra is going astray in the head…” we'd be more likely to tell the next-door neighbour, “…he's beginning to hallucinate. Imagine that carpenter from Nazareth is God, I ask you!” And just to confirm our opinion about poor old Ezra's premature senility, if we managed to listen to Jesus himself, we'd hear him talking about God, and more in his prayers, we'd hear him talking to God, calling him, “Father.”
In Jesus' own awareness then, God was quite distinct and separate from himself. So that even when we look at Jesus close up, as it were, the mystery of God isn't removed. The enigmatic nature of God's presence in the world and His coming among us through the event of the Christ continues to puzzle us.
The mystery of God remains. Indeed, if anything, Advent simply serves to heighten it. And it's something I'm sure we should never lose sight of, so that our talk about God should never become too flippant, too casual, too matter of fact.
Christian faith, with its symbols and rituals, reminds us of this, that sometimes we need to be still and just acknowledge that we've nothing to say, no light to cast on the mystery, no way of resolving the paradox. In this sense, it's always Advent. God is always coming.
We can't speak unreservedly of an open arrival. The trouble is that we live in an age that much of the time can't abide mystery. The spirit of our generation is one that wants everything exposed, laid open to view, the public view. The cameras are everywhere. It's a profane age. Too often it takes the sacred and the mysterious and profanes it. Self-assertion is the spirit of our time. We've all but lost what it is to be reticent. So, the very name Christ is on many people's lips a profanity rather than an expression of mystery. We vulgarise the very things we ought to reverence. We try to reduce religion down to our secularised values, down to what we can handle, turning the mystery of God into a superstar. And slowly, imperceptibly, we remove the voice of angels from the Christian message, or at least we remove from our lifestyle the capacity to hear it.
Yet the truth is that without this dimension of the beyond and the inexplicable, we can't even begin to hear the Advent message for what it is, the message that preserves the mystery of God. “Take the shoes off your feet,” the Divine Presence ordered Moses, “for you are standing on holy ground.” Advent is a salutary reminder in an age of hobnailed boots that there are times when we ought to tread slowly, softly.
There is however, as I've suggested, the other side of Advent, the other part of the paradox, that in Jesus Christ we not only encounter the mystery of God, but also the accessibility of God. Had we continued to follow Jesus down the street or along the lakeshore, to revert to our earlier flight of imagination, we'd have been aware of something else, as well as His ordinary humanness. We'd have been struck by His authority.
We'd have felt, as others apparently did, that here was someone who spoke not as man speaks. We'd have been forced to wonder at the things He did, the lame made to walk, the blind to see, lepers cleansed, and people crippled in spirit by sin and guilt set free, gloriously free. And when it was all over and He'd been crucified, and yet His presence remained still with those who were his disciples, so that they confessed Him as their risen Lord, and more than that, went out in the power of His presence with them and turned the world upside down, in the light of all this, we'd either have to dismiss it all as some kind of hocus-pocus, or lift our eyes away from all these strange events running back from an empty tomb in Jerusalem to a stable manger in Bethlehem, to lift up our eyes and see God.
See God behind the authority of this Nazarene carpenter. God so at work in this man Jesus, and Jesus so identified with God, that His will and that of His father's were one to the point that we could say, as the New Testament does, God was in Christ. And then we'd begin to understand how Jesus, with what would appear as arrogance in anyone else, could say of himself, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
God making himself accessible to us in Jesus. God drawn near to us. God with a human face.
And that really matters, doesn't it? To know in our own experience that God is down with us in the nitty-gritty of things here, in the small and inconsequential things of our lives, as well as in the big issues of world affairs and human history. It matters desperately to know that God's accessible when we're locked up in a sick room gasping for breath, or when our heart takes wings and we've just got to know who to thank, or when our child prays this Christmas and asks for the BMX bicycle. It matters.
In fact, religion is empty unless it brings into my little world the God of the universe, who's also smaller than the galaxies. When Emerson, the writer, was asked the secret of his life, he replied simply, “I had a friend.” It's really not enough to believe in God, maker of Heaven and Earth, unless we can also penetrate this mystery of creation and find a friend, one to whom we can pray and say, “Our Father…”
To live then in the light of this Advent paradox, to be grasped by it, to be religious in this the true sense of being religious, to live in the tension between this mystery and this accessibility of God will profoundly affect how we live, how we understand this world and our way through it. It means that we live humbly, sharing the same perplexities and inarticulate answers and this silence that everyone else finds before the mysteries of being human and not Supermen, and therefore before the infinite mystery we call God. And yet it will also mean that we live confidently, finding God nearer to us at times than we could dare imagine, and so in his accessibility proving himself to be there, the greatest certainty in all the world.
Interpreting the Times: Rock Bottom (1979)
First broadcast: Sun 9th Sept 1979, 11:30 on BBC Radio 2
with THE REV DEREK DRYSDALE
The third of three broadcasts on the theme
Interpreting the Times: Rock Bottom
Music:
Send In The Clowns / Lena Martell
Bright Eyes / Art Garfunkel
There's a Man Going 'Round Taking Names / Paul Robeson
Is That All There Is? / Peggy Lee
Contributors:
Mark Mulholland
Producer:
Ernie Rea
© BBC RADIO/BBC Northern Ireland
Interpreting the Times: It's My Life (1979)
First broadcast: Sun 2nd Sept 1979, 11:30 on BBC Radio 2
with THE REV DEREK DRYSDALE
The second of three broadcasts on the theme
Interpreting the Times: It's My Life/"Feelin' Free"
Music:
My Life / Billy Joel
Me And You And A Dog Named Boo / Lobo
Freedom / Love Song
Bind Us Together, Lord / Unknown
God Be In My Head / Unknown
Contributors:
Mark Mulholland
Rev Ray Davey
Producer:
Ernie Rea
© BBC RADIO/BBC Northern Ireland
Interpreting the Times: The Times They are a-Changin' (1979)
First broadcast: Sun 26th Aug 1979, 11:30 on BBC Radio 2
with THE REV DEREK DRYSDALE
The first of three broadcasts on the theme
Interpreting the Times
1: The Times They are a-Changin'
Music: The Times They Are A-Changin’ Bob Dylan
Just An Old-Fashioned Girl Eartha Kitt & Henri René
When The Stars Begin To Fall The Seekers
I'm Pressing On the Upward Way/Higher Ground Unknown
Contributors: Jayne Adair
Mark Mulholland
Producer: Ernie Rea
© BBC RADIO/BBC Northern Ireland
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