A Jerusalem of My Home

A Christmas Gift

“Once you domesticate Jesus, he isn’t there anymore. The domestic Jesus may be an interesting fellow, a good friend, a loyal companion, a helpful business associate, a guarantor of the justice of your wars. But one thing he certainly is not: the Jesus of the New Testament, Once Jesus comforts your agenda, he’s not Jesus anymore.”

Andrew Greeley

Hello friends,

I wrote this a year ago, and wanted to give a voice to it again a year later. I stand by it. Wherever you are in the world today, I wish you the merriest and deepest of Christmases.

Martin

“It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.”

Annie Dillard

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the God of the Christians is a scandal from beginning to end. Not was, is. He’s a pill we all find terribly difficult to swallow, no matter how much sugary-water we slosh it down with. Born a fugitive, dies an outlaw. Then comes back. He’s too much. This man will be called The Devil, a drunkard, a glutton, immoral, a disrupter, a friend of sex workers and tax collectors, someone that, according to Luke, favoured “ingrates and scoundrels”. He often chafes against his own family, who sometimes have absolutely no idea what to do with him, even trying to have him put in custody. He’s unpredictable and thin-skinned. Unlike Paul he doesn’t get his smarts from the Pharisees but from the dusty desert retreats of men like John the Baptist, likely the place that he picked up Hebrew, not just the Aramaic of the time. He’s literally baptised by a wild man. It’s not like we don’t have anything to work with.

It's Christmas Eve and it’s been a shattering autumn on the world stage. Right there where Yeshua’s story occurs is the Ghaza nightmare, up in Ukraine Christians kill Christians and it’s somehow justified, a holy war. It’s a feckin’ disgrace is what it is. A horrific, god-awful, shame-strewn nightmare from which we cannot seem to awake. I had anticipated in the middle of this misery to offer some hope this Christmas eve, but I may have to take the long way round to do it. With AI sucking the effort out of every living thing, it may seem soon that the long way is the only way if we’re going to cleave to some sense of what being a real human being actually is. The realest human being I’ve ever glimpsed is also a God, paradoxically, and it’s the untameable elements to him I’m cleaving to today, not just his baby form.

I need the God that a nanosecond after being baptised is booted out into the desert; no synagogue, no Torah, no fretting elders unless the rocks, sand and hills became such things to him. It’s going to be ghastly out there. I’m well pleased with you my son, now off to the Gulag with you. The spirit drove him out into the wilderness, there’s an urgency to the affair. There’s a pace, a tempo; from dove to scorpion in one fell swoop. And out there in the baked, barking, belligerent desert circles the adversary. The moment Yeshua’s affirmed he’s tested. In the buzz of news so bad I can barely stand straight in it, I need a sometimes tough, stark teacher in a tough, stark time. There’s love there, but it’s a whittled mandate, lean not florid. That’s who I’m leaning on this Christmas.

Tomorrow we feast. Tomorrow (or in a week if you’re on the old calendar) we rightly clink glasses and nosh and slurp and sing. If we’re lucky enough to have friends and family around us we should gobble up what light we can in the ferment of this winter darkness. Some of us will have been minding our consumption over advent, keeping meat, or whisky, or even oil at bay. No more. Have at it. Pull as many crackers as you can, crank up Van Morrison, use up the firewood, tell those that need to hear it that you love them.

And so, dear Parish, a little bit of the wild one’s story.

Silent night, holy night
All is calm, and all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child
Holy infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace

*

A baby is warm in the glow of animals and is remembering everything.

He is alethinos––he is the real. Reality has arrived.

The baby opens its mouth in a cave and a dove flies out. It’s going back, back to the earth’s early stretches and yawns, the whittled tips of her mountains, the yellowed fangs of her wolves, the green sizzle of her jungles, the slow way her continents fuse together like aurochs seeking warmth, then break apart like feuding lovers. This all takes a long, long time. So long our minds can barely stretch around it.

The Christ in Yeshua was present before we laid one hundred and fifty bear skulls in the Chauvet caves and commenced to dancing, before flood, before commandments, before Red Sea parting. And Yeshua is there after heavy Roman nails, reformations, both travesty and kindness in his name. There is no quadrant of time he does not abide in. Spirit hovered like a bird over the waters. The delight of crafting the Earth was upon it. The Grail making was upon it. This joyous burning bush in heavy-freighted universal dark. This womb of grain and whale and mountain and antelope.

