St. Stephen (Mid-week Message)

 

Feast of Stephen (Dec. 26) 

 Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Today is the feast day commemorating St. Stephen, the first Martyr and one of the original seven deacons of the Church. 

His story is told in Acts 6-7.  A division arises in the Church, at that time completely Jewish, between speakers of Aramaic and Greek.  The Greek speakers, Hellenists culturally distinct and accommodated to the larger Gentile culture of the Roman Empire, believe that there has been unfair discrimination against their community:  widows who speak Greek have not been receiving distribution of alms for the poor. The apostles, not wanting to get into the middle of a potentially vicious argument, opt out with the excuse that they are too busy preaching the gospel and cannot take time to “wait on tables.”  So they ask that seven be appointed to make sure the distribution works.  Seven are named as “servers” (the Greek word is “deacons.”)  Tellingly, all of them have Greek, not Hebrew names.    Stephen is the first-named among them. 

The Seven’s ministry was obviously more than simply table serving:  Stephen immediately gets into trouble because he is such a stirring preacher, working mainly among non-Christian Hellenized Jews.  He is arrested and hauled before the Sanhedrin.  Clearly a passionate advocate, he gives an extremely barbed speech that so outrages his listeners that they hustle him out of the city and without benefit of trial stone him to death.  As he is dying, he prays for his persecutors. 

Saul, later called Paul, stands by and consents to Stephen’s murder. The Christian community in Jerusalem, taking fright at Stephen’s death, scatters, and for the first time moves beyond Jerusalem and its immediate environs. Stephen’s steadfastness and forgiving prayers made an impression on Paul and bear fruit in his later conversion and ministry.

St. Stephen’s Day was placed as the day after Christmas probably because of St. Stephen being the first of the martyrs.  Large households in England that would keep their servants working on Christmas to make a proper feast began to give them the next day off, sending them to their own homes with boxes filled with foodstuffs and wine for their own day-late Christmas feasts.  Thus “Boxing Day” came about, with the expectation that gifts for the poor in general would also be given. 

 

Anglo-catholic priest and poet John Mason Neale in 1853 had this Boxing Day tradition in mind when he wrote his song about Duke Wenceslas I of Bavaria, posthumously named king and saint, and loved by the people of Bavaria and the Czech lands because of his works of mercy.  In the song,  set to the tune of an old Latin spring carol about the flowers blooming in April, “Good King Wenceslas” goes out on “the Feast of Stephen”” to give “flesh, … wine,” and “pine logs” to a poor man in the snow.

 

Given Stephen’s ministry to the marginalized and advocacy for them and the Gospel, it is fitting that such care of and advocacy for the poor are memorialized in Neale’s carol about St. Stephen’s Day.

“Therefore Christians all be sure, wealth or rank possessing, ye who now would bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.” 

Blessings on you all for the twelve days of Christmastide. 

--Fr. Tony+

Come let us adore Him

 

Come Let us Adore Him
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2012

6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Sung Eucharists
Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Isaiah 9:2-7 ; Titus 2:11-14 ; Luke 2:1-20 ; Psalm 96

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

O Come, All ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,

O Come ye, come ye, to Bethlehem.

Come, and behold him, born the King of angels,

O Come, let us adore him. 

Have you ever thought about what we are saying when we sing this?  Worship a baby, barely born and in diapers? (That’s what “swathing bands” are.) Worship a little creature with a brain that is just beginning to organize sensory input and is still years away from rational thought?  How can this be?

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God taking on flesh and becoming a human being, was a scandalous idea from the start. The basic problem is simple—“God” is what we are not. We are contingent; God is sufficient. We are changeable; God is unchanging. We are masses of conflicting urges and desire, most of them selfish and all of them formed by a self that is in no way complete or whole. God is pure being, intention, and love itself. We are incomplete and sick; God is wholeness and health itself. We have failings galore; God is holy perfection itself. We can be pretty benighted, ugly, and false; God is beauty, light and truth. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?

