A Holy Land Pilgrimage
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Christmas doesn’t come as a surprise. It’s always, at least in Western Christianity, on 25 December. And, just in case we could possibly forget, St Andrews has not one but two shops dedicated to all things Christmas. But though Christmas comes every year, it somehow has a different character every year, depending on what’s happening at the time. In recent years there were Covid Christmases with socially distanced services, cancelled pantomimes, and rather dismal online parties. This year, we can’t help but see Christmas through the lens of its geography.
For the Christian story is fundamentally rooted in geography, in real places with their physical characteristics – their weather, their landscape, their patterns of family and society, their buildings and forms of transport, their environment and culture. There are Bible lands, maps printed in many Bibles, difficult place-names for unwary readers in church. This is true both for the Old Testament and New Testament; both are full of geography and history: real places, actual times, authentic names. And the Christmas story, of the birth of Jesus, is located in this particular geography and history.
That’s true every year. But this year, since 7 October, the news has been filled with the same part of the world as the Bible, place-names found both in scripture and the news we scroll through – Israel, Jerusalem, Gaza. Maps of the region on news websites may bring to mind those maps in our childhood Bibles. Now I do not want today to make specific comments on the news. But in gathering as a community shaped by these scriptures so full of names, places and cultures, perhaps we can’t help but see overlaps, hear resonances, and reflect on these connections across space and time.
And so the scriptures, poetry and music of today’s service have offered a Holy Land pilgrimage – a journey through the geography of the Christmas story. I took the picture on the order of service of Manger Square, Bethlehem, outside the Church of the Nativity when I was on a Holy Land Pilgrimage in 2010. Faith in Jesus means following the one whose family lived in Nazareth, who was born in Bethlehem, who experienced the environmental pressures of Judaea under the Romans. It’s worth touching on the specific: for the Christmas story is, in a way, about God becoming even more specific in his relationship with the world.
The first poem we heard in fact, A Tour of Ein Kerem by David Curzon, is in the voice of a tour guide, perhaps speaking to pilgrims wanting to see where Mary and Elizabeth, who were both pregnant, met in what Luke merely calls “a Judean town in the hill country.” Ein Kerem is today a suburb of Jerusalem popular with artists. Yet even this tranquil spot occasions a reflection from the poet on other possibilities in these contested lands, the casual and brutal violence which armies indulge in.
And then of course there is Bethlehem, the ancestral home of Joseph a town about 6 miles from Jerusalem. John Greening’s poem Nativity is all about that town:
One topic throughout the whole of Bethlehem tonight:
money – and the tyranny of Caesar Augustus.
A cost of living crisis is not new, nor are rulers who oppress. Greening’s poem really takes us into the lives of those in Bethlehem at that time: finding release from their worries in wine and dancing, dodgy jokes to casual hook-ups. Yet in the midst of authentic, morally ambiguous life, “the Christ child’s first feed.” And we will sing later a prayer that we too go to that particular mixed-up town:
Oh, now carry me to Bethlehem
to see the Lord of love again.
Then there’s Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot. No place-names here at all, yet it’s full of geography: the feel of the winter cold, bad-tempered camels, hostile, unhygienic territory, the strange smell of this new landscape, its trees and plants.
Afterwards, “We returned to our places, these kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here”: the Magi were changed by the new place they went, and by the new birth they saw, and by the new faith which found its way into them. The old geographies of their homes were changed, disturbed by their journey.
When the Magi went home by another route, the holy family also left Bethlehem, also warned in dream. They fled to Egypt, safe from Herod’s soldiers. This of course is of great significance to Christians in Egypt including the Coptic Church. The infant Jesus spent two years or so in Egypt before going to Nazareth, celebrated in the prayer from the Liturgy we heard earlier. And indeed our call to worship drew on the prophet Hosea: out of Egypt I called my son.
Yet while Jesus was spared, Matthew goes on to describe the brutal Massacre of the Innocents – the killing by Herod’s soldiers of infants in and around Bethlehem. Matthew quotes powerfully a verse from Jeremiah chapter 31, from the time of the occupation of Judah by Babylon, the killing and the captivity of many Hebrews.
A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.
Ramah, probably about five miles from Jerusalem, was where those taken captive were assembled before being moved to Babylon. And Rachel, in the Old Testament, was the mother of Benjamin – the name for the district in which Ramah was found. She is depicted then as the mother of all the people there. Matthew finds in her grief from 600 years before an image of the grief of Bethlehem’s mothers in his day.
And the poet Adrian Mitchell reflects on the horrors of oppression and war through this story, Caesar and Herod the examples of brutal force; Rama the example of where suffering in war takes place; Rachel the example of those innocents who suffer in war.
As we have seen, the Christmas story is rooted in authentic places under historical rulers, in a particular time. But if it was only historical and geographical, we would probably not be here today, worshipping the Son of God. And so our final poem which we will hear soon makes the geography universal. In Christmas Traffic, we are in the world of space travel. U. A Fanthorpe envisages Mary accepting a role from Mission Control, and so:
A different traveller makes a different journey,
Arriving hungry, naked, true to instructions,
Docking on earth, taking the one small step.
This is the geography of the Universe: the Creator of all creation, stars, planet, dark matter and dark energy, docking on earth, connecting with our planet, becoming a naked, hungry baby. Jesus was born in a single cow-shed, in a particular town called Bethlehem, to one woman called Mary, a Jew in the Roman Empire under Augustus and the governor Quirinius. But he is a fellow-human being to all humanity, a fellow-creature with all creation, the gift of God to all the world.
God has made his pilgrimage to earth, and we are invited to share in God’s mission in our place and time, in Ein Kerem and Bethlehem, in Jerusalem and Rama, in Egypt and Nazareth, in Gaza and St Andrews, and wherever we make our earthly pilgrimage. As our choir will now sing:
Join the joyous Christmas celebration,
Join the folks of ev’ry land and nation!
Endless the song
lives on and on:
“Born is the King!”
END