Pilgrim Soldier

For the whole of December I’ve been reading a wonderful book by Maggi Dawn called Beginnings and Endings. A series of Advent readings that go from 1st December right though to Epiphany on 6th January, they have lit up the wonders of Advent in a way that hasn’t happened before. On 26 December she wrote the following when writing about the way Jesus was looked after after he was born; the way he was kept as safe as possible by being swaddled and kept in the cleanest available space.

“We expect Jesus to be where it’s clean, but he is born into the mess of human life. We think of Jesus as safe and calm and serence, but he grows up to be the kind of leader who has his sleeves rolled up, ready to face reality and connect the spiritual world to the material one. We try to restrain him and keep him clean, but he breaks out of those expectations. Our idea of ‘holy’ is to protect God from anything unpleasant and unmentionable, yet Jesus’ idea of ‘holy’ is to bring the fresh air of heaven into the dirtiest and messiest corners of our world. He will not remain restrained, swaddled, safe, warm and still for very long.”

I love that thought that idea of bringng “the fresh air of heaven into the dirtiest and messiest corners of our world.” This simple, yet profound statement, strikes to the heart of who we are as Christians. You see everything about our task as human beings is geared around trying to make our lives more comfortable.

Providing increased comforts has been one of the hidden driving forces of virtually every step forward in technology. This drive towards increased comfort has been either of the very practical sort, ie transport, or instead to provide increased wealth, which provides the money for us to buy the ‘home comforts’ so many measure success by.

However, comfort poses something of a problem to us. Jesus famously warns people that sought to follow him that whilst foxes have holes, the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. This makes the pathway of discipleship seem far from a comfortable lifestyle choice. Comfort does not easily go hand in hand with a gospel that seeks to reach into the dirty and messy places of the world. It doesn’t even matter whether these places are the physically dirty and messy places or those of our hearts and minds, either is an uncomfortable place to find ourselves in.

Recently, Phil Wall wrote an article on theRubicon that shows how comfort is something to be wary of because of its inherent ‘unrisky’ nature. He also made the powerful claim that,

“Taking faith filled risks within our comfort-oriented lives is a powerful antidote to spiritual impotency. … It is most often within the crucible of risk-induced challenge and hardship that God does his greatest work within us.”

Following Jesus’ lead in this is an inherently risky business. If Jesus was about reaching into the dirty and messy places of our world with the “fresh air of heaven” then surely, as his followers, we should be opening doors into these same areas so that the same fresh air reach those places too!