The early, united Church discussed the issue at length.  It gradually recognized that the Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth embraced and took on in every way but sin the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and contingency of being human. The early Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man, 100% Divinity and 100% Human Being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half God and half human being.

To those who say that Jesus was merely a man whom God had raised up, the Creed they wrote replies, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,” that is, there never was a time when he was not thus begotten.  “…Of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.”   The carol quotes the Creed when it sings, “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo! He abhors not the Virgin’s womb:  Very God, begotten, not created, O Come let us Adore Him.”

At the other extreme are those who believe that Christ was fully God and only seemed to be human. The letters of John in the New Testament condemn people who “do not acknowledge that it is in the flesh that Jesus Christ came” (2 John 1:7) and later Gnostics even split the human Jesus from the divine Christ, and pictured the unsuffering, unmoving Christ looking down upon Jesus on the Cross, laughing that people would mistakenly think that he, the Christ, had suffered.

 

To all of these, the Creed states, “He became incarnate (that is, took on flesh) from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” 

“Truly God and truly Human”: we often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us, only play-acting to be human.   The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church confessed in the Creeds teaches that this belief is heretical, despite it broad popularity among believers. 

God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weaknesses, ignorance, fears, and silly quirks. He was subject to natural evil like the rest of us. The most obvious example is his unjust death by torture at the hands of the Roman Empire. But despite this, he never resisted God.   

Theologians try to describe the incarnation from God’s viewpoint by saying that God took on flesh and accepted its limits, willing his divinity to be hidden.  An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes this as Christ “emptying himself.”

But we need another image to describe it from a human viewpoint.  One is Celtic spirituality’s idea of “thin places,” geographic spots where the veil between the ordinary world and the spirit world seem particularly thin, like the island of Iona, or our Trinity Labyrinth.  These are places where the Distant, Shining City does not seem so far away, where it seems easier to commune with God. There are also some people in whom the image of God does not seem so distorted, whose life shows the presence of God shining through. The man Jesus is the ultimate example of a person as a “thin place,” in fact, the thinnest of places.

The incarnation marks a profound continuity and solidarity between God and us and our lives in all their messy, chaotic glory.  In Jesus, all we are has been brought intimately close to God.  In Jesus, all we are can be made holy as he is.  And that is not just us individually, but in community too. 

William Stringfellow writes,

“Jesus Christ means that God cares extremely, decisively, inclusively, immediately, for the ordinary, transient, proud, wonderful, besetting, frivolous, hectic, lusty things of human life. The reconciliation of God and the world in Jesus Christ means that in Christ there is a radical and integral relationship of all human beings and of all things. In Christ all things are held together (Col. 1:17b).

“The church as the Body of Christ in the world has, shares, manifests, and represents the same radical integrity. All who are in Christ … live in the same integrity in their personal relationships with every other creature … [T]he reconciliation of the world with God in Jesus Christ establishes a person in unity with both God and the whole world. The singular life of the Christian is a sacrament—a recall, a representation, an enactment, a communication—of that given, actual unity, whether in the gathering of the congregation now and then or whether in the scattering of the members within the daily affairs of the world. . . . [I]t is careless and misleading to speak of the action of God in the world in Christ in terms of “making the gospel relevant” to the secular. The [Church] lives in the world in the unity of God and the world wrought in … Christ.” (William Stringfellow, A Public and Private Faith, 1962, 40-44). 

In Jesus, we see that our human limitation and weakness do not have to equal rebellion or resistance against God.  In Jesus, we see that God made us, wanting to look upon his creation and call it “very good,” but is not yet finished creating us.  Jesus calls, “Let God finish.”

Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God gave him, we must accept who we are—gifts and strengths, disabilities and ugly deficiencies and all.  We must accept who others are as well. We must be gentle both on them and ourselves.  Seeking to let God finish his creative work in us, trying to amend our lives, both personally and communally, requires an open-ended listening, a total trust that in God’s good intentions, in Lady Julian of Norwich’s words, “all is well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

A pretty good sign that we are not following Jesus in this is alienation: alienation from our selves; alienation from our bodies; alienation from our conscience. Alienation between people is a sign of this on a social level.  Alienation appears when we do not accept who we and others are and surrender this to God. We try to tough it out, and bulldoze ourselves into the better us that we have in mind, rather than following Jesus by emptying ourselves, to let go and let God.

A pretty good sign that we are getting closer to God in this is that regardless of the limitations and hardships we face, we still have a sense of one-ness. Teillard de Chardin wrote, “The surest sign of God’s presence is joy.”

Christmastide is a time of joy.  “O Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.”  That’s because God is here.

This helpless baby was God made one of us. We must treat all the helpless with the respect and compassion.

This helpless baby was only beginning to enjoy all the good and suffer all the bad life can throw at us. Yet despite it all, he remained ever trusting in his Father, and faithful. We must trust and be faithful too. 

Ambrose of Milan, who taught and converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth century, wrote the great hymn praising the enfleshment of Christ in these words:

O equal to Thy Father, Thou!
Gird on thy fleshly mantle now;
the weakness of our mortal state
with deathless might invigorate.

As God became truly human in Jesus, let us truly accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings. And as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads. 

O Come, let us adore him. 

In the Name of God, Amen.

Mother of God (Advent 4C)

 

The Mother of God

23 December 2012

Advent 4C

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. Said Mass

Micah 5:2-5a Psalm 80:1-7 ; Hebrews 10:5-10 ; Luke 1:39-55

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

A dear friend of mine in Hong Kong, the Rev. Will Newman, is a priest at one of the daughter churches of St. John’s Cathedral.  He tells the story of sharing their very Anglican parish hall with the local Roman Catholic congregation, in process of renovating their buildings, for their annual Christmas Bazaar fund raisers:  the Anglicans would hold their event on a Friday evening and the Romans on Saturday.   The local hired laborers were having a very difficult time keeping the decorations and sale material separate—the English on the boxes was beyond some of these Cantonese-speaking laborers, and they had no clear idea of how to keep the Roman and Anglican materials distinguished, let alone separated.  Will tried to explain when the foreman suddenly got a look of recognition in his eyes.  “Oh,” he said, “you are the boy church and they are the girl church.”  Will, befuddled, asked what he meant.  The foreman then confidently pointed to a small painting of Jesus in the Protestant jumble, and then to a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the Roman one.  “Boy church, Girl Church, See?”  “Yes, yes,” said Will, sure that the man had understood the distinction between the two traditions, while only dimly aware of the differences.  For the sake of the task at hand, he decided not to explain that the Romans also had Jesus and the Anglicans, the Blessed Virgin.  

The radical Reformation was highly critical of Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin.  They called it worship and prayers rather than devotion and requests for intercession, and said it was idolatrous.  As a result, they removed any ceremonial honoring of the Mother of Our Lord from their worship.  Because of this, many people today think that only Roman Catholics honor her as the Mother of God.   But that just isn’t so.   

Today, the fourth Sunday of Advent and the Last Sunday of Advent before Christmas, is Mary Sunday.  The Lectionary Readings are about the Incarnation of our Lord, and in these stories, Mary plays a leading role. 

The early undivided Church defined the matter clearly for all who desire to follow in the tradition and fellowship of the early bishops, successors to the apostles.  The Councils of Ephesus (431 C.E.) and Calcedon (451 C.E.) in the early fifth century both recommended referring to the Mother of Jesus as the Theotokos, “the one who gave birth to the one who is God,” that is, the One who gave birth to God Made Flesh, the Incarnate God. 

They defined this matter in this way in reaction to a minority group of bishops who felt it was wrong to call Mary the God-bearer.  They preferred to call her the Christ-bearer, arguing that God is eternal, outside of time and space, without parent or origin.    But the vast majority of the bishops determined that understanding Mary as the Mother just of a human part of Jesus rather than of his whole being and person misunderstood the nature of Christ so profoundly as to be unorthodox and heretical.  Jesus was not a 50%-50% hybrid of Divinity and Humanity, but was both 100% human and 100% God. Because these two natures were perfectly united in the one person of Jesus, it was only right that Mary be referred to not only as Mother of the Man Jesus, but also as Mother of God Incarnate.   They never had any intention of declaring that Mary was the Mother of God from eternity in the sense that the Father begot the Son from before all time.  Mary was the Mother of the Son, not of the Father.  But the Son was true God from true God, and so the Blessed Virgin was the Mother of God.  The defeated bishops separated themselves from the main body of Church, ultimately fled the territory of the Roman Empire and went East.  Missionaries from the Great Church of the East they founded were those who took the Gospel to Persia, India, and ultimately, China, in the fifth through the seventh centuries. 

But the main body of the Church remained firm in its devotion to a Jesus who was both true God and true Man, and to a Mary who was the one who bore God.  As a result, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholic, Eastern Uniate, Lutheran, and Anglican traditions all retain the usage of the term “Mother of God,” or “God-bearer.” 

Such devotion was rooted in scripture:  the Gospel of John portrays Jesus on the cross giving charge of his mother to the ideal disciple, and he says that she is our mother.  Most of the words of the great Marian devotional prayer of the West, the Ave Maria, come from the New Testament, most of them from the infancy story in the Gospel of Luke.  

Listen to the following snippet of a sermon on the Magnificat by Martin Luther: 

"For He that is mighty hath done great things for me, and
Holy is His Name." (Luke 1:49)

The "great things" are nothing less than that she became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed upon her as pass [human] understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of [hu]mankind, among whom she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in Heaven, and such a child.

She herself is unable to find a name for this work, it is too exceedingly great; all she can do is break out in the fervent cry: "They are great things," impossible to describe or define. Hence [we] have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God.

No one can say anything greater of her or to her, [even with] ... as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees, or grass in the fields, or stars in the sky, or sand by the sea. It needs to be pondered in the heart, what it means to be the Mother of God.

[Luther's Works, Vol. 21, p. 326, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Concordia Publishing House, 1956.]

Mary is both representative of our common humanity and an exceptional model surpassing all others in her election by God and her acceptance of God’s plans.   

C.S. Lewis described the process of God’s salvation history in these terms:  

“We [moderns] do not at all like the idea of a "chosen people". Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about [humanity]. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.”

In the reading from Luke today, we have the Blessed Virgin’s great song of praise to God, the Magnificat.  

Mary’s song is rich with snippets of poetry from the Hebrew scriptures. In piecing together these old, old sayings about God, she makes fresh, new declarations.  In connecting these ancient passages with her own circumstances, she declares God’s activity in the present tense.

It is bold and brave talk, about a God who overturns society, overthrows governments, and turns things on their head. 

Mary here is a perfect example for us on how to talk about God at work in our own lives. 

Some may balk at this idea, thinking that it is okay for a biblical figure to talk about God active in her life in terms similar to the great saving acts of God in the history of Israel, but a little presumptuous for us to do so today. 

But a couple of things in Mary’s song tells us how right it is for us to sing it along with her.  They are the reason we regularly recite the Magnificat in our daily Evening Prayer Services. 

Mary doesn’t speak about her own experience, importance, and future alone. She talks also about God lifting up “the lowly,” and “the hungry.”   She connects her experience of God uplifting her with God’s larger intentions for all.   God’s actions are not private treasures that separate us from others.  They are great signs of God’s love that connect us together.  Likewise, she talks about her experience of God in the broad salvation history of her people, and not in exclusive terms of “God acted here, now, and nowhere else.” 