In this time of savagery and spell-speech it is good to hear again of the three-that-is-one who hovered over the waters. And now, tonight, Yeshua is held in the arms of young Mary, warm in her glow with the vegetative earth around her. For a moment at least the un-ripeness of humans will have to wait.

What kind of God elects to be born into the dung of the world with a death sentence on its head? This one, obviously. Druids and shepherds turn up to give praise and gifts. Let us say a Celtic prayer together:

I bed down tonight

With Mary and her son.

I will not bed down

With wickedness.

Ingather me lord

Despite my wounds to you

Let me abide this night

In your treasure-house.

Yeshua is the name angelic Gabriel gave. Yeshua, deliverer. On the eighth day of his life when the name is given at temple, Anna the Prophetess speaks praise of the child and what he will bring to the freeing of Jerusalem.

It’s good to think of Anna. Anna is an old-growth tree, married seven years, a widow for eighty-four. Never left the shadows and flames of the temple area, but on this day raises her voice in exultation, spiritually diligent with her belly fasted and a prayer always resident in her mouth. And patient Simeon too, who feels the long-promised spirit as he cries out with this arrival of the Light. Put your ear to the ground in that place and you may hear them praising still.

Some say these are the very last of the Old Testament prophets at the arrival of the new. And the ancient Christ is completely mingled with the young Yeshua and grows and stretches into the shape of a young man. For a while things are quieter. It may even have been possible to forget for a moment quite who he is, though the living flame grows in him. It is years since many in Jerusalem had witnessed that high clear star in the eastern sky that the druids said signified a king was to be born.

It is some time since the agitation of Herod and his butchering of all boys under two in Bethlehem and her surrounding hills. Those humps were filled with the lament of Rachel, the sorrowed keen. We remember Joseph’s dream and the fleeing to Egypt, and the return when it was safe. And what of the leaping child in Mary’s cousin Elizabeth’s belly? John grew wonderful mighty, with vocation and prophecy pummelling his not-so-secret heart. He speaks up for Yeshua.

Thunder in the desert.

Speak it John!

Get ready for your God.

 Speak it John!

The king’s road is to

Be straight and smooth.

Speak it John! You can’t be saying what you’re saying and expect to get away with it John. No good deed goes unpunished. Saying to the big men, the Pharisees and Sadducees:

Wriggling den of snakes, show evidence of contrition. Jordan’s water will just bounce off your scales. Sober up and display the fruit of getting wise before the axe takes down the barren tree. There’s one coming with a winnowing fork and clear intention. The good wheat he will gather in his radiant barn, but the chaff he will burn in inexhaustible fire.

I deal in water, but he deals in flames.  

These are desert words, no seduction in them.

We crouch by the River Jordan with the sun on our backs and we bear witness. We peer at the shaggy man, the man of field honey and locusts, a being so uncompromising, so utterly affiliated with his message we barely have a choice but to splash into the waters and cry for baptism.

Not for a moment does he suck such attention into his being but turns his message relentlessly into holy fire, focuses on the coming of the Lord of the Elements, the World Shaker, the un-seducible Yeshua. Belt round waist, a drift of camel fur from shoulder to knee, this is the lightning man of tough, deep places. Like the Green Knight he picks up his head back from the plate it was later laid on and walks the centuries, lifting his flame on sloth and abdication in the human heart. He is peering in at us through the dusking window.

But we are not now by Jordan, but listening to a druid who will tell us of a great commission, to carry the ember of his words from the rightly tuned ear. The thought will become a sound and the sound will become a drum in the heart of many.

Yeshua took himself into the dust of the wilding desert and all the foreshadowing it would contain. Forty days and forty nights he abdicated meat or berries or water or anything. A forty-day wilderness, interior and exterior, crashing and bashing and swooning around him. Not four days, not fourteen, forty. A scouring.

Lucifer sees him there, dried up and belly-parched:

If you really are God, let these rocks leap up as fresh bread.

Bread can’t sustain us entirely. Food is every single word that finds itself to us from the jaw of God.

Lucifer suggests he leap from the roof of a temple, even quoting scripture to back the idea up:

Angels will catch you, not a stone will scratch your foot.

Do not tempt the Lord your God.  

Lucifer finds a high mountain with vast views and tries again:

I’ll give you all of this, just bow down and worship me.

Begone Satan.

Worship God.

Only serve him.

Lucifer left and angels attended.

Soon Yeshua would begin to teach.

