Sabbatical Picture No 6 The Baptist Font

Baptists are in short supply in Jerusalem.  There is nothing new about that.  You may find some near an American Pilgrimage Tour Bus (though there are, to be fair, a handful of Baptist churches in Jerusalem).  Baptists might wish to point out that the first Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 2) were practicing Believers' Baptism which basic jewel of Christian truth was recovered largely thanks to our Baptist forefathers in church history.

Commonly Christian visitors to the Holy Land think of being baptised in the River Jordan, where Christ himself was baptised by John.  A minor tourist industry engages in indiscriminate baptism there which I would howl at theologically were it not that in one of my churches I discovered that one of the most conservative, dependable and hard-working ladies of the church was baptised there on a pilgrimage and it had been her key spiritual moment (as well as her only baptism).

The picture here is not the River Jordan though.  It is in the Anglican Cathedral - St George's - in Jerusalem.  Was the Bishop who built this (otherwise very English) cathedral a closet Baptist?

The answer is no.  This is a diplomatic baptistry (the icon behind it is a clue).  The high Anglican Bishop had it built to indicate his positivity toward the Orthodox Christians in the city and its surrounds.  (As most Baptists probably don't know, the Orthodox Church generally practices baptism by immersion, though most commonly (and scarily) to not-yet-believing infants.)

Today the baptistry is used sometimes, though ironically it was built with no real intention that it should be.

Baptist Churches in Britain usually have a baptistry that was built with the intention that it would be used.  In last year's submitted statistics (though the strongest churches can't be bothered with such things as a rule) the 2000 churches in the Baptist Union averaged one baptism each.   So we have built baptistries that were intended to be used and we don't use them.

Sabbatical Picture No 5 A Street Corner

It smelled of urine and dilapidated cars and vans were parked at weird angles on the sidewalks.  Posters were pealing from the walls, mostly advertising gigs. Weeds grew between paving stones.  Washing hangs from grubby balconies.  Was it Hackney?  Or Leeds?  Bristol?  No, it's Jerusalem.

Just a street away from the tram line - but a street away that tourists would not generally take - here is city life in the Jewish part of Jerusalem for some of its inner city residents.  Few would be surprised to find this kind of scene in the Arab or Palestinian part of the city - but here, in the Promised Land??  How easily we romanticise a name - Jerusalem, all godliness and gold.  I venture that few of the home-owning Christians of England would readily swap their situation for these streets, even those who get dewey eyed singing about Jerusalem.

Referencing Blake's poem Jerusalem, standing on this street in the modern, Jewish Jerusalem a dark satanic mill on the next corner would not have seemed so much of an incongruity as the poem supposes.  Never did the importance of a Jerusalem that descends from heaven (Revelation 21) strike me as so important as it did here.

Sabbatical Picture No 4 The Poster

There are few more politicised places in the world than Jerusalem.  The time I spent there was relatively peaceable but 'peace in Jerusalem', despite its Biblical pedigree, seems almost a contradiction in terms.

Mr Trump had visited Israel not long before I was there.  In the UK our Prime Minister invited him to visit almost before he sat down in the Oval office but later reflection has led to some pause as to the wisdom and timing of such a visit.  Outside the USA - and in several parts inside the USA - this poster would not have survived a night, never mind several weeks.  In several parts of Jerusalem it wouldn't have survived ten minutes.  Yet on this and several nearby boulevards it and its cousins hung undisturbed long after Mr Trump had departed West.

Such is the black and white politics of modern Israel.

Will true peace ever come?

By one measure Jerusalem had its chance and blew it.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!"

But the same Book that tells me of that missed opportunity, tells me that the King of Jerusalem will return one day and, following the End, peace will be the everlasting state of affairs.

Make Jesus Great Again.

Sabbatical Pictures No 3 The Walls

The Walls of Jerusalem are very evocative for Jews and Christians.  So much so that on any given day there were odd (I use the word ambiguously) people standing on the current walls reading passages of the Bible out loud to nobody in particular.

There are several Biblical reasons for doing this if you choose to find them  This, from Isaiah 62,

I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem;    they will never be silent day or night.You who call on the Lord,    give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem    and makes her the praise of the earth.

