Christmas 2020 (II): It was grim………

I’ve always struggled with “Christmas”. Don’t get me wrong, I can indulge in as much chocolate as the next man (more if it is Dairy Milk – apologies for the shameless plug). I enjoy the time off work, particularly after the last nine months of sitting in front of a laptop screen. It was nice to see the dinning room table revert to being a dining table on Christmas day. I do like the opportunity to get together with family and friends, although it is obviously somewhat restricted in current circumstances. But there is no necessary connection between any of these things and the most amazing event ever to occur in the history of this planet, not to say the universe. A big claim. But is seems bigger than it is because it is entirely subverted by what “Christmas” has become. Of course, this suits the culture at large. To my fellow strugglers I want to say that, on reflection, much of what occurred at and around that “first Christmas” is entirely appropriately remembered, meditated on and savoured this Christmas.

It was a short video by N.T. Wright that reminded me that the first Christmas emerges from “a very dark time when everything was pretty miserable”. So if you feel that things are grim now (and the pandemic hasn’t gone away), the true Christmas story, as opposed to the shallow jollity of the popular version, comes as a relief. It is fairly grim too. It is the story of the arrival of a young Jewish couple in the town of Bethlehem almost 2000 years ago. It should have been a happy time for them. Betrothal should have led to a happy marriage, soon followed by the birth of their first child. In that culture at that time, these twin events should have filled both them and their extended family with joy and excitement. And the  context would have enhanced this. The young woman concerned, Mary, had an older cousin named Elisabeth. Even although Elisabeth was well past having children, she had just produced a son. Everyone was cock-a-hoop. In fact the whole thing had caused quite a stir. There was talk of angels, miracles and prophecies and all sorts of things, but facts is facts, and Elisabeth and Zechariah were now parents. But for Mary and her intended (let’s call him Joe) life had become a tad complicated. And not in a good way.

Mary, although only engaged, was found to be pregnant. This was found, as opposed to announced, because Joe was not the father. A scandal was brewing and it was clear what should happen. Joe, for the sake of his own reputation should divorce her, and make a big thing of it. After all, by definition he wasn’t to blame for the situation. To make matters worse from the point of view of many observers, Mary went on about angels and not being pregnant because of any man. You can imagine the sneers. For cousin Elisabeth to talk in this way was bad enough, but at least she and her husband Zechariah were clear that the baby was theirs. For Mary to try and piggyback on this good news was just bad form. Everyone knew fine and well how babies were made. But Mary apparently stuck to her story, and then to cap it all, poor old gullible Joe had started talking about dreams and angels. Again, you can imagine the looks and sneers. You don’t need too much of an imagination to understand the pressure and unpleasantness all this likely caused. In our day and culture it would be bad enough. But in Mary and Joe’s time, grim would hardly cover it.

To social and psychological pressure was then added considerable physical discomfort. With Mary heavily pregnant, they had to travel from Mary’s home in Nazareth, south to Bethlehem. This was a journey of about 70 miles, that would take at least 4 days. While they didn't exactly travel under duress, it was in response to a legal edict. Neither the destination nor the timing were of their own choosing. It was an arduous journey by modern standards, uncomfortable and even dangerous. As well as the constant fear of miscarriage, they were travelling under a cloud of scandal, probably in a caravan with people who knew (and therefore could spread) the “story”. There was a far from warm welcome awaiting them. After all, do you suppose anyone really bought stories of angels and virgin births? Grim. And then there was a birth. The physical circumstances are unknown to us. We don’t know who attended Mary, we don’t know if Joe watched or helped (what was really going through his mind?). We do know that all that was available to put the new baby in was a feeding trough! Hardly an auspicious start. And from there things had a distinctly up and down feel.

Yes it is true that there was a visit from a group of strange, sweaty, but largely respectful shepherds not long after the birth. But, with all due respect, we’re hardly talking royal visit. And neither Joe nor Mary really knew what to make of them. They too had some story of angels, apparently lots of angels. A few weeks later when M & J went up to the temple at Jerusalem as prescribed by Jewish law, they had two encounters with rather sad characters, neither of which were particularly helpful or, at the time, illuminating. They had other things on their mind, like the embarrassment of only being able to afford the “poor people’s” sacrifice for their firstborn. However, one of the ups some months later, when things had begun to settle down, was the visit of well-heeled foreigners who actually brought gifts with them. Some of the gifts were quite valuable. But still, confusing.

