Fulcrum

For Christians in this country there is a sense of being a target: sometimes for aggression, but primarily for ridicule or simply bemusement by non-believers

Will Gore Independent. 25 December 2017

Our 17th Beer and Theology, in association with The Centre for Theology and Community and the Hurtado Jesuit Centre, will be with Graham Kings and The Venerable Elizabeth Adekunle, Archdeacon of Hackney, who has written a number of articles for Fulcrum.

The subject will be "Feminism".

This is open to all and provides a chance to get together, have a drink, meet some new faces and talk about theology.

We shall be meeting on the ground floor of the pub, for wheelchair access.

It's 6pm-8pm (though some may continue longer....) on Friday 19th January at The Angel (101 Bermondsey Wall East, Rotherhithe, SE16 4NB).

Past Beer and Theology Events

Beer & Theology One. David Barclay 05/02/16 :- How churches talk about money
Beer & Theology Two. Rebecca Gormally 18/03/16 :- Crisis in Children's Care & Education
Beer & Theology Three. Jos Downey 13/05/16 :- Science and Theology
Beer & Theology Four. Angus Ritchie 01/07/16 :- What is Sacramental Life?
Beer & Theology Five. John Moffat SJ 16/09/16 :- Eucharistic Economics
Beer & Theology Six. Andy Walton 04/11/16 :- Strike A Happy Media
Beer & Theology Seven. Lily Botras 02/12/16 :- What Happened to the Arab Spring?
Beer & Theology Eight. Dr Muthuraj Swamy 06/01/17:- Inter Faith Dialogue: Is it Worth It?
Beer & Theology Nine. Jamie Klair 17/02/17:- London's Nigerian Pentecostal Proliferation
Beer & Theology Ten. Simon Lewis 17/03/2017:- A Christian's heart for Art
Beer & Theology Eleven. Richard Sudworth 05/05/17:- Christian-Muslim Relations
Beer & Theology Twelve. Dr Rachel Burke 16/06/17:- Personhood, Death and the NHS
Beer & Theology Thirteen. Prof Joanildo Burity 14/07/17:- Religion and Politics in Brazil
Beer & Theology Fourteen. Julie Gittoes 08/09/17:- Singleness
Beer & Theology Fifteen. Dan Warnke. 27/10/18:- A Disabled Church?
Beer & Theology Sixteen. Guido de Graaff. 1/12/18:- A Disabled Church?

Francis uses Christmas Eve mass to express hope that no one should feel ‘there is no room for them’ and urges faithful to turn fear into charity

AP in Guardian. 25 December 2017

Justin Welby joins Pope Francis in using traditional Christmas Day message to make oblique criticism of Donald Trump over Jerusalem decision

Harriet Sherwood. Guardian. 25 December 2017

The replacement of religious symbolism at Christmas with anodyne commercialism reflects a wider trend, and is a threat to social values

Observer. 24 December 2017

Over the 65 years of her annual Christmas broadcast, the Queen has begun to take a deliberate turn towards religion

Catherine Pepinster. Observer. 24 December 2017

After experiencing the horrors of war, Bryan Mealer lost his faith. Morning runs with a priest – and a visit to a more welcoming church – helped restore it

Guardian. 25 December 2017

Fire underlines a spiritual problem, not just a political one, says clergyman

Harriet Agerholm. Independent 23 December 2017

Christian families in Iraq are preparing to spend their first Christmas at home after returning to their homes following ISIS' retreat.

Christian Today 22 December 2017

Church leaders from across the UK have rallied around the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, in his campaign against a bill making its way through Israel's parliament.

Christian Today 22 December 2017

Britons should "take pride" in their country's Christian heritage at Christmas, Theresa May has said.

BBC 24 December 2017

Carols, many of them familiar from childhood days, are a huge part of Christmas. The best of them have stood the test of time, often for centuries, and speak timeless truths in memorable words and music. Here are the stories of three of them.

Mark Woods. Christian Today. 23 December 2017

Christmas church services and other celebrations are being held this weekend under the gaze of armed guards and security cameras in many countries after Islamic State gunmen attacked a Methodist church in Pakistan as a Sunday service began.

Reuters in Christian Today 23 December 2017

There has been a surge in anti-Christian attacks following the election of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

 

Michael Safi. Observer. 24 December 2017

Major project aims to protect panel paintings in East Anglia from catastrophic effects of infestations

Dalya Alberge. Observer. 24 December 2017

Like many of us I have been reading and hearing and seeing and telling the Christmas story all my life. When I was a small child I had just one line to say in the school nativity play, and I said it so quietly in rehearsal that the teachers made somebody else say it with me in the performance. When I was a little older I was the head shepherd in the church nativity, and had a special wooden shepherd’s crook which in the end I forgot to bring. As a teenager I wrote a series of short stories retelling Jesus’ birth from the perspective of a shepherd, a wise man, and an angel. The tale of Christmas is buried deep in my imagination, far deeper even than those other tales we all know so well, of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the rest.