As ever Jerusalem provides far too much complexity for us simple souls to know what to do.  The walls on which this and other passages were being read aloud (in English of course, and with a South African or American accent depending on who it was) were built to protect Muslim Jerusalem by Suleiman, whose famed inscription reads,

he who has protected the home of Islam with his might and main and wiped out the tyranny of idols with his power and strength, he whom alone God has enabled to enslave the necks of kings in countries (far and wide) and deservedly acquire the throne of the Caliphate.

I have severe doubts that the readers are intending to promote his 16th century (AD) plan.  Also, the walls are in the 'wrong' place biblically speaking and do not surround Zion with which in the scriptures they are associated.

But this picture from those walls contains a nearly hidden addition to this story.  For, looking out toward Bethlehem, in the far distance it is possible to see another wall, the 21st century wall that divides Israel from the West Bank.  Whether you are Palestinian or Jew - or for that matter a foreign visitor - this is the real wall of Jerusalem.  It, and the issues it represents to Jew and Palestinian alike, are the real cause for prayer.

Sabbatical Pictures No 2. By the Pools of Bethesda

A plaque tat needs no further comment in the place where it happened.

Sabbatical Pictures No 1 Church of the Dormition, Jerusalem

It's September and I'm back at work so it must be time to start blogging again.  And what better way to reflect on my Sabbatical than with a few pictures?

Here's one:

I was very excited to take this picture because, years ago on my first visit to Jerusalem, it was somewhere that made a big impact on me yet it rarely appears prominently in brochures and books.  It is in a chapel beneath Dormition Abbey on the Hill of Zion.

Amid the typical mosaics of many of the chapels this ivory and ebony chapel stands out.  It was a gift to the Abbey from the Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and it shows the wonderful simplicity of the Christian story that can be reduced to 6 pictures!  This is useful in Africa I'm sure, but stunning in the ecclesiastical, political and religious quagmire that is Jerusalem.

The Church, or Abbey, is singular testimony to the complications of Jerusalem.  Whilst (on the day I visited) it is a peaceful hilltop spot with a very nice cafe and bookshop the history is quite different.  Built in the 20th century it became the front-line when in 1948 the State of Israel was formed but not including the walled old city which is next to this church.  Jordanian troops patrolled the old city walls and Israeli troops took potshots at them (and vice versa) from the large tower of this church.  It was basically a frontier command post.

Nor has peace arrived for this church today.  Being adjacent to the Jewish Quarter has made it a target for graffiti and worse by Jewish extremists.  In a fascinating commentary on Jesus himself, although this building is pretty much entirely about Mary (dormition = fell asleep = allegedly where Mary died) the abuse in the graffiti has always been aimed at Jesus.

Not so much has changed in 2000 years.

Jerusalem's Windmill

There is a green hill far away outside a city wall.  And on it there stands the windmill.  This is not at all what we expect.  It is one thing to find a windmill in the Netherlands or Kent, quite another to find one outside the walls of Old Jerusalem.

This windmill was both a success and a failure.  

It was a success in that it was built as part of a project to get Jews to move out of their enclave in the old city onto the more spacious land outside.  This seems a simple enough idea now, but in the insecurities of of the nineteenth century with about 20,000 Jews in this enclave of the great Ottoman Empire, moving outside the walls was a daunting idea.  With the help of the windmill a colony was successfully formed outside the cramped squalor of the Old City.

Moses Montefiore, a British Jewish banker provided the funds, but its familiarity to an English eye is down to the fact it was designed in Kent.  And that is why it has survived (more later).

It wasn't a success as a windmill once it encouraged the Jews out of the enclave.  The photo contains a clue for there is a Jerusalem summer sky.  Of course it might be blowing a gale with a blue Middle Eastern sky - that's not unheard of, but rare.  The Kentish windmill lacked the Kentish wind.

But as history turns out (and nothing in Jerusalem is ever simple) its Kentishness saved it.  After the Second World War the Jews were organising themselves to form a homeland State and their enemy was the British.  The British determined to destroy the windmill which was functioning as a gun turret.  But the men sent to destroy it found that it had been designed in Kent - their home county.  So they simply blew the top off it to make it unusable but preserved.

And on another hill near the city the Maker of All showed greater mercy to those he had made.

Zion's Gate

Psalm 87

On the holy mount stands the city he founded;

    the Lord loves the gates of Zion
    more than all the dwelling places of Jacob.
Glorious things of you are spoken,
    O city of God. 