This is a man of such magnitude it causes mouths to gape even two thousand years later. He shatters all pronouncements of reality: corpses lurch back to life, weather is tamed, water is walked upon. But stress surely rides with ecstasy in such daily reconfiguring of the possible, such hourly wrenching from the domestic. It costs Yeshua, his accomplishments. Foxes have holes, birds have their nests, but the Son of the Man has nowhere to find shelter.

The man of no shelter tells stories so deep that birds could nest there. The man of no shelter calls to the parts of us that lurk with the dead. The man of no shelter barks at the wind and it changes direction. The man of no shelter can multiply sustenance to feed strangers and enemies. The man of no shelter allows himself to be anointed for burial even before he was dead. The man of no shelter speaks to the three-times denier in us, with the shaming of the cock crowing. The man of no shelter is the myth-world man, walking amongst us. 

No wonder there are crowds. Pushing always, frantic, some in fury some in bliss. Mind after mind after mind getting popped by such vibrational disarray. A spiritual atomic bomb ricocheting endlessly into the gabbling centuries that have followed. He teaches on spiritual waters whilst we park our arse on scrubland and listen unblinking to the carpenter in the boat. He tells us we can walk across the water and join him if we just had a little faith.

And Yeshua wanders like a Peregrini with his troubling thoughts and the people would gather for his words of strange fire:

Blessed are those who recognise spiritual poverty and cry out for God, they will enter the heavenly dimension. Blessed are those who grieve their un-ripeness and say sorry. They will be washed clean and locate a life beyond their years. Blessed are those with a gentle touch and abiding patience, they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those whose hunger is for Christ, that high passion will be satisfied. Blessed are those who exemplify mercy, it will return to them like a tide. Blessed are those scrubbed clean from the inside, this will enable them to truly experience God. Blessed are those at peace with God and bring this peace to others. Do this and you are a child of God. Blessed are those who live openly for Christ and take the consequences. This is the door into heaven.

And they say we need a new story. They say we need a new way to live. It arrives, that day on the mountain.

I am giving my sermon up the hill in Widdicombe church, Dartmoor. The place is completely empty. Somewhere back in the 19th century my aunt Met’s grandfather was priest here. High up in the ceiling, right over where the priest speaks are the foliaged heads of two Green Men, and amidst them Gawain himself.

The Dartmoor gorse, yellow and bright, is the Jesus cloak that gives shelter to animals and birds. The Dartmoor tors, great granite outcrops, are the teeth of my teacher when he tells me not to gather treasures on earth. The Dartmoor rivers, the veins of the moor, are the tongue of my teacher when he tells me to gather up treasures of heaven. The big wild sky of Dartmoor is the intelligence of my teacher when he tells me my eye is the lamp of my body. Pay attention to what you choose to look at.

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green & pleasant Land.

Stay awake lads, just stay awake.
I would prefer a pen not a sword, a spade not a blade, but I’m not up for neutering William Blake.

A Jerusalem of Ashburton, A Jerusalem of Buckfastleigh, A Jerusalem of Pondsworthy, A Jerusalem of South Brent, A Jerusalem of Rattery, A Jerusalem of Holne Chase, A Jerusalem of Hexworthy. A Jerusalem of my home, A Jerusalem of my writing desk, A Jerusalem of my parenting, A Jerusalem of my secret, damaged heart.

All of this falls on me like soft rain, the Teacher helps me descend as much as ascend. He’s always pointing at the earth when he speaks to me, drawing in the dirt. These are my quiet visions, my slow theosis.

Gawp at Christ on the cave wall flushed bright with juniper wick. Christ as premonition in the shaman’s dream-vision, as the healer rubs their astonished eyes then claps their hands. Christ of ochre and leaf and feather and glimpsed from the corner of your wonder-eye. Christ with God as the Earth’s very foundations are laid, as his Father gives order to morning, addresses the gates of death, binds the Pleiades and loosens the cords of Orion. Christ for millions upon millions of years before he was Yeshua. Upon innumerable stretches of time. Christ in the time of Tetradactyl and Leviathan.

Maybe we are still a pre-Christian civilisation.

We are the slumbering ones
As Jesus walks the dark garden:

Stay awake lads
Just stay awake
It’s not much I’m asking

As a culture we need to get rung.

Listen for Ciaran’s Bell, waking up the place of beast and shadow. Listen for Arthur’s Bell, waking up the Hill of Sleeping Warriors. Listen for Mary’s Bell, the kick inside.
Be vigilant for the Dreaming Bell.

We are like Jonah,
Head wrapped in seaweed,

But remembering the light.

We are like Job
Shattered by Leviathan:
I have my hand over my mouth.

Stay awake, Just stay awake.

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