Archives for posts with tag: Palestinians

Hope and Ash

By hughdbryant
March 10, 2025 //
0

Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 5th March 2025 at All Saints Church, Penarth

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

2 Cor 5:20b-6:10

John 8:1-11

Psalm 51:1-17  

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=608110117

‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’. That’s what Jimmy and Craig are going to be saying to you in a minute, when the ‘ash’ in Ash Wednesday is imposed on your forehead. The imposition of ashes is a symbol, a sign of the spirit of penitence, of repentance for sins; and also it is a symbol of our mortality – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. You will remember those words from funerals. These symbols lead us into the next 40 days of reflection and repentance in Lent. 

The prophet Joel writes all about the day of the Lord, the coming of the Lord, the moment of the Messiah. It’s portrayed as a pretty terrifying event. The day of the Lord is coming, it is near; a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. In the darkness will come a great and powerful army. 

Joel is prophesying about the coming of the Lord against a backdrop where Israel, the chosen people, have not waited for salvation but they have gone their own way in many instances and worshipped other gods. In Joel’s prophecy, and in the way that Saint Paul emphasised similar ideas, it’s important that we shouldn’t separate ourselves from God. We shouldn’t pretend that we don’t need God, and we should acknowledge that we have strayed from the straight and narrow and we have been sinners in many ways. 

Although the book of Joel begins with the description of a plague of locusts, Joel believes in the end there will be a rapprochement between his chosen people and the Lord; a rapprochement, a coming-together again. ‘Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love; who relents from punishing.’ 

St Paul picks up the idea of the day of the Lord: ’At an acceptable time I have listened to you and on a day of salvation I have helped you’ – it is a quotation from the book of the prophet Isaiah – and Saint Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!’ The Day of the Lord. 

Almost using the language of Joel, St Paul writes to the Corinthians, ‘We entreat you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God, to come back from sin’. He puts himself alongside the prophets, doing a rather similar job. ‘We are ambassadors for Christ’, he says, ‘since God is making his appeal through us’. That’s pretty well what the Old Testament prophets like Joel was doing. They were putting the voice of God into the human language. 

St Paul appeals to the Corinthians to be reconciled to God. He feels they have gone away from God. Saint Paul tells the Corinthians that he and his team have been through tremendous trials as a result of their trying to proclaim the gospel. But it is worth their suffering. Now is the crucial time: now is the moment, now is the moment about which the prophets were prophesying, so now is the time to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. 

If you read these passages while you are thinking about the situation in Ukraine or in Gaza, for example, you might well feel that one of those visions of the day of the Lord, the day of vengeance, the End Time, might be an apt description; especially if you reflect on the thought that nobody is really considering a wider perspective, or a higher perspective, than the relative strengths of the humans involved in any of these terrible situations. 

The Israelis can go on killing Palestinians, quite irrespective of any questions of principle, let alone the Ten Commandments. Is it right to do so? Does it break international law? They really don’t seem to be interested. As they see things, it is a question of self defence; although it seems more likely that it is retaliation, and it is extraordinary that in order to attack Hamas they don’t appear to be worried about killing thousands of Palestinians, at least half of whom are children, who haven’t ever done anything to harm them. 

Similarly in Ukraine, if you are at the court of Donald Trump, it doesn’t appear to be a question of what is right or wrong, but rather the only consideration is that might is right. President Trump and his team have said that Russia is entitled to keep the land they have seized from Ukraine, because they have ‘lost a lot of men in the process’. There is nothing about whether it was right or good to invade another country. 

President Zelenskyy is supposed to agree to a form of capitulation because, according to President Trump, he ‘doesn’t hold many cards’ – or maybe, any cards  (I’m not quite sure what was said, because everyone was shouting). Because he doesn’t hold any cards: again no question whether he is doing the right thing, whether it is legitimate to defend your country when it is attacked, but rather just a question whether his relative strength is less than the aggressor. Might is right, although they do not actually say this. If you re-read the passage in Joel about what the Israelites were doing wrong, following other gods, turning away from the true God, it could be a way of describing what is happening now in Ukraine. 

