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Good morning. One of my favourite childhood hymns began with the words, ‘Hills of the North rejoice’. It was a thrilling Advent invocation to the coming Christ that started in a minor key and ended triumphantly in the relative major. We often sang it at school at this time of year. I loved the imagery of the third verse: ‘Lands of the East, awake; soon shall your sons be free. The sleep of ages break and rise to liberty. On your far hills, long, cold and grey, has dawned the everlasting day.’ Singing that as I did in, say 1957 or so, I had no doubt that those cold grey hills were some part of the Soviet Union, that mysterious other world from which we were all told freedom had been banished. I was wrong in my assumption – the words were written in the 19th century and might have meant anywhere vaguely East from Turkey to Japan. But the hymn came back to mind when I saw the protests in the Ukraine from those who would like to have stronger economic links with Europe. Ukraine is a complex nation with European ties, once part of the Soviet empire, now independent. It looks both East and West and it is not for us to say where its future lies. From the Russian point of view it is in the nature of things that Ukraine looks towards Moscow and that’s not only because it offers strategic access to the Black Sea but also because the origins of Russia’s ancient Christian faith came from this region. It was here that Vladimir, the 10th century Prince of the Kiev Rus adopted the Christian faith of Byzantium. His new nation was baptized on what is now Ukrainian soil. So it is not surprising that there should be resistance to any move westward. More than economics is at stake, there is historic destiny. The prayers and hymns of Advent speak of the coming Christ as the Desire of the Nations, as though each nation had its particular hope and dream of fulfillment; its own relationship with God running through time. But nations as we have come to know are not simple entities. Some of the world’s worst atrocities have come about through people trying to create a pure identity through the toxic mix of nationhood, ethnicity and religion. At its best faith presses us to look beyond these particularities to what we all desire: liberty, material sufficiency and hope. Of those I think the most important, ultimately is hope. What faith sees as the Desire of Nations transcends the desires of any particular nation. It is easy for us to feel sympathy with the Ukrainian protestors, especially when Russian influence looms so large. But today all nations have to look beyond themselves and their own interests. We all look east and west and north and south. It is the oneness of the world, not the integrity of the nation, which is today our greatest moral and spiritual challenge.