Twinning

What British town might best be twinned with Bethlehem?

Musing on this I feel that perhaps a city twinned with Bethlehem ought to be - well - holy and perhaps very old. We might think of St Albans, with a history going back to Roman times and architecturally dominated by a great Abbey Church and Cathedral honouring an early martyr of Christ. Not very Middle Eastern though.

The most obvious place to twin with Bethlehem has, in a sense, already started. It is a little Carmarthenshire village once known as Dyffryn Ceidrich. The village chapel was (not unusually) called Bethlehem and such was the overwhelming nature of the spiritual revivals experienced in the area and the smallness of the village that somewhere in the mists of history the village stopped being known by its original name and took on the name of the chapel. Hence Britain has its very own Bethlehem, complete with nearby sheep.

However the truth is that just one British place is twinned with Bethlehem. I confess to a whiff of pride as Diane and I are former residents of that place. On the other hand, even as I write this article, my head continues to involuntarily shake from side to side in a kind of deeply disturbed bewilderment. For the British city now twinned with Bethlehem is....

Glasgow.

Yes, that Glasgow. Rangers and Celtic, Billy Connolly, Barlinnie Prison and a homing device for Atlantic low pressure areas. Whether I was climbing over a sozzled seasonal celebrant on the underground, fighting the wind and rain between shops on Sauchiehall Street, queuing in a launderette full of students or sitting in a bleakly dark and forbidding kirk, thoughts of Bethlehem rarely surfaced in my student life in Glasgow - even near Christmas!

Yet thinking on, Bethlehem and Christmas are all about incongruous twinning.

I don’t know what angelic heralds do after a major performance - do they get straight on with heavenly ministry or do they take time out? If the latter then surely, as the shepherds made their expectant way down to Bethlehem to see the Christ-child who was Lord of glory, one of the heavenly chorus muttered to another, "I just don’t understand why He would twin with them"

King of kings, yet born of Mary,

As of old on earth He stood,

Lord of lords, in human vesture,

In the body and the blood;

An April Evening

The first genuinely spring day (as against day in Spring) moves toward its close.  The sun looks like it has forgotten to go down - or at least is staying up late - perhaps to make up for its relative disappearance over several weeks.

It brings to mind something that can only be associated with such an April evening:

Maybe it's down to my male council estate barbarism but this bit of Victorian-Edwardian sacred choral doggerel did nasty things to me.  This has evoked guilt over the years when elderly people have expressed their devotion to it - one wanted me to play it on the organ so they could sing it and some imagination was required to avoid this.

This April I've decided to try to understand myself on this issue.

My initial excuse to myself was the paucity of the performance of a Sunday evening Free Church choir in the 1960s when its finest days would have been its former days.  But listening to this chorally excellent rendition on YouTube convinces me that the problem lies elsewhere.

I like sheep and lambs.  I like the countryside and especially the hills.  I have given my life to the Lamb of God who sacrificed his life for me. So the themes in the song can hardly be the problem.

I have concluded that the problem with Tynan's poem, a problem reinforced by Robertson's mood music, is that it evokes pity for the crucified Christ.  And this is not at all what should happen.

Yes, lambs are pitiful, but the Lamb of God who died was not to be pitied.  Did he not quell the women of Jerusalem's tears and tell them to weep for themselves and their children?  The pity in the Passion is all ours, his is the pain, the sacrifice, the slaughter.  

And the salvation.  It is not of any note that He died between two crosses on a hill: he died between two condemned sinners who were on crosses.  In the end the song takes away the power of the cross and replaces it with pity.  Perhaps that is what I find, pitiful lamb that I am, so pitiful about it.

Andrew's Day

A recent blog I read was bewailing why the churches (in England) are not taking more interest in next year's Scottish independence referendum.

 

I think today explains that. 

 

 

 

Eight people died in a horrible helicopter crash in Glasgow city centre last night - someone remarking it was the worst possible beginning to St Andrew's Day (the national day of Scotland - [and Barbados, see last year's blog]).

 

Whilst understanding what they meant, they are also possibly wrong.

 

Insofar as St Andrew's Day is about the Biblical disciple Andrew it was beautifully portrayed in the help that ordinary people gave to one another in Glasgow last night when the helicopter crashed on the city centre.  Andrew the fisherman was as ordinary as any Glaswegian, and he helped, first of all by bringing his brother to the Lord Jesus.

 

And whether Scotland is independent (as it usually has been) or in a union with the UK (as it currently is) the big things like city centre disasters are what the people of God and the kingdom of God are firstly about.  I can't get excited about Scottish independence not because it doesn't matter but because it doesn't matter enough.

Ted

Dr.Ted Herbert, Vice-Principal of the International Christian College in Glasgow, speaking at his home church a few days before his death and just a few weeks after suddenly being diagnosed with cancer.



Master, You only are immortal, the creator and maker of all:
and we are mortal, formed from the dust of the earth,
and unto earth shall we return.
For so you ordained when you created me, saying:
'Dust you are and to dust you shall return.'
All of us go down to the dust,
yet weeping at the grave, we make our song:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.