Joel suggests that, if people repent, the Lord will forgive them. But we watch and we see no signs of repentance: so we begin to fear that there is no way out of this. President Trump accuses President Zelenskyy of playing with the possibility of a third world war and it is believable that a third world war would be a form of apocalypse, that it might be the end of human life as we know it. 

In a way, therefore, no wonder that we are at least metaphorically in sackcloth and ashes over this situation. It shames the whole human race. Is it really going to be the case that we are dust, and to dust we shall shortly return? You might wonder how Jesus would deal with such an awful situation. What would Jesus do? When something has gone horribly wrong, when people have clearly behaved totally sinfully, what would Jesus do? 

This is where we have this wonderful story, (which nobody really knows where it properly belongs in the Bible, because it’s in different manuscripts in different places, and indeed is completely missing from some manuscripts), the story of the ‘woman taken in adultery.’  The very words, in their archaic ghastliness, tell you that something extraordinary is going to be played out. The context is a provision in the Jewish law which you will find in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 22 according to which adulterers were to be stoned to death. 

When you read about all the awful punishments that were used in the ancient world and indeed are still sometimes used in the Middle East today, the true horror of what was being proposed might escape us; but this was a truly awful form of killing, right up there with crucifixion in its cruelty and inhumanity. But it’s not necessary to go into all the ghastly details in the story in order to understand that it is another example where Jesus turns things on their head in a marvellous way. 

Who will guard the guards themselves? I wonder if Albert Pierrepoint, the last British executioner, was a good man who never did anything wrong. Jesus is saying that there is room for mercy and room for repentance. The only thing that he asks the woman to do is not to sin again. Don’t miss the mark again; stay close to God. However awful, whatever it is you’ve done, whatever it might be, there is room for forgiveness. 

That’s the second half of the message with the ash. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. That’s good advice. It’s the best advice. But let’s just look again at the beginning. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return’. Do you remember what comes next? In the funeral service it is the ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ’. So in our Lenten reflections this isn’t just a time for despair: a time for sadness and fear; a time for regret, although we may have all those things; but it is also a time for that sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life. For the sure and certain hope of Easter. 

So even in the face of a world which seems to have abandoned the Lord and to be headed for that day of darkness and gloom when ‘like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes’, even so we can have a sure and certain hope that ultimately Jesus will be the winner, Jesus will be the conqueror, the conqueror over death and sin. So we are invited to return with all our hearts, with fasting, weeping and mourning; but not to do it just for show: to ‘rend our hearts but not our clothes’. Because ‘the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love’. Brothers and sisters, we must not lose hope. 

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Comfortable Words in Gaza

By hughdbryant
October 13, 2024 //
0

If you come across a terrible situation, what does it feel like to the people involved? And if it is a truly terrible situation, what does God feel about it?

We hear about Joshua leading the people of Israel into the promised land, and taking over the city of Jericho, in a very theatrical way, at the blast of a trumpet. It did occur to me that the priests who blew the trumpets, and blew the trumpets continually, must have been supremely fit, because they were walking round the city and blowing their trumpets at the same time, for seven circuits of the city. I have no idea how that compares with the effort required to undertake the half marathon, but I suspect that it is in the same league. To do that, while blowing the trumpet flat out is pretty impressive.

I’m very edgy about reading Bible stories about the Israelites entering the promised land at the moment, because I can’t get away from thinking about what is happening in the Holy Land today. In a sense we are looking at the consequences of the Israelites entering the promised land all over again, in 1948, or possibly you could trace it back to the Balfour Declaration, in 1917. If you want to know more about the history, there is a very good film which we saw the other night, courtesy of Christian Aid, called The Tinderbox.

Either way, they were displacing the indigenous Palestinians and now, in the conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel is to take steps to avoid genocide. I was listening to the BBC Today programme yesterday morning, and I would like to read to you what I made notes of from the programme and from Jeremy Bowen’s report.

