Shovelling Coal

This Sunday was a continuation of the last. I was again with Geoffrey, but this time in Cockenzie rather than Tranent. We were leading worship- which this time included Communion. It was the second of our three-Sunday Advent series looking at Holiness & Risk.

For the third Sunday of Advent, the traditional focus is John the Baptist. He was a prophet baptising people in the waters of the river Jordan.

Years earlier, the travelling Israelite people had crossed over that same river which had been halted by God for them to cross. Reaching the other side, they built an altar-cairn by which to remember the event. We don't know, but I wonder if John was baptising near to that place, and was standing on the stones that had once constituted that cairn.

Shortly after, Jesus would take the baptism that John performed in the waters of Jordan, and use the same imagery to describe a baptism of the Holy Spirit.

As I said, I was in Cockenzie. Many years ago it was a fishing village. Now the place is dominated by a coal-fired power station. Both of these raisons-d'etre relate to the same age-old sea (providing the obvious habitat for fish, and the cooling waters for the furnaces), but the activities around them have been redefined over time to fit the needs of the present.

Today I still understand the human raison d'etre to be intimately interwoven with the story of God. I sometimes wonder if there are too many communities of Christians still casting nets out to sea, rather than shovelling coal into the furnaces.

I did take a picture of the power station, but I preferred this, looking along the southern edge of the Forth back into Edinburgh...