No inn at the room

One of the perplexing features of Christmas is that the popular perception of what happened two thousand years is at odds with what probably occurred: but the myth has taken such deep root in people’s minds that it’s hard to shift. To try to address this, I wrote “No inn at the room: a nativity for adults” – and it’s been fun to put this together with a few folk here willing to act the parts.

There are three main issues behind this nativity:

• The word traditionally translated ‘inn’ should really be translated as ‘guest-room’.The idea that there was ‘no room at the inn’ goes back to the King James version of the Bible: “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” [KJV] The NIV has it right: “She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.“
• Middle Eastern rules of hospitality mean that it’s inconceivable that Joseph’s family would not have put them up when they were in Bethlehem – especially with Mary being pregnant, however they thought that came about. Otherwise, this would have brought shame on both the family and their town. This makes it even less likely that they would have stayed at an inn.
• In a first century Palestinian home, illustrated in the Lego model below, the guest room would have been off to one side – and it is this that would have been unavailable to Mary & Joseph. The animals wouldn’t have been kept outside in a stable, where they would have been vulnerable to thieves: they would have been kept at one end of the family room, behind a half wall, and would have been fed from a couple of hollows in the floor of the family room – the mangers.

Many are better qualified to write about this at length than I am. Suffice it to say that there is a great chapter in Kenneth Bailey’s “Jesus through Middle-Eastern Eyes” and a good article by Ian Paul here.

Why does it matter? The main reason is that I think it’s really important that we have integrity about the story of Jesus. There’s enough in the gospels that is beyond normal human experience (think about the large number of miracles, for a start), that we shouldn’t be making things more difficult by clinging onto things that really are mythical.

In the play, Mary and Joseph are played by Ellen Steward and her brother Gregory. Gregory is at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and Ellen may well follow him (if she doesn’t go to London instead). I was therefore keen for them to provide the carols for this. Andrew Stevens, a retired vicar living in Edington, plays Joseph’s (fictional) uncle Malachi – and did a sterling job, really understanding the role. Lily and Adam Keating are the two shepherds at the end. I am very grateful to each of them for their willingness! I am also very grateful to Rowena at the Crown Inn, Catcott, for her willingness for me to use their pub for the ‘Pub timelord’ role.

From walking the nature reserves to caring for Creation

When I mention to Christian friends that I visit the local nature reserves, I sometimes get a response that leaves me slightly wrong-footed. They may say something like, “How good it is that you can get out into open and worship God there!”. It’s a lovely thought, and I do do that occasionally – but when I go watching wildlife, I’m primarily focussed on watching wildlife and not on worshipping God.

It’s quite hard to pray when there’s a photogenic egret just in front…

The reality is that I find it far easier to worship God when I can focus on doing just that, and not being distracted by other things. Otherwise the praying can be a bit like “Lord, I just want to commit to you… hang a sec, Lord, an egret’s just landed in front of me, where’s my camera, back in a mo…”

The more I watch wildlife, though, the more I realise that I can’t ignore the global issues that affect the animals and birds themselves. A small example was given in my recent blog post about Great White Egrets, but it’s a far bigger problem.

The latest information from the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission is that 13% of bird species, 25% of mammals, 33% of reef-building corals, 34% of conifers and 41% of amphibians are threatened with extinction. There are a range of issues that contribute to these depressing statistics: three major ones are pollution, invasive species and global warming. So what should we do about it?

Vine growing up the side of one of the church’s buildings in Martley; we also had one in Wichenford that grew through from next door.

Although global warming has been widely known about for thirty years, I have to admit that my response then was somewhat bone-headed. I even tried to be a Climate Change denier. My argument was that we really don’t know enough about the Sun’s behaviour and its effect on the Earth to rule it out as the cause. This was a weak argument at best and has since been ruled out – but what eventually convinced me was that it’s not just global warming that’s the problem: there’s atmospheric pollution, for example, which is itself a major cause of global warming. It’s effectively the smoking gun. (I remember the discussion that made me wake up to this, and wish I’d had the guts to admit it.)

Despite realising the seriousness of global warming and related issues for at least twenty years, I have to admit that until recently I haven’t done much about it, apart from using energy-saving light-bulbs and driving a fuel-efficient car. Getting married to Jen has made a substantial difference in that area – she’s much more naturally conscientious than I am about acting on what she believes in. We’ve therefore recently decided to adopt a flexitarian diet, which is designed to be environmentally sustainable without going vegetarian. A major part of it is to reduce the amount of red meat that we consume: animal products (and especially red meat) have a much bigger environmental impact than plant products.

Last autumn, I did a series of talks here called ‘Eyes on God’s Creation’, which was intended to be a follow-up to the wildlife weekend back in June. One of the talks was on climate change, for which we had a really good outside speaker. To my surprise we had half the numbers for that than for the previous two talks. While I was reflecting on this afterwards, one person seemed to put her finger on it: climate change makes us feel bad – that we ought to be doing more than we are – and we tend not to like hearing it.

