Advent: 7 December 2022
Greetings,
This Advent Calendar comes to you from London, where I’ll be conducting the University’s London Alumni Club’s Carol Service this evening. We’ll be gathering at St Columba’s Church of Scotland, Pont Street at 7 pm for carols, readings, a sermon from Revd Scott Rennie, minister at Crown Court Church of Scotland, also in London, and a reception afterwards. Online registration has closed but you are welcome to come to the church tonight for the service, reception and to support the London Scholarship Fund. Details here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/develop-2/london-carol-service/ So here is a London Advent Calendar, as found on the Fortnum & Mason building in Piccadilly last night:
As for our A to Z, today we have reached H which is for Herod. Herod was the Jewish king in Jerusalem, a client of the Romans into whose Empire his kingdom had been swept. According to Matthew, he tried to use the Magi to find out where the supposed Messiah had been born. And then to prevent any rivals to his power, he ordered the killing of all boys two years or under in Bethlehem and around. This has become known as the Massacre of the Innocents.
While Matthew presents this violence as emerging from Herod’s fear of losing power rather than any religious motive, it is worth reflecting on the connection between religion and violence. One of the most insightful analysts of why people do kill for religious reasons was the late Jonathan Sacks, who was Chief Rabbi. In Not in God’s Name, he makes a powerful argument against religious violence:
Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practised cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamour of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is : Not in My Name.
To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege. It is a kind of blasphemy. It is to take God’s name in vain.
Children and other innocents are still put to death in the name of God. How dearly we would wish these words, and Sacks’ profound commitment to understanding, had been found in religious rulers, many of them espousing Christian faith, over the centuries, and even now.
Yours,
Donald.