But when each year it comes to December and I turn back to the gospels, and read again the tale of the frightened virgin, the astonished shepherds, the wise easterners, the throngs and throngs of angels, I find that the story comes to me again as a new story. I am called to receive it as one who has not heard it before, and to respond to it: not as a sleepy child who enjoys the comfort of an ancient tale before closing her eyes at night, nor even as a scholar who seeks the thrill of finding new things in a play she has read a hundred times. I must hear it as a story that is completely real, and completely relevant.

In other words I must put myself behind the eyes of Theophilus, that shadowy person to whom Luke addresses his two books which tell firstly of Jesus’ life and then of the first decades after he died.

To these men, the story was not old. They had not acted in nativity plays every year throughout their childhoods. They had not heard the Christmas story time and time again. They had never even heard the word ‘Christmas’. When Luke wrote this story down it had happened relatively recently. There was nothing faded or childish about it. It was not a bedtime story but a historical account. It was real. “I do this so that you will know the full truth about everything which you have been taught.”

Luke and Theophilus were like us: they had not seen Jesus. They weren’t there when he healed the hopelessly sick or preached standing in a boat or shone with eternal light on the mountain or hung bloodstained on the cross. They did not see the manger in which the baby was laid, or the hillside with the sheep the shepherds had abandoned in their rush to heed the angels’ proclamation. But they had heard about these things, and they believed that they were true.

Luke says he has studied all these things carefully, worked hard at his research. He stresses the number of sources he has used, and their quality: many people had already written down the things which Jesus said or did, and these were eyewitness accounts. Luke never saw Jesus, but he had been Paul’s friend and fellow worker during the earliest decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection. It was from Jesus’ own friends that Luke first heard the story.

What of the part about Jesus’ birth? This was longer ago than the cross, and none of the apostles whom Luke knew were there in Bethlehem when Christ was born. But he still had an eyewitness. Twice he tells us that Mary ‘treasured up all these things in her heart’ (2:19, 51). What he means is that Mary remembered what happened, she stored up the memories like precious jewels, and afterwards she told other people about it. Luke knows that his history is true because his source is Mary herself.

This is how the story comes to us at the beginning: as a piece of research, a historical account, a brilliant piecing-together of different sources to uncover the truth about the past. It was a story that needed to be proved, and could be. To Theophilus this was like hearing a grandparent’s story about something that happened fifty years ago; or reading a memoir spilling the beans on what was really going on in Westminster under Blair. It was real.

Yet in another sense the story was not new to Luke or Theophilus. At least, it was not entirely unexpected. Luke takes a long time to wind up to the birth of Jesus, and during those eighty verses he shows us that this story is part of the vast story which Jewish children were told, and are still being told, all their lives. He has Mary put it in a song (1:46-55): “He has helped his servant Israel, just as he promised our ancestors.” And in case we didn’t hear it the first time, Zechariah sings about it too (1:68-79): “He has raised up a horn of salvation for us, as he said through his holy prophets of long ago.” This is the story the Jews had grown up with, the one they’d heard again and again every year, at home and at school and in places of worship. A story of promises from the Old Testament, which said, “God is a rescuing God and one day he will send the best rescuer of all.”

So the story of Christmas which Luke tells in the first two chapters of his first book is not only a new story, it is also an extremely meaningful story, presented not as a funny anecdote of childhood nor as a revelatory political memoir but as the fulfilment and flowering of a story which began with Abraham or even before him. It is the realization of countless hopes. It is a life-changing story, because it is the story of the end of the world as we knew it, and the start of a new one. It is the most relevant story of all. The reality and truth which Luke is so anxious that we should take on board is not trivial or just interesting: it is momentous. It makes a difference. This, as the old priest Zechariah sings, is the tale of the sunrise, of the moment when darkness became light. To those who listen, it will bring peace.

This is the story, told in precise historical prose and joyful, glorious poetry by turns: a story that is real, and alive.

When I have noticed these things, the truth and the momentousness of Christmas, then I find I can embrace once again its familiarity. This story is about the whole world. It is like a fairytale after all, because it lifts the spell and shows things as they really are. There is a handsome prince beneath the beast; the scary witch is a mere shrivelled old woman. Christ has come. The sun has risen. I will tell this tale to children just as it was told to me, year upon year, knowing that it is real and that it has the power to change their lives; hoping, in the end, that they will be able to wrap themselves in it as in a blanket, and sleep peacefully.

After the US president’s Jerusalem statement, tourist numbers to Christ’s birthplace have collapsed and violent protests have grown

Peter Beaumont. Bethlehem. 24 December 2017

My Christmas letter to churches around the world. The Archbishop of Canterbury on Facebook. 21 December 2017

More than a quarter of teenagers  believe they will not enjoy Christmas this year without social media, a study reveals.

Alexandra Richards, Evening Standard. 21 December 2017

Christmas is a time for celebration, for feasting and for relationships. But it is also a time for a mild engagement in iconoclasm, as we peel back the layers of accreted tradition and recover the origins of the Christmas gospel. In that spirit (and Spirit) I offer three Christmas surprises for you to unwrap at your leisure, peruse, and enjoy in between chomping on another turkey sandwich. The shepherds were not poor outcasts; the swaddling of Jesus was not mere motherly care; and the holy family was not abandoned and alone.

Ian Paul. Psephizo blog. 23 December 2017