Now this post is a real giveaway that I am one of those people whose devotional Bible reading is done late at night rather than when I wake up. Despite the best endeavours of every Bible reading scheme I've ever encountered and 99.5% of preachers and teachers, and even despite being more of a morning person, I have never managed to sustain early morning devotional times. It was, I think, the late and still somewhat lamented David Watson who allowed that some people would opt for evening/night devotions, commenting it was absolutely fine just so long as you remembered to pull your armour straight in the morning when you woke up (a light and humorous reference to Ephesians 6) - well I recall it almost 30 years on, so it must have been significant!
All of this is a very long introduction to my response to yesterday's notes on the start of Luke 2 and the emperor's census. As I read the notes, I was taken back more than 30 years to the thoughts of my RE teacher on the timing of Jesus' birth, at the height of the Roman Empire, pretty much the entire known world, and the significance of this. The writer of the notes observed that the census was all about power - by counting the citizens and knowing where they were the Emperor could determine how to control the empire - effectively the world. God subverted this by bringing the bearer/means of salvation for the world (known and unknown) to birth within that endeavour. How then, the writer asked, might God be working in and through systems and persons we see as powerful, corrupt or even bad at a global level? That kept me puzzling for some time before Morpheus overtook me, and still has my puzzling today. God at work subverting global financial or climate change issues...? God somehow at work in the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq...? Or even, dare one go there, in the whole terrorism thing...? And if so, how? And how do we avoid just reading in what we want to see or justifying our own prejudices or agendas...? I'm not entirely sure I can quite get to where the writer suggests, and of course I could totally have missed the point, but it's good to be made to puzzle over it.
If anyone read the notes and does get it or has any ideas maybe they can let me know?