We should avoid and be very suspicious of claims about God’s actions in the present that isolate one person or group and set them apart from others, or that try to tell all the inside story on detailed events in the present and the future.  Theology that pretends to tell us what God is doing right here and right now, and that claims definitive knowledge of what will happen in the future is manipulative theology. We have heard a lot of this kind of thing recently: Hurricane Sandy was God’s punishment for abandoning his way, the horrors in Connecticut happened because we do not having organized public prayers in state-funded schools, etc.  This is just bad theology. 

Acknowledging God’s love and mercy to us in terms that bring us together  and do not drive us apart, affirming hope that God will be true to God's promises and love in the future as in the past, this is good theology indeed. 

When all is said and done, the Blessed Virgin’s song of praise remains outrageous and bold.   It is the ultimate Advent hymn, rejecting the world as it is, hoping for a turning of the tables, and confident that God has made and will make all things new.  It says things are going to get better, not worse.  It calls us to pray and sing along with this young Hebrew girl at her prayers, this lowly handmaiden chosen to as the Glorious and Blessed Mother of God. Let our souls magnify the Lord, for he has done great things for us. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

Jesters, Christmas, and Jesus

“Jesters, Christmas, and Jesus”

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

December 20, 2013

The English tradition of having Mummers’ Plays or Pantomimes as part of their Christmas celebrations comes from the idea that making fun of our solemnities and normal social order is a key in finding the liberation of the soul we seek in our mid-winter festivals.  It is part of a tradition that often includes the crowning a “Lord of Misrule” and turning the social order on its head, if only for a single night of partying.  A very old form of the Christmas Mummer’s Play tells the story of St. George fighting the Dragon in terms that express our hope in darkest winter for the return of Light and Warmth. “Like winter, I must die,” George says after being dealt a deadly blow by the Dragon, “But rise again as Spring.”    We are going to try to put on a short, impromptu version of St. George’s Play at coffee hour after the 10 a.m. Mass on Sunday. 

Sociologist Harvey Cox wrote, “Like the jester, Christ defies custom and scorns crowned heads.  Like a wandering troubadour, he has no place to lay his head.  Like a clown in the circus parade, he satirizes existing authority by riding into town replete with regal pageantry when he had no earthly power.  Like a minstrel, he frequents dinners and parties.  At the end, he is consumed by his enemies in a mocking caricature of royal paraphernalia.  He is crucified amid snickers and taunts with a sign over his head that lampoons his laughable claim.”  

Let us pray.   

“Lord, help us live so foolishly for you that we draw onlookers and those who would deride us.  And while they watch and mock, change all our hearts that we might learn to laugh at the foolishness this world calls normal and run away from the circus that is ‘real life’.  Amen.”   

(Prayer from Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, p. 73) 

Gaudete (Advent 3C)

“Gaudete”

16 December 2012

Advent 3C

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Zephaniah 3:14-20 ; Canticle 9 ; Philippians 4:4-7 ; Luke 3:7-18

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Such horrible news this week.  Shootings in a Portland mall filled with holiday shoppers.  Then the horrible murder of dozens of elementary school children and their teachers in Connecticut.   We can only feel anguish and sorrow for the victims and their bereft families and communities, for the souls and poor families of the murderers, and, ultimately, for ourselves.   Lord, have Mercy.

A week ago on Thursday, we here at Trinity recited a “Blue Christmas” litany during the noon healing Mass and then had a remembrance luncheon for those in the parish family who are still grieving for the loss of their loved ones by death in the last year.  

As we approach the holidays, I have had numerous parishioners come to me and express their fear and sorrow at having to go through a time of “comfort and joy” when they themselves feel no comfort or joy, whether because of bereavement, or pain they suffer from bad relationships in their lives, whether with controlling and never satisfied parents, abusive or emotionally distant spouses, negligent and distant children, or former co-religionists in churches they have left because they were just too beaten up by them.  

