Articles - From the Vicar

Dear Friends

Having spent 10 days in Bethlehem this autumn I must confess that it has changed the way I picture the Christmas scene.

To begin with, I always thought of the shepherds up on the hillside, travelling down into the village. However, Bethlehem is on top of a hill, one of the highest around, so the shepherds would have had to travel down and then up again to get to the stable. Oh, and the stable: in "the shepherds fields" today are ancient caves where the sheep were kept and there is also a 4th or 5th century feeding trough for the animals, hollowed out of a large piece of stone. So now I think of the stable as a cave (there are caves all over hillsides throughout Palestine) and the manger as a straw lined stone trough.

But perhaps the biggest change is that I can no longer think of Bethlehem just as a place from 2000 years ago. The "little town" has been replaced by a bustling, large town filled with real people: shopkeepers and taxi drivers, farmers and school children. It has become a place of real faith with real Christians worshipping there each and every week, though in declining numbers as so many have given up on the hardships and emigrated. And it has become a place without sentimentality as I think of the segregation wall that will soon surround the whole town and the area around. It is easy to think of Mary and Joseph trying to make the journey from Nazareth today. Would they get the permit to travel? Probably not. If they were allowed to travel, how long would they be detained by soldiers (carrying not swords but machine guns) at the checkpoint in the wall? Quite possibly so many hours that they would never make it to the inn before the baby was born by the side of the road. So the shepherds (who still walk the fields) would have arrived at an empty cave and gone home disappointed. The wise men from Arabia would almost certainly have been turned back long before they got any where near Bethlehem.

But one thing has not changed. God was man in Palestine - born into a real world of violence, injustice and oppression. Born as light in the darkness - and the darkness will not overcome it.

I wish you all a non-sentimental but no less joyful Christmas.

David

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay