Last year I spent Christmas at St Andrew's Cathedral. There was incense, holy communion and a whole heap of other stuff that would horrify many Sydney Anglicans and the Moore College crowd. Which is their bad luck because this St Andrew's Cathedral was in Tokyo!
St Andrew's is the Cathedral Church of the Tokyo Diocese of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai. I doubt Henry VIII imagined a diocese with a name like that! Still, I doubt he imagined his Church of England being established in Japan, its bishop named Andrew Yoshimichi Ohata and its dean (a woman!) named Maria Grace Tazu Sasamori.
And neither he nor I would have expected English speakers being relegated to a small hall next door to the main Cathedral. Why? Because the main Cathedral service was reserved for Japanese-speakers, thank you very much! In the main Cathedral, hymns were sung in Japanese and prayers addressed to Iesu Kirisuto. Who could imagine English speaking worshippers relegated to a place outside the main centre of the Church of England?
To compensate, the hall was provided with its own name — St Alban's Episcopalian Church. Yes, we have to keep those Americans happy. The church was named in honour of a holy martyr, and I couldn't help but notice what looked like Byzantine relics. The reverend conducting the service (from memory, Father William) was more contemporary. American lawyers don't just stand behind the bar table but roam around the court room. This reverend walked among the congregation prosecuting his Christian case and making the Christmas story real.
He spoke of the politics of that day, the clash between Herod and the Romans and priests, the social and political dangers affecting different Jewish groups. The little baby in the manger descended from King David didn't just appear in Bethlehem in a vacuum.
The reverend compared the precariousness of the baby Jesus' family to the precariousness of other communities today. He spoke of the Iraqi Christians on the Ninevah Plains. But that wasn't all. No one objected when Father William asked us to pray for the people of Bethlehem who, in his words, 'continued to live in brutal occupation behind a huge concrete wall'.
Rarely have I seen Palestinians get such a prominent mention in a Western church. Middle Eastern Christians, indeed any Christian minority, only seem to matter when their persecutors are Muslim. And yes, such minorities should and must matter, just as Muslims shouldn't ignore persecuted