Advent day 27. Our Friend.

Music:
Come Thou Long Expected Jesus, Performed by Salt of the Sound
The Pilgrimage Series, Written and Performed by Dear Gravity.


Advent and Christmas are seasons of song—without our carols, it just wouldn’t be Christmas.
Looking back to my early Christmas memories, many of them revolve around song. Singing in the church Christmas pageant, singing silent night at a Christmas eve candle lit service or even carollers singing in the streets. Christmas is marked with song.
Songs are poetry set to music, and poetry is how we express the indescribable.
The precision of style has its place, but it cannot properly speak of the transcendent.
Language that aspires to describe the divine is best done as poetry.
By poetry, I don’t necessarily mean rhyming verse, but language that prioritizes form over function, and beauty over utility. The power of poetry to speak of the divine is why Genesis opens with poetry, why the Hebrew prophets were mostly poets, why the psalms are all poetry, and why so much of the best of the New Testament is poetic: The Beatitudes, the prologue to John’s Gospel, Paul’s ode to love that is I Corinthians 13, and the majestic anthems of praise found in Revelation. Perhaps you don’t see yourself as a poet, but there are times when the only thing you can do with your deeply divine thoughts is to scribble them down in a journal or notepad.
On Thursday we looked at Mary’s revolutionary song, the Magnificat and today we have Zechariah’s song before us—a song composed at the birth of his son, John the Baptist. Zechariah’s prophetic song might be described as a poetic meditation on salvation.

What a beautiful song of salvation! Zechariah’s poem says that through Messiah we are saved from enemies and hate, fear and foes, placing our feet on the path of peace.
And isn’t that all we really want—to be set free from fear and to walk in peace?
But throughout history, we have seen, time and time again, that the desired path to peace is through conquering those who stand in the way of peace. War and vengeance will no more lead to peace than drought will lead to a bountiful harvest.
We must not make the mistake of thinking that this salvation can come by the way of the world.
A world under the sway of the wicked one says we’re saved from our enemies by destroying our enemies; that we’re saved from those who hate us by hating them even more; that we’re saved by fear by placing the highest priority on security; that we can only walk in peace when we have eliminated every possible threat.
The Messiah won’t play the devil’s game of trying to conquer fear by fear, hate by hate, violence by violence. Messiah will be the saviour who guides our feet into the way of peace.
The kingdom that Jesus brings to us is a kingdom that this world has never seen before. One of peace, love, hope and joy.
The contrast of the advancement of the kingdoms of this world and the advancement of the kingdom of God couldn’t be more clear.
This kingdom is known to some as the Upside-down kingdom. We can see a very clear statement of Jesus proclaiming the upside-down kingdom in John chapter 15. Here Jesus famously says: Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

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