Friday, as the news from Connecticut unfolded, Elena and I drove up to Portland to attend the annual performance of the Christmas Revels that evening.  The theme was an early American and Appalachian Christmas, with plenty of African-American spirituals, Sacred Harp shaped-note hymns, and the fuguing tunes of William Billings.  It was joyful, happy, and hopeful, with lots of music for and about children.  But the events in Connecticut were on everyone’s mind. 

Thinking about the dead first graders, I found myself weeping several times while children sang such things as “follow the stars, how they run; see the moon, how it grows,” “What a goodly thing if the children of the world could dwell together in peace,” and “God bless the Master of this House, and his good mistress too, and all the little children that round the table go.”  Even the call “rejoice, rejoice, rejoice” seemed hollow.    

Today, the third Sunday in Advent, is called Gaudete Sunday.  We lit the pink candle on the Advent Wreath, and I am in rose rather than blue or violet vestments.   This is the Sunday in Advent when our fearful expectation of the coming of Christ is supposed to turn into anticipated joy, when the coming of Christ is seen as the setting right of all things that are wrong, rather than as the ultimate comeuppance of the wicked, including us.   The Latin word Gaudete means “Rejoice.”

It is what Paul commands us to do in today’s epistle reading.  “Rejoice always, again I say, rejoice.”

But how can we rejoice in the face of such dreadful things? 

Rejoicing amid bad things is incongruous with how our emotions work.  The problem is hinted at in the contradiction we find when we read today’s Gospel, about John the Baptist’s severe moral teachings, along with Paul’s “Rejoice! Rejoice!”   It is shown, I think, by the difficulty that many of us have this time of year if we are bereaved and mourning, or suffering from isolation, loneliness, or despair.      

I do not think that Paul is giving us a dopey repetition of the nostrum, “Don’t worry, be happy!”  He wrote this letter to the Philippians while in prison, after having been beaten savagely several times for declining to denounce his faith.  And in his letters he certainly seems to have the full range of human emotion, from cold rage and blazing anger at times to gentle warmth and affection and even fall down laughing humor at others. 

There is something much deeper at work here.  Our emotional life has a certain shape and dynamic, and normally this horror and sorrow rule out rejoicing.  But perhaps our emotional lives are not complete.   We may seem constitutionally unable to feel joy at times of sorrow as Paul enjoins us, but perhaps our feelers are broken. 

Paul is not arguing for us to become clinically emotionally impaired, whether as rapid-cycling bipolars or sufferers from profound and dissociative mixed states of affect. 

Importantly, Paul says, “Rejoice in the Lord always.”   His point is that the source, object, and driver of our joy should be Jesus, not the circumstances we find ourselves in.   He as much as admits that our circumstances can be pretty bad when he says, “do not worry about anything that may happen,” but rather pray and ask God for our deepest desires in all aspects of our lives with a thankful heart.

What’s petitionary prayer and thanks got to do with it?   Our rejoicing should be in the Lord, that is, in Jesus, and Jesus taught us how to pray.   

In his great model of prayer the Our Father, Jesus gives us a whole list of yearnings we should feel and supplications or petitions we should present to God in our prayers:  the arrival of God’s reign, the fulfillment of what God wants on earth as well as in heaven, our daily sustenance, forgiveness of and reconciliation for our failings and the ability to forgive others and reconcile with them, to not be subjected to severe testing if possible, and to be delivered from all ill.    

Where in any of this is the gratitude Paul talks about, the thanksgiving?    

It is found in the opening words of the prayer, “Our Father in heaven, may your name be made holy.” This is the ultimate confession of God’s love and beauty, and of thankfulness for all that God’s love and beauty entails, all the blessings we enjoy.

That is really the heart of the matter.  Paul says that if we have thankful, yearning hearts full of petitions to God, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will fill our hearts and minds with the knowledge and love of God.  Joy, rejoicing, is found in such peace.  