Perhaps they thought that now things would calm down. They’d be able to settle, maybe in the civilized south somewhere around Bethlehem, or maybe in a Jerusalem suburb. Mary had recovered from the birth, and the child was healthy and growing well (always a relief in a time when infant and maternal mortality were much higher than they are now). Maybe some of the scandal was beginning to dissipate. But, again, things took a turn for the worse. The local government at the time was controlled by a paranoid brute called Herod. He had got wind of religious speculation that a “messiah” (ie a competitor) had been born. This started a train of events which meant that Joe and his (now) wife Mary, and the baby, had to run further south still, further from home and family, all the way to a foreign country (perhaps funded by the presents they had received). The child wasn’t yet two years old, and he was now both a political and religious refugee. Around the same time Herod sent his army into Bethlehem and the surrounding area to butcher male children aged two and under. Did Mary and Joe hear about this in exile? Was relief tinged with a certain guilt? Their exile only ended after Herod’s death perhaps months later. After another long journey they arrived back in Nazareth. Who knows what sort of welcome they received, if any welcome at all. They probably hoped for a quiet life. They were to be disappointed. Grim.

And yet the real event here is mind-blowing, with big implications for our here and now. A child was born in Bethlehem, in the midst of all that social and practical mayhem. But what only gradually emerged was that this was no ordinary child. It seemed as if He had lived before. Of course He had. Because while a child was born, the Son had been given. This was God becoming something different, the God-Man. What had been promised on the Old Testament, what is revealed in the New, is that there in Bethlehem “the Word became flesh”. It would take Christians about 400 hundred years to get their collective heads around this. They would have to find new concepts to put into words what had happened. But one of the things that can help us in our current circumstances is that it did not happen in a palace or in comfort or in safety. It happened in grubby and grim circumstances. It is in such circumstances that God often works out His purposes.

Never mind light at the end of the tunnel. This is light in the midst of darkness. It is light that we need now.

Life in the Pandemic XVI: The light at the end of the tunnel

The great sulk continues in the actual Whitehouse. The great contrast with the Bartlett Whitehouse continues (yes, I know it’s made up, but I’m still enjoying it). The great pandemic continues. Indeed in the land of the Whitehouse it is getting unbelievably worse. Each day in the US literally thousands are now dying, with the numbers still growing. No slick drama could cover this misery. Or the tearful frustration of healthcare workers at the end of their endurance pleading with people and politicians alike to do what can easily be done to ease the situation. We have our moments on this side of the Atlantic, and have endured our own share of political chaos and incompetence during the pandemic, but it does not seem to have reached quite the proportions of the Trumpian dystopia in the US. However, a light has now appeared at the end of the COVID tunnel.

Thanks to a remarkable effort and a ton of public money, there is now good evidence of no less than three effective vaccines, and slightly weaker evidence for at least two more. These have already been used on tens of thousands of people in various clinical trials. In the UK the first vaccine was authorised for use on the 2^nd December, and the needles were stuck in the first arms earlier this week. There are lots of people who deserve lots of credit for these achievements. Those who pioneered some of the underlying science behind the “Pfizer” and “Moderna” vaccines certainly deserve credit because they have come up with a new way of designing and producing vaccines which, at least in this case, appear to be amazingly effective. In the case of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine (not far from approval now), science plus some inspired guesswork appear to have produced the most usable of these initial vaccines. Because of its simpler production, ease of transport and robustness, this is the one that will perhaps have the most global impact. (Some) politicians and the regulators deserve credit too. There appears to have been little haggling over funding to push forward with trials, and real cooperation to expedite both trials and approvals without compromising safety. If there has been a conspiracy, it has been to advance as quickly and safely as possible, and it has achieved something of real and lasting benefit. And for once those on the outside of the rich, industrialised and wealthy world have not been forgotten. Yes, I’m sure grubby politics and grubbier economics will soon reassert themselves, but for now it’s worth smiling about much of this. But, of course, it is just the start.

There is a world of difference between a vaccine and vaccination. The real value of the work that has been done will only be realised when the vaccines end up in peoples’ arms. There are lots of other people we will need to rise to meet a whole different heap of challenges before we approach the end of the pandemic tunnel. Manufacturing enough vaccine for close to the whole human population of the planet is hardly trivial. Production problems have already reduced the rate at which the newly approved Pfizer vaccine can be rolled out in the UK. And after making the stuff, it has to be transported, and then distributed. For the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this is a challenge because they appear to be rather delicate requiring very cold transportation and storage temperatures, and minimal handling. That's why it’s the Oxford vaccine, which is slightly more robust and happy at roomish temperatures, will probably have the global impact. Once all of these challenges have been overcome, there is the issue of the population’s willingness to bare their arms.