As part of my Sabbatical I have spent some days in Jerusalem.  Previous days in Jerusalem had been hurried pilgrimages but due to a combination of plans and unexpected circumstantial changes this time I was had days to explore.  

Here is Zion's Gate.  Like many things in Jerusalem it is not what you first assume it to be - or perhaps more accurately want it to be.  For this gate is, as might be expected by the name, next to Zion's hill but the hill is outside the Old City wall, not inside it.

Walls are human constructs and cause confusion in many ways.  Today's international political hot potato a couple of miles from here is the wall (you can see it from this wall) built between Israel and the West Bank.

This Old City wall had many stories but until 50 years ago this year it had, since the modern founding of the State of Israel, formed the border between that State and Jordan.  The marks in the wall are not the result of weather but of bullets.  The Israelis were outside on Zion's hill and the Jordanians inside on the Old City wall, a tense stand off that in other places nearby required the UN to intervene to rescue, for example, stray footballs and family pets caught between the two sides.

It is ironic and thought-provoking that having (joyfully) dispensed with this wall as a barrier the Israelis have felt it necessary in this century to build another one between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.  It is a metaphor of the human condition - a metaphor written into the First Story when Adam and Eve are walled out of the garden.

God loves the gates.

This is because he IS a gate (John 10).

Bunched

A disconcerting life-fact is the way that the truth of our thoughts comes out a little more when we are wound-up than when we are calm.  My mother has always sounded more Welsh (occasionally repairing into Welsh words even) when she is more worked up.

Yesterday, in the frenetic atmosphere of Prime Ministers Questions (an atmosphere that he himself has encouraged however) Mr Cameron splurged out his collective noun for migrants trying to reach Britain from their staging post in the Calais area.  A bunch of migrants, he called them.

It was part of an insult thrown at Jeremy Corbyn who is unlikely to be much affected by any more insults.  However, plenty of hearers concluded that it was more of an insult to the people wanting to migrate.  There was added poignancy on Holocaust Memorial Day as no other day of the year more accurately reflects the dehumanising of groups of people than that day.  In Jerusalem great care is taken to record as best as is possible the names of everyone who was killed in the Holocaust precisely because in their death they were simply a bunch of Jews.  Here is the Hall of Names:

I am struck by the story told by the Lord Jesus.  (He, remember, was a Nazarene [i.e. one of the bunch from grotty Nazareth] - oh, and God manifest in the flesh).  There were, his story goes, a bunch of sheep.  Strangely the shepherd - the god-figure - leaves that bunch and goes across hill and valley to find one lost sheep.

So it wasn't the outsider that was God's bunch but those in the fold.  Kind of like Ali (who has a degree in Economics and a masters in Business and who owned a chain of supermarkets in Syria) who is on Calais waiting to join a bunch of Britons, David.

Hearing

Not too much attention is given by Christians to the meaning of hearing.

Even as I write that, I realise I must immediately disown all reference to Church microphones and induction loops that plague the peaceableness of every congregation's relationships.  (It seems clear to me why angels in heaven use trumpets and God a very loud voice life the sound of many waters - nowhere could be free of sin that had electronic sound reproduction!).

The hearing I refer to is that with which the Lord Jesus ends many parables -  he that hath ears to hear let him hear.  Lest we take that turn of phrase to mean that everyone will hear Jesus also indicates rather the opposite, quoting the old prophet - ears have they but they hear not.

Serving God in a vast city where, nonetheless, many do not hear I have been thinking about this.  Clearly we who know Christ have to be out there and the past year has seen our church do that on many occasions (but nowhere near as many as the Jehovah's Witnesses locally, let's admit).  There is a telling to be done.

But there is also hearing.  

The picture above is a quotation from John Wesley.  It stands by one of his great outdoor theatres of preaching where thousands heard.  We envy him.  Then we beat ourselves up for falling so far short.  But we might miss what he says - to declare unto all that are willing to hear.  Wesley was a great evangelist partly because he had a great hearing audience.  A Christian in Saudi Arabia or North Korea has very few hearers (except perhaps by media).  A Christian in parts of Africa or South America may quickly amass many.  Jesus did both, with Galilean audiences of thousands and disgruntled Jerusalem Temple or Nazareth sceptics who wouldn't accept a word he said.  Hence his point.

The willingness to hear is not the work so much of the evangelist as the community.  Or more properly of the Holy Spirit who graciously unplugs ears sometimes.