Introducing the topic, the presenter Justin Webb said,“Israel’s operation in Gaza is intended to destroy Hamas. Now the medical charity MSF says the bombardment is turning neighbourhoods into uninhabitable ruins. There are still 400,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, the UN says.” He introduced a report from Jeremy Bowen.

“JB: ‘Israel has upped the military pressure on northern Gaza once again…. Just a few miles away on the other side of the wall is Jabalia Camp, where Palestinian families were fleeing on the orders of the Israeli army. Some of them were hit by bullets.’

“A Palestinian, a woman called Manar al-Bayar, who was rushing down the street carrying a toddler, says: ‘They told us we have five minutes to leave the Fallujah school. Where do we go? In southern Gaza there are assassinations. In western Gaza they’re shelling people. Where do we go? O God! God is our only chance.’

“JB said: ’The Israelis don’t allow journalists in [to Gaza] except with the army in very restrictive circumstances.… the Israelis are doing a major military operation. They are working in virtual privacy there, secrecy. They are moving, they say, after elements of Hamas, but of course there are terrible things happening to the civilian population who have already lived under massive pressure for a year.’

“He introduced Liz Allcock, of Medical Aid for Palestinians, who said: ‘It’s been apparent for some time that this has been a deliberate systematic attempt to present an existential threat to the Palestinians, particularly in the north of Gaza, by making life unliveable but at the same time issuing these forced displacement orders, and then when people try to flee, direct targeting of those people while they are under the impression that they will be provided safe passage.”

JB asked how she could prove they were being aimed at deliberately. “After all, it’s a war zone”. She said, “When we are receiving patients in hospitals, [there are a] large number of those women and children and people of, if you like, noncombatant age, receiving direct shots to the head, to the spine, to the limbs -[which is] very indicative of direct, targeted, attack.’

JB: “At the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, the director is posting daily updates from his intensive care unit. It is filled with wounded children on ventilators.

He says Israel is blocking fuel deliveries for his generator and bringing the hospital and its patients close to catastrophe.

JB: “On Israeli TV, … a retired general has launched an idea that he believed can finally deliver victory to Israel in Gaza. The IDF is gradually adopting some or all of this new tactic, to clear northern Gaza, known as the “Generals’ Plan”. It was proposed by a group of retired senior officers led by General Giora Eiland, who is a former national security adviser. His idea is to tell civilians to leave, and if they don’t, to impose a siege. No food or water, and treat everyone left as a legitimate target.”

What does it feel like to be a Palestinian in Gaza right now? Could it be a bit like being an inhabitant of Jericho when Joshua and the Israelites were walking round blowing their trumpets? There’s no hope. Destruction is all around you. What did you do wrong? Isn’t it striking that the voice of the woman from the heart of northern Gaza appeals to God. Only God can help.

I can’t help feeling that somehow we should not be just leaving this to God. We should be doing something to stop this killing and this desolation. We should certainly bring this to the Lord in our prayers, but also what Jesus said about the unrepentant cities should resonate with us, surely.

That’s what Jesus felt. He was looking for repentance, for the minds of the people where he had done the deeds of power, his miracles, to be changed, and for them to follow his commandment of love.

We must repent, change our minds, and change the minds of the people in those terrible places. At the very least we should be writing to our MP to join the calls to our government to stop supplying weapons to Israel.

Because, after all, how hard is it? How hard is it to follow Jesus’s commandments? The answer is what we have traditionally called one of the ‘Comfortable Words’. ‘Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you’. ‘For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’.

If people really believed that, and if they did something about it, then a lot of the suffering in the world, if not all of it, would go away. Because they don’t, really they are like the cities in Galilee that Jesus condemned in frustration. Is what we do better than the genocide? What would Jesus say?

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Jerusalem the Golden

By hughdbryant
January 15, 2024 //
0

Sermon preached by Hugh Bryant at St Peter’s Church, Old Cogan, on 14th January 2024

Jerusalem the Golden

Isaiah 60:9-22 – https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=572149666

‘Jerusalem the Golden with milk and honey blest’. I have to share with you that when I was little and I first heard this hymn, of course I was struck by how joyful and beautiful everything in it was, but nothing was more striking to me than the fact that Jerusalem was the home of my favourite biscuit.