This will all take time. So for at least the next few months most of us will need to do what the media claims we’re all sick of doing. The routine of facemasks, social distancing, handwashing and lots of working from laptops at home where we can, will all have to continue. Restrictions on activities we all used to take for granted will also continue. And if we don’t stick to this, more people will die than would otherwise be the case. Maybe, just maybe, next summer we might be returning to something akin to what we used to think of as normality. The virus won’t have disappeared of course. And we don’t know how quickly our new-found, vaccine stimulated immunity will. So care will still be needed. There remain many unknowns. In reality we have a distance to travel in the tunnel, and the light, while reasonably bright, isn’t stellar yet.

Which brings me to what I’ve been reflecting on. The COVID tunnel is far from humanity’s longest or darkest. COVID vaccines, impressive as they are, are no solution to our biggest problem. Indeed, although they are vital, it would be a great mistake to indulge in any collective hubris about our achievements, before moving on to some other issue. After all, it was almost certainly human activity that led to the pandemic in the first place. And before most of us adopt a smug attitude because we know whose fault it all is (or think we do), there’s plenty of collective blame to go around for all sorts of abuses that have exacerbated the pandemic. Some of the very same things may well lead to the next global disaster. And that’s all before we get to other things like the climate crisis. It turns out that the inevitable progress of humanity has never been inevitable at all. And sometimes progress is not as progressive as is claimed. In economics, poverty abounds and seems only to shift rather than decline (although statistically until the pandemic progress had been made). In health as we’ve seen, old diseases may be conquered (if not eradicated) but new ones emerge. Even although poverty, illness, war and famine are avoidable, we manage not to avoid them. There are lots of good things that we can now do which previous generations didn’t even dream about. But for all that we appear to be largely stuck.

Maybe this is because fundamentally humanity’s big problems aren’t intellectual or technical. Therefore the really big issues do not have intellectual or technical solutions. The nub of our problems are moral, and beyond that, spiritual. The real tunnel we’re naturally stuck in is that we’re just not what or who we are supposed to be. But particularly at this time of year, we remember a light that appeared. And it appeared not at the end of our tunnel, but in the middle of it. It would be hard to put it better than John put it at the beginning of his Gospel:

^9 “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. ¹¹ He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. ¹² Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— ¹³ children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” John 1:9-13

Note to self: It’s time I stopped fixating on the pandemic, and considered again the events that culminated in the arrival in this very world of Jesus, who came to illuminate the way out of this very tunnel.

Providence or judgement – it’s too early to tell

In 1972, the then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was widely misquoted as saying that it was too early to tell whether the French revolution had been a success. It turns out that he was actually referring to the 1968 student uprising, not the 18^th century revolution. But why let the facts ruin a good quip. At the turn of a new year, with Boris Johnston’s new administration (it could hardly be called a new government) still to take full shape, I’ve been trying to work out what to make of recent events.

I dutifully made my way to my polling station on the 12^th December, more or less decided on which party not to vote for, but less sure who I should vote for. When it came to it, I just couldn’t put my “x” against the Conservative party candidate. Where I should put it was more of a struggle. On one level this is all entirely unimportant. We’re talking about just one vote (ie mine) in a safe Labour seat. Unlike so many in the north of England it is still a safe Labour seat. Voting Conservative in this election was a possibility simply because they were the only party on the ballot that were going to deliver on the outcome of the EU referendum. As I’ve explained before, even although I voted “remain” I think that the clear (if narrow) result of the referendum should be upheld. That’s means leaving the EU. I find none of the subsequent rewriting, rewording, rerunning, and reneging on the outcome of the referendum in any way convincing. Even had the alternatives been a lot more palatable than they were, I would still have considered voting Conservative on the basis of this one issue. But on careful reflection, I couldn’t do it. Here’s why.