As I have said over this pulpit before, standing in awe before the eternal weight of glory, beholding the beatific vision of a Holy and perfectly loving God, looking upon the beauty of God and feeling the love of God in the heart of Jesus—this is the core of trusting God, of being open to God, and of being changed, and in changing the world.   It is also the core of peace in our hearts. 

It is at the heart of finding solace in grief, hope in despair, comfort amid horror, joy in all things even when they are pretty horrific, and the strength to advance God’s reign. 

The Revels performance is so moving to me each year for the same reason that I love our Trinity Church Advent Labyrinth walk, precisely because they celebrate the Light in the darkest and drearest part of the year.  A poem written for the Revels and read at each performance sums the idea up well: 

The Shortest Day
By Susan Cooper
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Carols of this season put it well.  One says, “Good Christians all, this Christmas time, remember well, and keep in mind, what God Himself for us has done, in sending His Beloved Son.”  Another says, “So let us be happy, put sorrows away, remember Christ Jesus was born on this day.”  Another:  “In the deep mid-winter, Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago.  Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him Nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away When He comes to reign: In the bleak mid-winter A stable-place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.”  And the Latin carol we often hear choirs sing this time of year, “Gaudete, gaudete, Christus est natus ex Maria Virgine, gaudete!”

Hope in the darkness, joy amid wickedness.  Not joy at wickedness or darkness, but joy at the Light which the darkness cannot overcome, and yearning and hope for the Good and Love that Evil cannot destroy.

Thankful and yearning prayer in the midst of darkness, in the midst of mourning, in the depth of fear and despair, allows us to feel joy in the Lord.  And this is so even if such yearning and prayer is manifested merely as reveling and dearly loving our friends.  When consciously part of yearnings that we in our vulnerability intentionally reveal to God, such prayer empowers us, and moves us to change, and amend our lives.  It is at the heart of what John the Baptist preached, as dour and forbidden as he might at times seem to us. 

Let me close by reading what the Bishop of Washington D.C., the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde,  wrote in reaction to these horrors: 

Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more. Jeremiah 31:15-17

We are united tonight in grief.  Tomorrow shall we unite in resolve to ban weapons whose only purpose is to kill large numbers of people?  And to make it as easy to get mental health care as it is to buy a gun?

I join Dean Gary Hall of Washington National Cathedral in calling on our national leaders to enact more effective gun control measures. We know from experience that such calls go unheeded. But what if this time, you and I took up this issue and wouldn’t put it down until something was done? You will be hearing more about this from the dean and me in the days ahead, but for the moment, let us join in lamentation, in mourning and in prayer. Today we grieve, but soon we act.

Arise, cry out in the night,
as the watches of the night begin;
pour out your heart like water?
in the presence of the Lord.
Lift up your hands to him
for the lives of your children Lamentations 2.19

Other bishops, including our own Michael Hanley here in Oregon, have made similar calls.

Let us go forth from this Eucharist today, this Great Thanksgiving, renewed and recommitted to joy, to love, to caring for children, to supporting and healing the ill and reconciling hurt, and to forgiveness.  Of course, let us mourn the people and things we need to mourn.  And let us be angry as appropriate at the wrong way the world is.  But in this all, may joy in Christ inspire us to work for a better world, both in our own lives and in our communal life together. 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

St. Lucy's Day (Mid-week Message)

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Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

December 12, 2012

St. Lucy’s Day (December 13)

December 13 is the Feast Day of Saint Lucy, a martyr during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian (304 C.E.).    She is associated with light in darkness, since her Latin name Lucia is very close to the Latin word for light, lucis. 

Twelve days before Christmas, St. Lucy’s Day is a mirror and foretaste of January 6’s great festival of light, Epiphany, twelve days after Christmas Day.     Before the Gregorian Calendar was introduced in 1582, December 13 was the day of the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.   St. Lucy is one of the few saints celebrated in reformation Scandinavia, and her day is marked by a procession of a young woman representing the saint.  She wears a crown of lit candles and is followed by young women (and now also young men) bearing candles.

