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Hymns Ancient & Modern - Nunn Andrew

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92 pages

English

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It was not only Mary and Joseph who journeyed to Bethlehem – all the characters and creatures we meet in the nativity stories found their way to the manger, summoned by stars, angels or political circumstance. Each time we celebrate Christmas, we travel there too, and open ourselves to transformation. Bethlehem Bound is a daily spiritual travel companion for the season, beginning with the great Advent antiphons that herald the feast, and ending with the Presentation in the Temple. Each day it travels with a different character from scripture and the Christian tradition – Jesse, Anna, Gabriel, the donkey, the innkeeper and his wife, the shepherds, the martyrs we commemorate at Christmas and many more. The journey had its challenges for the original characters and it will for us, but at its end is a wondrous gift from God - God’s own self in a baby laid in a manger. Bethlehem Bound invites us to embrace that gift afresh.

Sujets

Biblical Meditations

Philosophie et théologie

New Testament

Religion

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	31 août 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786224507
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Bethlehem Bound
Andrew Nunn

© Andrew Nunn 2022
First published in 2022 by the Canterbury Press Norwich
Editorial office
3rd Floor, Invicta House
108–114 Golden Lane
London EC1Y 0TG, UK
www.canterburypress.co.uk
Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,
Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version
Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National
Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78622-448-4
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

Contents
Preface

Beginning the Journey
17 December
And now meet … Jesse
18 December
And now meet … Anne
19 December
And now meet … Gabriel
20 December
And now meet … Mary
21 December
And now meet … Joseph
22 December
And now meet … the Donkey
23 December
And now meet … the Innkeeper
24 December
And now meet … the Shepherd
24 December, 11.00pm
And now meet … the Star
25 December
And now meet … the Cast
26 December
And now meet … Stephen
27 December
And now meet … John
28 December
And now meet … the Children
29 December
And now meet … Thomas
30 December
And now meet … Anna
31 December
And now meet … the Innkeeper’s Wife
1 January
And now meet … the Elder
2 January
And now meet … John
3 January
And now meet … Melchior
4 January
And now meet … Caspar
5 January
And now meet … Balthazar
6 January
And now meet … the Wise Men
2 February: Candlemas, Jerusalem Bound
8.00am
10.00am
12 noon
4.00pm

Notes and Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements of Illustrations

Preface
You need to know two things about me to understand this book. The first is that I absolutely love Christmas. There is nothing really that I don’t like about it, to be honest. The food suits me; I adore putting the decorations up; and singing carols non-stop, as I do in Southwark Cathedral, thrills my heart. But above all I love the accounts of the Nativity that we find in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and the contrast with St John’s Gospel which takes centre stage as we get to Christmas Day itself. The accounts are full of little details and wonderful characters, and we know it all inside out. Except, I wonder if we do.
The second thing about Christmas that I really enjoy is imagining the back story to characters and situations in the scriptures. I suppose this is something of what St Ignatius of Loyola encourages us to do in the Spiritual Exercises. We need, I think, to get inside the story, discover the person, find ourselves there, in our imagination and in our praying.
Put these two loves together and the result is what you find in this book. We start from the point when Advent shifts a gear: that is on 17 December, the day the church calls O Sapientia. It seems an odd place to begin, but starting at that point enables us to become part of the final stage of the journey to Bethlehem and to what lies beyond it in the twelve days of Christmas.
Each day from 17 December onwards you will find the gospel reading for the Eucharist that day and a reflection on it. There is also a character to meet, someone I want to introduce you to. Most of the people you will know. Some of them are familiar characters from the Nativity; others are those we remember on the rich series of days that follow Christmas Day; others have never had a voice. The stories are of my own imagining, though I hope they pick up on what we do know from scripture and history. The book ends with a postscript on the final day of the Christmas Season, the Feast of Candlemas, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. That chapter is written in a similar way to another book of mine, The Hour is Come , taking us through the day and its events in what I like to call ‘real time’.
The whole book is interspersed with prayers. Some will be familiar as part of our heritage, but most of them are prayers I have written for this book which have sprung from my own reflections, my own imagining.
As Dean of Southwark I have had the privilege of accompanying many people on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pilgrims are always very excited on the day when we are Bethlehem bound, when the coach heads out of Jerusalem and through the entrance in the wall that separates Israel off from the Palestinian Authority. The journey to Bethlehem is now much more difficult, and Mary and Joseph would probably not be able to complete it today as they did then. That is a sobering thought as we pass by the Banksy murals on the forbidding wall. But it was a hard journey then and it is a hard journey now. However, whether we make it in fact or in our imagination, the journey is always life-changing, because at the heart of it is gift – the gift from God of God’s own self in a baby laid in a manger.
Enjoy the journey. Thank you for travelling with me.
Andrew Nunn

Beginning the Journey

It’s only 80 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem, not that far really. In a good car you could do it in a couple of hours. But on a donkey, on foot, pregnant? They tell me it could take four days but even that, I think, would be pushing it. But that was the journey that Mary and Joseph made in order to respond to the command of the Roman occupying force that everyone return to their home town to be registered. They had no choice really. Compulsory registration would be a means of controlling the people, not of simply doing a census, counting who was there. Despite the circumstances, they had to go.
Many of us will be attending carol services in the lead-up to Christmas or in the days immediately after. Since it began in 1918, just after the end of the First World War, millions of people across the world have tuned in to hear the famous carol service from King’s College Cambridge, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. After the opening carol, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, with its wonderful solo verse, comes the Bidding Prayer written by Eric Milner-White in 1918 when he was Dean of Truro, which begins with these lines that provide an invitation to us:
Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger. 1
Mary and Joseph made the journey, and we are invited to be Bethlehem bound with them. It is a kind of pilgrimage that we make, one that requires us, not to move physically from where we are but, as the Bidding Prayer describes it, ‘in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem’.
I want to begin this journey – and I hope you will travel with me – from a particular point in Advent. Today, 17 December, marks a change in gear within our keeping of the season in that this is when we begin to use what are known as the ‘O Antiphons’.
It is thought by some that as early as the sixth century a series of special antiphons were being used in the final days leading up to Christmas. An antiphon in Christian music and ritual is a kind of responsory sung by the choir or congregation, usually in the form of a Gregorian chant, to a psalm or other text in a service. These O Antiphons were written for use at Vespers (what we know as Evensong) before and after the Magnificat.
They are called the O Antiphons because each one begins with the vocative ‘O’ and follows it with a messianic description from scripture. They begin on 17 December, a day named as O Sapienta, with this text:
O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other,
mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence. 2
But I don’t want our journey to end when these antiphons end on Christmas Eve. The journey continues, because not only are Mary and Joseph Bethlehem bound – there are shepherds and wise men on the roads as well. So our journey will take us through to the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrated in both the eastern and western traditions of the church on 6 January, and beyond that to the very end of the Christmas Season, Candlemas, celebrated on 2 February.
Each day we will be meditating on the gospel reading set for the Eucharist. They will be familiar texts – but I hope that, just as in travelling through familiar landscapes we can end up seeing something new, so with this journey, that God will make himself known to us in the scriptures in new ways. We will also be meeting one of the characters from this Nativity journey because all of us are ‘Bethlehem Bound’.
It is not an easy journey to make. That is brought out by T. S. Eliot in his wonderful poem ‘Journey of the Magi’. Eliot takes as his inspiration a sermon by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, form