I have lots of friends in the US who thought carefully about their options in the last US presidential election, and decided for a whole heap of reasons that they would vote for one Donald J. Trump. I thought, and still think, that this was a crazy decision. I understand that many of them wanted a president that would make conservative picks for the Supreme Court and I understand why this is important to them. For others there were other issues like Trump’s support of the state of Israel. What I don’t understand is why these political issues trump (as it were) the demonstrable fact that the Donald is a serial liar, with apparently little respect for truth. He has raised telling not just half-truths (the terminological inexactitude so beloved by British politicians), but full blown non-truths to a finely honed political weapon. He has systematically sought to undermine truth more widely by sowing confusion at every turn. He has branded those who have sought to hold him to account and fact check him as “fake news” peddlers. Words matter. True words matter, and false words matter. I’ve concluded that none of this is accidental, it’s policy. Neither is it because of some intellectual impairment on his part. It’s done deliberately, knowingly and with calculation. It is unforgivable because it is plain wrong; and it is corrosive.

Then there’s the issue of his attitude to women. The “Access Hollywood” tape should have killed his presidential campaign stone dead. He never fully repudiated the views he expressed, and indeed subsequently suggested that the tape is not genuine. The lack of plain human decency revealed by that particularly nasty conversation was exhibited on other occasions during the campaign, and has been exhibited time after time in his conduct as president particularly in his twitter rants. The notion that he could be re-elected, now that his basic indecency has been chronicled, observed and established, is terrifying in the extreme.

I would gently point out to my US chums that the US Supreme Court is mentioned nowhere in Scripture. But a commitment to truth is. Being careful with our words does. Integrity, honesty, decency all do. What Scripture teaches about the role of women we can argue about. What we can’t argue about is the basic respect that all are entitled to, which contrasts sharply with Trump’s attitude that debases women to the level of exploitable objects. There is such a basic disconnect between the values, attitudes and behaviours that we are called to, and those exhibited on a daily (not to say hourly) basis by the Donald. I cannot understand how so much of what Scripture calls for can be set aside, in order to obtain questionable temporal objectives that Scripture has little to say about. “Evangelicals” as a block in the US elevated arguable political gains above clear values that they should have been articulating and honouring. But what struck me on the way to polling station was that I was in danger of doing exactly the same thing.  

Brexit, the issue that nearly decided my vote, isn’t in the Bible either. Things like telling the truth are. We can argue about austerity, universal credit, NHS spending, taxation and the rest.  And we should. We can argue about whether and how we should leave the EU. Of course these things are important. But there are other things that are more important. Leading the Conservative party (by their active choice) is a man whose basic dishonesty over a long period should have disqualified him from high office. Boris has, after all, lost two jobs (one in journalism, one in politics) for telling straight out lies. And there was no obvious evidence in the election campaign that he has any regrets about what has been the hallmark of his basic approach to life as well as politics. This is enough to disqualify him from high office in the estimation of some who politically share many of his views. And while he hasn’t quite had an “Access Hollywood” moment, there are doubts about his attitude to women and family. I know that in our system all politics is about compromise, and if I’m waiting for what I think is perfection, I’ll be dead and in the glory before it arrives. But I only had one vote to cast, and basic issues of honesty, truth telling and decency determined how it wasn’t cast. Because our elections are a secret ballot, I don't need to let slip here how it was cast.

But given that even without my one vote Boris still got his “stonking” victory, did I just get it wrong? Well, that’s clearly logical possible. But I have my responsibilities, and I leave it to the Almighty to decide the big issue of who gets power. His perspective is bigger, deeper and longer than mine. Bigger forces were at work, and always are. Underpinning the stuff we see is a deeper reality of a God who continues to work His purposes out. It may turn out that, in ways invisible to me, Boris is just the right man for the times. Just the man to get us through the Brexit morass we find ourselves in (for which he is partly responsible after all). If we do get out of the situation we’re in with anything like limited damage, this will not reflect on Boris’ brilliance, although undoubtedly political hubris will impel him to claim exactly that. It will be providence protecting us from ourselves – again.

Of course it could be that things are going to go from bad to worse. The predictions of the remainers will turn out to be spot on, and we will endure economic, political, security and strategic disaster. We will never reach the sun-lit uplands promised by the hard brexiteers. In that case, Boris may turn out to be a modern form of Old Testament Babylon: God’s instrument of judgment. We would certainly deserve it. There are many ways in which the culture in which we find ourselves is deeply dysfunctional. I’m partly to blame of course by not being the salt and light that I should be. For all that, although we Christians may moan about the state of the UK, the fact is that compared to many of our brothers and sisters elsewhere we’ve actually had it very easy for a very long time. Maybe the ease, freedom and relative order we’ve enjoyed partly explains out lack of saltiness. Maybe it is coming to an end. I have no way of knowing. 

Time will tell. It’s too early to know which way it will go.