Advent Thoughts - Coming
The new ReadyWhenURKettle is operated by text message. It contains a radio receiver and levers to turn on the kettle when an SMS message is picked up. Tea company PG Tips, who have worked with Orange to produce the kettle, are hoping for success when it hits shops in January. Spokesman Pete Harbour said: 'It's a great gadget that will give people longer to see their favourite TV shows.'
Modern technology is making it easier to do all sorts of things from a distance. We can shop without going to shops, we can confer with colleagues all over the world without leaving the office, we can see our photographs without taking them to be developed. It is becoming distinctly unfashionable to have to make the effort to go anywhere.
God’s choice to come into our world indicates God’s reluctance to do things from a distance. In Jesus, God “makes the effort” to come and share human experience. What Jesus discovers is not a world where people sit in their armchairs enjoying every modern convenience but a world, like the one experienced by most people these days too, full of struggle and challenge.
There is lots to be grateful for in contemporary labour-saving devices. But God’s loving when Jesus came was not labour-saving. Let’s check today that we’re not seduced by modern expectations into thinking our loving can be without effort.
The National Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong Museum in Oregon has a new exhibit – a cardboard box. “Low-tech and unpretentious it may be, but the cardboard box has fostered learning and creativity for multiple generations and in many cultures,” said Christopher Bensch, chief curator. "I think every adult has had that disillusioning experience of picking what they think is a wonderful toy for a child and then finding the kid playing with the box. It's that empty box full of possibilities that the kids can sense and the adults don't always see."
There are enormous possibilities for fun in the simplest and most unlikely things. It often takes a childlike attitude to see them but it’s an attitude people of any age can develop. The same is true of the ability to become aware of God. There are places and times where we expect to be conscious of God because of their religious connotations but it’s often on less predictable occasions that we get a sense that God is there and such moments are all the more exciting because of their unexpectedness.
Of course, a child is fascinated by a box because he or she is able to imagine what isn’t there. It becomes a spaceship, castle or a haven to daydream in. When God becomes real, for example in what we are looking at, in a conversation or in a moment of quiet reflection, what is revealed to us is what is there all the time – we’re just not normally aware of it.
Developing the capacity to have fun will enrich our lives. So too will becoming more open to letting God come to us in the simple, ordinary aspects of our lives.
After Babs the gorilla died at age 30, keepers at Brookfield Zoo decided to allow surviving gorillas to mourn her. Babs' 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the first to approach the body. She sat down, held Babs' hand and stroked her mother's stomach. Then she laid her head on Babs' arm. Other gorillas approached Babs and gently sniffed the body. Koola brought her infant daughter and held her close to Babs, as she had frequently done when Babs was alive. "I had a headache for the rest of the day after all the tears I cried watching them," said their keeper, Betty Green.
Touching was central to the way these gorillas expressed their grief. There are many other emotions touching can convey. Comfort, affection, reassurance, sympathy as well as greeting and farewell can all be physically expressed.
One of the messages of Christmas is that God wanted to be able to express feelings in physical ways. By being born in the flesh, God made bodily contact with the world. Jesus nearly always touched those he was healing.
Perhaps today as we use our hands and bodies to communicate with those we care for, let’s be grateful for touch, for the extra emphasis it gives to the way we convey our feelings and for its ability to say what words sometimes can’t.
“2B? NT2B?=???” is a text version of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Dot Mobile, a company offering mobile phones to students, has hired Professor John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College London, to offer subscribers text message summaries of literary classics and quotations from them. The climax of Romeo and Juliet is that "bothLuvrs kill Emselves," while Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice concludes when "Evry1GtsMaryd."
Such summaries may well convey factual information about what happens in these well-known works of literature. But they don’t capture their full emotional force. For this you need words.
When the fourth gospel describes Jesus as the Word, its writer was perhaps recognizing a similar truth. The Hebrew experience of God had been varied, often very personal and almost always powerful. Yet those who had experienced Jesus in the flesh felt that everything that had preceded him was a pale reflection of God compared with the impact made by him. Even words failed fully to capture the force of his presence - he was best described simply as the Word.
Let’s appreciate today writers and journalists who use words well to convey and evoke feelings and imagination as well as to give factual information. And let’s be grateful for the Word which was made flesh.
It took less than 10 minutes for Kubwa the elephant to deliver her 200-pound baby boy. But, though a month early, it had been 21 months since staff at Indianapolis Zoo had artificially inseminated her. “Many elephants take days to deliver their offspring,” said Zoo spokeswoman Judith Gagen. "He's just adorable. There's nothing like a baby elephant."
Staff waiting for the great day were taken aback at how quickly it was all over. “But now our part begins,” said Judith Gagen. The calf has apparently already learned to stand on a stepstool to reach his unusually tall mother's udders and Kubwa has already formed a strong bond with the baby. But the attentiveness and care of the zoo keepers will also be crucial in these early days of the elephant’s potential lifespan of 50-60 years.
The coming of Jesus was over in a flash when compared with the centuries God had used to prepare people for the moment. But that period of gestation and birth led into a time which still continues in which those who adore the infant Jesus want to work alongside God in making a reality the potential let loose in that stable.
There are pivotal points in all our lives, times when the labour of months or even years comes to fruition, moments which influence and shape what lies ahead. When such occasions feel as though they are moving us on in a direction which feels right, it’s helpful to allow their force to carry us forward. We will benefit if we can harness that momentum creatively. Let’s hope today that that crucial moment in the stable is one which increasingly we and all people respond to. Working closely with God, there’s no knowing where, through many years and over centuries, it might lead.
