Happy New Year!
Tomorrow it's Epiphany, the time of year when we remember the Magi's journey. I've been thinking about the route of their journey and it strikes me that they'd need an armoured car to get through that region of the world now. My prayer this Epiphany is for more pilgrims of peace in the middle east. Here is the likely route of the Magi:
They would have probably started in ancient persia. Modern day Iran - part of George Bush's Axis of Evil - Iran is about to have sanctions imposed on it by the UN due to fears about it's nuclear weapons programme...yet in the 1980's the US was happy to sell arms to Iran when it was fighting the evil of communism. Iran has frequently called for Israel to be wiped off the map and had a recent conference of Holocaust deniers.
They then travel onto Iraq and probably to Basra...Where one person is assassinated every hour as Iraq's second city descends into civil war. They'd journey up the river euphrates passing Bagdad and then cut across the desert to Damascus in modern day Syria - another part of Bush's Axis of Evil. Syria fund Hezbollah in Lebanon, causing massively destablization in that region due to the assassinations of senior officials in the anti-syrian government of Lebanon.
Then they'd drop down to Jerusalem, before going onto Bethlehem. Israel is symbolised by two walls. The western wall of the temple, highlighting the prayers of the religious Jews and the wall that divides Israel and the occupied territories. The magi would of passed through the wall...
What a grim journey...
Still... Paul got to travel to Malta, and it wasn't even on an 18-30s, so that must have been quite nice.
Posted by: Fat Roland | January 05, 2007 at 07:09 PM
Watch the secret service pick up on this post as international intelligence chatter....
Posted by: Mike R | January 07, 2007 at 11:42 AM
Ben - thanks! This came in the nick of time to give me content for an all-age service I was doing this morning. By the end, we had the church folk processing with the models of the Magi (which eventually were placed in the Crib), doing 'stopping places' on the journey through today's territory, praying for each place as we went along. All ages enjoyed it. Which, of course, is what needed to happen. It just needs someone with the imaginative leap, and this week that person was you!
Posted by: Paul Roberts | January 07, 2007 at 06:41 PM
I wholly agree with the person who recent told me and several others that if you want to see the next wave of the true church to look not to the North and West, but to the South and East. Europe and the United States are becoming two of the most ungodly nations in the world, whereas nations in the South and East are now showing more signs of spiritual life than ever before.
If you want to see what I think is the most plausible scenerio for the future of the emergent church, I suggest you look to China. There the elderly fear that as capitalism slowly takes over their country the young people (perhaps age 18-30) will forget the oppressive struggles that took place just so that they would have the right to worship. As the young people forget what it was like to not be free - either literally as spiritual people in a communist state, or as sinners enslaved to sin (think Pharisee)- they will forget the roots of their faith, and thus the movement grow stagnant. But so long as freedom in Christ remains fresh and desired so will the movement of the emerging church.
Hear me. It is for this reason why so many fundamentalists (at least in the US) do not take the emergent church seriously. They do not see the fire of the Holy Spirit in the souls of those having this dialogue. The fire within must burn hotter and brighter, and as it does that fire will light the way to a more desired, more passionate freedom in Jesus Christ that will ultimately lead the world into a new era of Christianity.
Posted by: Tim | January 08, 2007 at 10:35 AM