Lucy refused a pagan marriage and gave her dowry to the poor.  Her jilted pagan bridegroom reported her to the authorities, who demanded that she sacrifice to the image of the Emperor.  When she refused, she was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in a brothel.   She replied by saying that God judges the intentions of our heart and not our actions when forced against our will.  When the soldiers came to take her away, they found that they could not move her from her house despite increasing heroic efforts on their part, and her death resulted.  In some retellings, St. Lucy dies by having her eyes gouged out before being beheaded, though the late medieval iconic image of St. Lucy bearing a pair of eyeballs in her hand probably results from her being, associated as she is with light, the patron saint of those suffering from blindness and eye diseases, rather than the means of her execution. 

The following hymn (number 490) summarizes themes that are appropriate for St. Lucy’s Day, midway through Advent: 

Iwant to walk as a child of the Light
I want to follow Jesus
God set the stars to give light to the world
The Star of my life is Jesus.

Refrain:

In Him there is no darkness at all
The night and the day are both alike
The lamb is the Light of the city of God
Shine in my heart Lord Jesus.

I want to see the Brightness of God
I want to look at Jesus
Clear Son of righteousness shine on my path
And show me the way to the Father. (Refrain)

I'm looking for the coming of Christ
I want to be with Jesus
When we have run, with patience, the race
We shall know the joy of Jesus. (Refrain)

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

For on-line readers:  

Here is John Donne's poem for St. Lucy's Day, about mourning during the Winter Solstice, with my bracketed notes trying to bring his sense into modern English:  

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY.
by John Donne

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
            The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

[It is the end of the year, St. Lucy’s day, with scarcely any light. The sun is exhausted and its rays are like mere firecrackers that fizzle briefly and go out.   The world’s life force seems to have drained into the ground; the thirsty earth has drunk it and is now waterlogged like a person with edema-swollen feet.   Life itself seems shrunken, dead and buried. Still, all these things seem positively cheerful in comparison to me, reduced to feeling like the words engraved on a tombstone.]

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
            For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

[So look carefully at me, all of you who will be lovers next spring — as far away as another world — because I have become like death itself, though love with its magic once distilled out of my nothingness the concentrated essence of myself.  But Love also ruined me. He has now re-made me out of absence, darkness and death, almost as if I had been born out of nonexistent things.]

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
    I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
    Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
            Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

[Everyone around me seems to have the best of all good things. They are made of life, soul, form, body, spirit — they are real.  But I, through the distillation process that is love, have been reduced to a mere grave where emptiness is buried.  Many times in the past we two wept a flood of tears that drowned everything. Many times we became chaotic messes when we had to pay attention to anything besides each other.  Many times when we were apart, we became lifeless as corpses.]

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know ; I should prefer,
            If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my Sun renew.

[But she  (the loved one)  died, if that word can be used in talking about her, and that turned me into something like a potion distilled from the primordial chaos before creation.  If I were a real human being (and I should know what that is like because I used to be one) I would think myself better off if I were an animal.  Even plants and stones have feelings, and they are more real and alive than I am.  They are capable of loving and hating. Even if I were a nothing, a mere object, I would have the capacity to cast a shadow when light shone on me. But I am truly nothing, and the sun will never shine for me again.]

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you,
            Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

[All you lovers—on account of whom the sun in the sky (not the true sun) now arrives in the constellation Capricorn (the goat), to borrow for the new summer new life-drive (like a goat’s lust)—all of you go and enjoy your summer.  Since she (St. Lucy) is enjoying and celebrating this long night, let me get ready for her, and let me call this hour her (the dead loved one's) vigil, and her evening (or Eve), since it is the midnight of both the year and this day.]