A Sacred Awakening

A Sacred Awakening

I have just been listening to a podcast interview with   Sami Awad, author of “A sacred awakening”.  He is a Palestinian living in Bethlehem with an 800-year heritage in the Territory, who says he can no longer accept Christianity and yet holds the teaching of Jesus as central to the hope of his people, indeed of the world. 

He is a liberation activist who believes we are called to take the words of Jesus: “love your enemy’, seriously: he believes nonviolence is the route to harmony, justice and peace. While he grew up in a devout Christian home, he claims he discovered Jesus when he stepped out of Christianity.
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That should pique some interest!

The Christianity he says he cannot accept is one primarily focussed on personal salvation. He fails to see how such teaching speaks to the context in which he lives. Yet the teaching of Jesus, teaching on justice, liberation, forgiveness, and nonviolence he finds profoundly life giving. It is in this teaching, teaching he would describe as teaching on the Kingdom of God, that his hope lies. He argues that Jesus never called people to focus on him, to accept him as Lord, (as he says he did when he was 12), but to become awakened to and live the kingdom of God, both present, and longed for. 

I found the interview challenging, not least as I seek to say a word that makes any real sense of the Advent season in the world context of 2025.

I was prepared for confirmation, aged 12, by my local vicar Mr Baines, brother of Harry Baines then Bishop of Wellington NZ. I was his only candidate! I rode my bicycle from our farm to his home in the next village, St Bartholemew’s Chalvington. The focus of the lessons was the beatitudes, the opening to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.  To be honest, I do not remember much about the lessons, but I do recall him saying that the beatitudes described the nature we are called to be, and that in my confirmation I was committing myself to be like this, because it is what Jesus is like. (Am I who I am because of my confirmation!?) These pithy sayings have long been understood to be the core of Jesus’ teaching.  They are not, as often taught, blessings poured on people exhibiting certain traits, but an invitation to a life which is more Christ like.

Herein is the Kingdom of God.  It is not about reign, or rule, or power, or authority, it is about abundant grace accessed when life is lived as life is intended to be. At heart, everyone of us are children of God.  Christ is the image of the invisible God, all things came to be through him, we carry that divine DNA, confirmed through Jesus taking human nature to himself. Becoming awake to that nature is the essence of the Christian journey.

This Sunday we read Isaiah 65:17-25, a repeat of the more famous Isaiah 11: 6 – 9 Both use metaphors to describe the world as God envisages: “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together”, Is this possible?  Can Russians and Ukrainians sit together?  Can Netanyahu and Hamas leadership live together?   Sami Awad recounts the story of sitting down at a café with one of the leaders of Settler violence in the West Bank.  The Settler apparently began the meeting by drawing a square frame with his finger around his face saying: “this is the face of the instigator of violence against Palestinians”.  His aim was clearly confrontational. Sami declined to respond in kind but asked, “tell me about yourself, who you are, your pains, sufferings and difficulties”. Apparently, the man then proceeded to tell of a lifetime of pain, dislocation and bullying and went on to say this was the first time he had ever told his story.

Jesus was born at a time of great turbulence; it seems to be forever thus. Does it have to be? So, where does hope lie? Christ likeness is always transformative. Transformative both for the one offering it and for the situation graced by it.  The Isaiah passage and the teaching of Jesus speak of a new creation. Incarnation is the heart of Christian life.  We are not ‘saved’ out of an evil and dying world’, we are called in partnership with Christ to be agents of transformation within this world.  This is where our blessing lies, this is the work of salvation.

This work is never done, that is why it is right to speak of the Kingdom of God as both now and yet to come.

In the meantime, don’t expect a Christian life to be universally lauded, especially when its standard is judged to threaten agendas of power and wealth. This has been the experience of Bishop Marrian Budde of Washington, it will probably be the experience of Archbishop Sarah Mullally of Canterbury.
Power and authority are too often grasped and cemented through notions of who is in and who is out, notions exaggerated by belief about the saved and the lost, the worthy and the unworthy, about truth that can be known here but cannot be known there.   Cruelty and fear have too often pushed light, understanding, and harmony aside.

 As painful as it is, we must never forget that when faith or religion use Christ’s name to declare some to be right and others wrong, some to be clean and others unclean, some to be worthy and others unworthy, the Kingdom of God is denied.

Examples:  The crusades; genocides on all continents in which Christians have been complicit including Palestine; Northern Ireland; hatred towards the Islamic world; conspiracy theories circulating amongst Christians; Ukrainian atrocities given legitimacy by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church; South African apartheid promoted by the Dutch Reformed Church; subjugation of First nations people by missionaries who insisted cultural rites were haram, and faith needed to be dressed through western thought. 

We will read a lot of Isaiah in the lead up to Christmas. Let’s give him the last word here. Isaiah 12: 2 – 6 is used liturgically as the Song of Isaiah.  It begins:  Surely God is my salvation I will trust and will not be afraid, for the Lord God is my strength and my might: he has become my salvation.   The “I” is not the individual, but the community.  Scripture knows little of an individual out of the context of the community to which he or she belongs. Our community begins with the immediate family but spreads to include the whole created order.  It is always in the wider whole that we bless and are blessed.