There was a time when liturgical purists would criticise churches where Christmas carols were sung before Christmas. School nativity plays, however, with hosts of sparkling four-year-old angels and shepherds in tea-towel headdress won the day, and long years later parents and grandparents treasure memories of those happy occasions. There is nonetheless danger if we focus only on the nativity scene and over-sentimentalise the baby Jesus. How often do we hear people say that Christmas is for the children and we can agree up to a point perhaps? But a Christmas that is only for children and about children is not the Christmas of Christianity; Advent insists that this is serious business for everyone.
In tomorrow’s gospel reading we hear John the Baptist’s blunt message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” He anticipates the coming of Jesus; an event of world significance is about to take place and people need to pay attention.
Peace and harmony
But what is meant by terms like the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God? Essentially it is about a new world order where God’s rule prevails – the new heaven and the new earth that the Bible talks about. In the Old Testament reading the prophet Isaiah paints a word-picture of what that might mean: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”
He envisages an end to rivalry in nature and society, a shared existence where hospitality replaces hostility and prey and predator live peacefully together; the peoples of the world united in peace and harmony.
Recent political developments in America and Britain and trends elsewhere suggest that significant numbers of people, many claiming to be Christians, hold a contrary view. They define themselves by what they are not: Jewish, Muslim, Black, Hispanic, immigrant, etc. This white man’s disease – the master-race syndrome – is by no means new. Albert Schweitzer, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, confronted it a century ago. Franco-German by background, he was born in 1875, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He was very accomplished and quickly acquired an international reputation as a theologian, musician and philosopher. But Schweitzer was appalled at the racist mindset of white Europeans (there’s nothing new about it) towards the African peoples not only by centuries of enslavement but by the ruthless exploitation of their continent by competing colonial powers. He wrote ,“If all this oppression and all this sin and shame are perpetrated under the eye of the German God, or the American God, or the British God, and if our states do not feel obliged first to lay aside their claim to be ‘Christian’ – then the name of Jesus is blasphemed and made a mockery.” He abandoned his comfortable, professional lifestyle, trained as a doctor and moved to Lambaréné in Gabon in west Africa to care for the sick.
Schweitzer believed that Christianity was the answer to the world’s troubles but only if individuals lived it. “The miracle must happen in us before it can happen in the world. We dare not set our hope on our own efforts to create the conditions of God’s kingdom in the world. We must indeed labour for its realisation. But there can be no kingdom of God in the world without the kingdom of God in our hearts. The starting point is our determined effort to bring every thought and action under the sway of the kingdom of God. Nothing can be achieved without inwardness. The spirit of God will only strive against the spirit of the world when it has won its victory over that spirit in our hearts.”
John the Baptist argues that the kingdom of God is not some impossible airy-fairy idea but an alternative lifestyle bringing healing to an unjust and divided world but he tells his listeners that they must change, one by one. The decision is theirs – and ours.