I’m not sure that you can get them any more, but Jacob’s Milk and Honey, in those days, was the biscuit that I really liked. It was a bit like a jammy dodger, but it was oval rather than round. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’. Whatever else this wonderful place had, it had the best biscuit. Also, of course, chapter 60 in Isaiah, which Bernard of Cluny must have had in mind when he was writing our hymn in the 12th century, originally in Latin, had some very memorable lines for a little boy, which the compilers of the lectionary have chosen to omit tonight. We have started at verse nine, but I think you ought to know what you are missing. Here is some of the beginning of chapter 60 of Isaiah.

’60 Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.
2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.
……..’
And then this immortal verse:

‘6 The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord.’

The dromedaries of Midian and Ephah: dromedaries, please: not ‘young camels’ as the modern translation limply puts it. But that might have been all right when I was eight or nine years old, but what about ‘Jerusalem the golden’ today?

I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a slight feeling of unreality when I started talking about childish enthusiasms for particular types of biscuit, in the context of Jerusalem. Equally, the visions of Jerusalem shown to the Jews in Isaiah’s prophecy, on their return from exile in Babylon at the beginning of the sixth century BC, when scholars think Isaiah 60 was likely to have been written, just seem totally different from what we see today.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC Middle East, editor, has written that, following the war of independence of Israel in 1948, and the Six Days war in 1967, ‘the Jews and the Arabs went about their business and the weight of the conflict never lifted. Israelis scrabbled to build a new state while Palestinians mourned the loss of the one they never had.’ [Bowen, J., (2022), The Making of the Modern Middle East, London, Picador; page 45].

The holy places of the three monotheistic religions, the religions of the book, so-called, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are all in Jerusalem, right on top of each other. For as long as most of us can remember, the Holy Land has not been entirely peaceful. there have been major wars, the Six Days War, the Arab-Israeli war.

The occupied territories on the West Bank, which did belong to Jordan, were seized by Israel in 1967: the United Nations resolutions, forbidding the Israelis from creating settlements in the occupied lands, have been ignored, and there has been a constant undercurrent of violence. When Mr Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, indicated that he believed that the trouble had not started on seventh October, he was pointing to the terrible history of violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians over many years.

Specifically in Gaza, in 2009 Israel bombed the Gaza Strip systematically over a period of 22 days in a campaign which they called Operation Cast Lead. It killed 1400 Palestinians and on the Israeli side there were 13 casualties. What is going on now is even worse.

I have been following the proceedings in the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has started a case against Israel alleging that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, and that ‘provisional measures’ to preserve the rights of either party, as they are defined in the statutes of the International Court, article 41, are being sought, which would have the effect, if the parties would obey such an order, of bringing about a ceasefire.

The Israelis have sent a full team of lawyers to appear in the Hague before the court, including several leading British barristers. They say that South Africa’s claim that Israel is guilty of genocide is wrong, for three reasons. First, that under the Genocide Convention 1948, there needs to be an intention to bring about genocide. Israel has no such intention, they say. Second, the Convention requires that there be a dispute between the parties which has not been resolved, and, they say, there is no dispute in being between South Africa and Israel. And then, finally, that what Israel is doing is self defence and not genocide.

Probably the most powerful speech from the South African side was by an Irish barrister, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, who made the most powerful speech [see https://youtu.be/yhsWyBWGoCU?si=GjVSf6PyqnHYEoC%5D, which ended up quoting a sermon which was preached at Christmas by the Reverend Dr Munther Isaac, the minister at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, who is a Palestinian.

The sermon is called “Christ in the rubble.” It is available to see on YouTube and I highly recommend it. [See https://youtu.be/aEGiANa0-oI?si=whdmciTT00C6is-t%5D South Africa’s counsel, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, quoted this at the end of her address.

‘I want you to look in the mirror and ask, where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?’