This has led me to begin to write a Lent course on Creation Care. The purpose of Lent is to look at those areas of our lives that are not pleasing to God: if it makes us feel bad, well, that’s part of the reason for the season. While we’ll often do Lent in a way that’s quite personal – which is really valuable and important in itself – looking at environmental issues forces us to see ourselves as part of a society that is causing global ecological problems.

There are several challenges: to make the course relevant environmentally, while being accessible and not too stodgy; and to engage with scripture in a meaningful way that isn’t contrived. We’ll have to see how well this works!

Refreshment or burnout?

Jen and I have just been to an excellent Pastoral Refreshment Conference, an annual event at Hothorpe Hall in Leicestershire. It’s run by Living Leadership, an organisation which aims not only to train pastors, but to enable them to be able to sustain ministry over many years.

It’s an issue I’m passionate about because I’m all too aware of how often ministers burn out or fall into serious sin. For example, at a well-known Anglican church over the last twenty years, two associate ministers had to leave because of depression, two others through having affairs, and then the senior pastor had to leave, also because of an affair. I am convinced that ministers need to be living healthy, balanced lives – and failure to do so impairs our witess to the good news of the gospel, which is at the heart of what we do.

Mark Meynell, the speaker at the Pastoral Refreshment conference. (source)

The speaker for the conference was Mark Meynell, who was an associate pastor at All Souls, Langham Place. Jen had heard him speak regularly and had found his preaching to be particularly helpful. Then after some years Mark admitted that he had been suffering from depression throughout his time there, and some time after that resigned from his job.

Jen and I missed the first talk on the Wednesday evening (we were late!), but heard the evening session when Mark talked in detail about his depression. He described what it was that had triggered it, and how he coped (or didn’t) with the aftermath. It was a powerful session because he didn’t give easy answers, and shared honestly about the bleakness and blackness of the hardest times. (His blog describes some of this experience here).

At one point the next day, as Mark was describing the reality of being in depression, I wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to pull the series through: after all, the conference was about ‘refreshment’ rather than ‘depression’! I need not have feared because his talk on the final morning was both refreshing and very challenging. He didn’t join all the dots, but he’s writing a book that probably fills a few of the gaps.

Inferring somewhat, at some point Mark took a step of faith to believe that the gospel is true, even though he didn’t have the right feelings. A key verse for him is from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “we live by faith, not by sight” (here) – in other words, if it’s true, it doesn’t matter what we feel. What the New Testament doesn’t offer Christians is an easy, struggle-free life – and Paul certainly doesn’t, either. When he talks about “light and momentary troubles” (here), he’s downplaying the ordeals that he describes in detail elsewhere (such as imprisonment, floggings and shipwrecks: here).

Towards the end, Mark played us a song by Steven Curtis Chapman which expressed his own battle after heart-rending tragedy.

After returning from the conference I came across a very moving interview with Chapman himself, a year and a half after his own tragedy. It’s a very powerful testimony (so much so that one of the interviewers struggles with his own emotions).

One of the most refreshing aspects of the conference was the willingness to tackle a difficult subject. The more healthily pastors can talk about issues like depression, the more easily we’ll be able to assist those going through similar experiences – but also, the more we’ll be enabled to take preventive steps for ourselves.

What’s the most important aspect of the gospel?

As we approach the Easter season, I am reminded of a question that I was asked some years ago, by John, an interviewer while I was in the application process for ordination. Without intending to, I completely bamboozled him with my answer.

The question was outwardly straightforward: “What’s the most important aspect of the gospel?”. I’ve since discovered that this is a fairly standard question for ordination candidates to be asked, and there are a number of basic answers, depending upon your theological preferences – none of which I gave.

For example, I could have focussed on the events around Christmas (in theological language, the incarnation, when God became man in Jesus). Without this, the other extraordinary events of Jesus’ life could not have happened. 

Or I could have looked at the events of Good Friday: through Jesus’ one, perfect sacrifice of himself on the cross, for our sake, Jesus opened the way for each one of us to have a living and active relationship with God. Everything else is a bonus.

The Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, which may be the site where Jesus’ body was taken, and from which Jesus rose from the dead. (Photo © Philip Benshmuel; original here)

Alternatively, I could have chosen Easter, which celebrates the resurrection: the fact that Jesus rose bodily from the dead: the crowning triumph of Jesus life on earth, when he showed that he had defeated both sin and death.

Instead I said, without hesitation, “the fact that it’s true, that’s what’s most important about the gospel”.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” spluttered John, “the fact that it’s true, is that all you can say?”

My point was that the gospel is based on historical fact – most particularly as recorded  in the four reasonably-independent biographies known to us as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – rather than upon myth or legend, or some esoteric knowledge that only the chosen few have access to. I’d be tempted to answer the same way today.

However, if I’d answered the question the way John wanted me to answer, I’d choose Easter and the Resurrection. This is the defining event of Christianity: it’s the miracle that trumps all the others, where even death itself was defeated. All four gospels climax with it and provide evidence for it. The incarnation may have paved the way for it, and Jesus needed to go through the one perfect sacrifice on the cross for it to happen, but it’s the resurrection that is the greatest triumph of all.