She produced staggering figures of the numbers, killed and injured, including 9000 children killed by the Israeli army, and a number of quotations from Israeli politicians suggesting that they want to drive all Palestinians out of Gaza and raze it to the ground. Dr Isaac, in his sermon, raised the issue of complicity: that Western nations, that he characterised as ‘the Empire’, (by analogy with the Roman Empire) are standing idly by or even supporting genocide, by providing arms and other support.

Clearly, there are strong arguments on both sides, but one thing which we must surely agree on, is that the current situation has nothing to do with that golden Jerusalem, with milk and honey blest.

Isaiah’s prophecy is so different.

‘I will appoint Peace as your overseer
   and Righteousness as your taskmaster. 
Violence shall no more be heard in your land,
   devastation or destruction within your borders;
you shall call your walls Salvation,
   and your gates Praise. 
The sun shall no longer be
   your light by day,
nor for brightness shall the moon
   give light to you by night;
but the Lord will be your everlasting light,
   and your God will be your glory.’

What a wonderful vision that is. Now all we need to do is to turn it into a realistic hope.

What shall we do to bring peace to the Middle East? I think that bringing things before the International Court of Justice is a good and constructive step. Others have suggested that there should be boycotts for as long as the genocide goes on.

If you agree with Dr Isaac and many other commentators, indeed, that it is genocide, then maybe there should be no more pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and we should stop buying Jaffa oranges. As the author Naomi Klein has pointed out, a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions was very effective in bringing about the ending of apartheid in South Africa. [See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/only-outside-pressure-can-stop-israels-war-crimes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other%5D

As Prof. Vaughan Lowe, KC, one of the counsel for S. Africa, said to the International Court of Justice, however awful the attack on October 7 was, 9000 Palestinian children killed, and countless others maimed, and continuing to be killed and maimed, along with tens of thousands of their mothers, cannot under any circumstances be justified as self defence. [See the verbatim record at https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240111-ora-01-00-bi.pdf%5D

Let us pray.

Let us pray to you Lord, that your will be done and that you will bring about peace in your Holy Land, and in particular, in Gaza, today.

Amen.

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Milk and Honey for Dromedaries

By hughdbryant
May 1, 2018 //
0

Sermon for Evensong on the Fourth Sunday after Easter, 29th April 2018

Isaiah 60:1-14, Revelation 3:1-13

I’m not sure whether Jerusalem is a good thing. ‘Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest’: as some of you will know, always puts me in mind of my favourite biscuit when I was little: Huntley and Palmer’s Milk and Honey biscuit, which was a bit like a superior jammy dodger. No, what I have in mind now is that the idea of Jerusalem covers all sorts of things. It is a place: for sure it is a place today, which President Trump has designated as the place where the United States will have its embassy, as though it were the capital of Israel – although it isn’t. There is the place in ancient times which Isaiah, the third of the three authors who together make up the book of the prophet Isaiah, writing in the sixth century before Christ, made the more or less mythical capital of the promised land, the city of the Lord, the ‘Zion’ of the holy one of Israel. Zion is the name of the hill on which the city of David, the centre of Jerusalem, was built. It was the place for the temple and was, in a sense, where God lived.

So it goes on to have a meaning as the heavenly city, the kingdom of heaven; which is the idea in our reading from Revelation. ‘Him that overcometh’, the elect, the chosen ones, ‘him … will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, … and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is the new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God’. We still talk about people being ‘pillars’, ‘pillars of the church’. They are the stalwarts, the usual suspects, on the PCC and Deanery Synod.

That mythical new Jerusalem was adopted by William Blake, of course, in his great hymn,” And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green? … I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, until we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’

In some ways that all sounds very admirable and harmless. The picture in Isaiah of the holy city, ‘The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense’ is a wonderful picture. You may wonder, of course, what a dromedary is. And I have to tell you that Hilaire Belloc, in his ‘Bad Child’s Book of Beasts’ gets the dromedary completely wrong. He says,

The Dromedary is a cheerful bird:

I cannot say the same about the Kurd.

Hilaire Belloc, Complete Verse, collected edition (1954), reprinted 1991, London, Pimlico, p.237 n

A Kurd, you know, people who live on the borders between Turkey and Iraq: Kurds, not animals at all! But also, dromedaries are not birds, not birds at all. They are a sort of small camel. Mind you, The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts is probably not a good source of zoological information. I can’t resist reading you what Hilaire Belloc says about the tiger, just before the entry about the dromedary. It comes after his description of the lion.

The Tiger on the other hand, is kittenish and mild,

He makes a pretty playfellow for any little child;

And mothers of large families (who claim to common sense)

Will find a Tiger well repay the trouble and expense.

Oh dear. Well, Isaiah correctly thought of dromedaries as a species of camel. ‘The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah’. Everyone will come to the holy city, not only the Jews but also the Gentiles: ‘The Gentiles shall come to thy light.., the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.’

‘Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.’

This is a clue to the problem which I want to go into now. It’s the idea of a homeland or nationality; it’s a very strong idea in many people. Scotsmen go all over the world but keep their Scottishness; they always celebrate St Andrew’s Night and Burns Night. But nationality is not an entirely benign idea. The problem seems to come when people are on the move. Obviously, as we are in church, we can think of the Jews, the people of Israel, leaving the land of Egypt and the land of Babylon –

‘By the waters of Babylon

We sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion.’ Psalm 137.

They longed for the Promised Land. Then, as we know, the promised land story was effectively repeated, but without any parting of the Red Sea or anything, following the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Palestine was declared to be a national home for the Jews – and there’s been trouble ever since, between the Israelites and the people they displaced, the Palestinians.

In this country, maybe William Blake’s new Jerusalem has to some extent already been built. I noticed that an MP called Kemi Badenoch, whose parents were Nigerian, was saying on ‘Any Questions’ on Friday that she thought that Britain was a very attractive country for people to come to and settle in; and that we are a welcoming people. I have to say, having heard the awful stories of what has happened to many of the ‘Windrush people’, I thought she was being rather generous; but nevertheless, the idea is there. It seems to be a similar one to the one in Isaiah: that if we have ‘built Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land’, then not only the Israelites, but also the Gentiles will be welcome to it:

‘.. thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night’

so presumably that means that not only the people who were born here, but also other people from outside – in this context, the ‘Gentiles’ – should be able to get into the Holy City.

But then again, perhaps the Holy City is spiritual, a spiritual concept rather than a literal, physical one, so we should rather look at the sort of vision that St John the Divine shares with us in Revelation. A place for the people who prove worthy of salvation:

‘Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world..’

If you are one of the saved, then you are going to be welcome in the City of God, new Jerusalem. This new Jerusalem is in heaven, or it ‘comes down from heaven’. I think that, as soon as you see the word ‘heaven’, it’s a signal that this is a spiritual concept rather than a literal, physical one.

The Son of Man, Jesus, appearing to St John the Divine, telling him to write down his letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, is a sort of preparation for the Day of Judgement. Watch out! ‘I know thy works’. You aren’t everything that you’re cracked up to be. Be careful, if you want to go to the new Jerusalem.

So I wonder whether the idea of the new Jerusalem resonates with us at all today. Is it in ‘England’s green and pleasant land’? If so, are the Gentiles allowed in – with their camels and dromedaries, bringing their gold and silver? Who are the ‘Gentiles’ today? Are they just us, who happen not to be Jewish? or should we be like the church at Philadelphia – by the way, you know what ‘Philadelphia’ means in Greek: it means ‘brotherly love’ or ‘brotherly affection’ – and of course that includes sisters too. Αδελφός means a brother, and αδελφή a sister, so Φιλαδέλφεια means brotherly or sisterly love.

So are we going to be like the people in Philadelphia? Although they have ‘a little strength’, they’re not very strong, they have ‘kept my word’ and have not ‘denied my name’. They will be welcome in the new Jerusalem. We know what we have to do. Open the gates!

L

Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized