Beatitudes in Sharp Focus (Mid-week Message)

 

Beatitudes in Sharp Focus

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

December 30, 2020

 

Today is the sixth of the twelve days of Christmas, the day supposedly where the counting carol says our true love gives to us “six geese a’ laying.”  The three days following Christmas (not counting Sunday, which takes precedence and bumps the other commemorations to a day later) have been the “martyrs to Jesus” days that follow the Feast of the Incarnation.  Boxing Day, the “Feast of Stephen” when Good King Wenceslaus sets for us the example of giving alms to the poor, commemorates    St. Stephen the Deacon and proto-martyr (a martyr in will and in deed).  The next day is the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, who died at a ripe old age after decades of persecution (a martyr in will but not deed.)  Then comes the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the babies killed by wicked King Herod in Matthew 2 (martyrs in deed but not will—the fact that these Jewish children are honored as sainted martyrs due to the circumstances of their deaths undermines the claim by evangelicals that only those who confess Jesus as Lord in their hearts and on their lips can be welcomed to the realms of the Blessed.   Next, on December 29, is the feast of St. Thomas Becket, murdered at the altar in the cathedral of Canterbury by henchmen of Henry II for his valiant defense of the Church’s independence of the state, (a martyr in deed and in will.)  The anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee also falls on December 29. 

 

Why celebrate martyrs during the heart of Christmas? 

 

Christmas is about the turning over of things:  God made man, growing winter darkness turning to growing light, the poor of the earth welcoming a king who appears not to be a king.    Its stories underline the fact that the so-called great of the earth are not all that great.  Shepherds hear the angel choir, not King Herod or Emperor Tiberius, or their courts.  Jesus’ conception is questionable; his mother’s honor in doubt to some.   The stories of martyrs—intentional or no, Christian or no—are stories of the relatively powerless suffering at the hands of the so-called mighty. 

 

And in that, they summarize in a focused way the point of the beatitudes:  blessed are the starving, those who are thirsting to death, the dirt poor, those broken with grief and mourning, those persecuted for trying to do what’s right.  God’s grace and presence is shown most clearly in the moments when you least expect to see God. 

 

President Trump issued a statement yesterday extolling Thomas Becket as a hero of defending the church from interference from the state.  The point is well taken, though the dispute between Thomas and Henry was not that of someone desiring religious freedom:  Thomas wanted clerical superiority to the state, amnesty from all the demands of secular law.  Henry rightly saw that such privilege destroyed the rule of law in a land.   Thomas defended the Church and died for it; we honor him for that.  We do not thereby argue that priests, deacons, and bishops should be exempt from criminal law.    The fact that the outgoing president used Becket as a way of highlighting his own enraging appeals to his base marks it as an abuse of religion, the very thing Becket opposed.  This is all the more noticeable when you realize that he did not talk about the holy innocents:  perhaps that would raise too many questions about whose policies resonate with the violence of Herod and Tiberius.  Hundreds of children remain separated from their parents as a result of the “zero tolerance” border policy of 2017-18. 

 

As gentle as the image of baby Jesus in the crèche is, it does not try to soft-pedal the clear implications of the incarnation: St. Francis, who first made a crèche as a Christmas devotion, knew that all the gentleness demanded a willingness to embrace poverty, suffering, and woe—yes, kiss lepers!—to show God’s love.   In his great hymn to the creatures of God (Brother Sun, Sister Moon), he praises even sister Death as the joyful end of suffering.  That is because Francis knew that the way of the cross is the way of light and life, and that God is most present where we least expect him. 

 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

Incarnate (Christmas 1B)

 

Mystic Christ, icon by Fr. John Giuliani

Incarnate

John 1:1-18
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year B RCL TEC)
27 December 2020: 10:00am Live-Streamed Ante-Communion
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP
Readings: Isa 61:10-62:3; Ps 147, Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love. 

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

Today’s Gospel takes a very different approach than Luke or Matthew.  Rather than tell a story of Jesus’ earthly origins, John tells us of something quite a bit deeper and much, much more hidden. 

 

 The hymn to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the eternal word of God, in John chapter 1 begins: “In the beginning was the word.”

This translation misses the richness of the Greek en arche en ho logos. Another way of translating might be, “At the start, at the root of all, the logos existed.”

The Greek word logos is where we get out word logo, our word logic, and our words analogue and dialogue. It means much more than just “word.”   Its basic meaning is whatever it is that makes or conveys meaning or sense, whether in our minds or on our lips Something is logical, or has logos, because it coheres and is patterned.  Geo-logy is the patterns we see in the physical world, Gaia.  Theology is a patterned and coherent way of talking about God, Theos.   Logos is a deep pattern, a coherence, that lies behind and beneath disparate and apparently random facts. 

 

Thus, a good way to translate the first verse is, “At the root of all things, there existed Meaning.”  The Chinese Bible translates it as the equivalent of  “At the Universe’s Origin, was the Tao.” 

Episcopal priest Jim Stamper gives us the following paraphrase: 

 

Initially there was a pattern for everything.
The pattern was God’s; God was the pattern.
The pattern was always God.
Everything came from that pattern.
There isn't anything else.
The pattern is both the source of life and the meaning of life.
…

The initial pattern for everything that is,

became a human being and lived among us.

We experienced how awesome [he] is:

as awesome as a newborn baby is to [a parent],

the gift of life and all its possibilities.

 

 

The hymn says that the Word/Meaning/Pattern of God took on flesh. The choice of the word “flesh” is deliberate. In Semitic culture, basar “flesh” was the physical, earthy part of a person that you could see, touch, and smell. It was a key part of you, and not wholly separable from your mind or spirit. The symbol for a man to be part of God’s covenant with Abraham was that he be circumcised in his flesh. For Greeks, sarx “flesh” was the changeable, impermanent part of a human being. For some Greek philosophers, it was the part that resisted reason and had a mind of its own, the part that I think we would identify by talking about addictive, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. It was in this sense that Saint Paul had occasionally used the word—sarx for him sometimes is shorthand for that part of a human being that resists God’s intentions for us.

When the prologue of John says the logos became sarx, it means that Reason, Pattern, Meaning itself, took on all it means to be a human being: all the limitations, all the doubts and fears, and the ignorances, all the handicaps.

 

The hymn adds “he dwelt among us.” The word used for “dwelt” is eskenasen: he “set up his tent” among us. The image is of a temporary habitation, like the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle of the ancient Israelites, where God Himself was made manifest to Moses.

The hymn adds, “and we saw his glory, as of a father’s only Son, full of Grace and Truth.”

Grace—one directional love, without condition, of its nature giving.  Truth—genuineness, authenticity, transparency.   It is here that the conflict between divine and human, the perfect and imperfect, the boundless and the bounded is resolved: Grace and Truth. For despite all our limitations, we human beings can on occasion transcend ourselves and open ourselves to Grace and Truth. On even fewer occasions, we can even become the channels or instruments by which Grace and Truth can be given to others.

“We saw the glory of God made flesh, we saw the beauty of the pattern behind the worlds placed within this apparently meaningless world—and we recognized that glory as Grace and Truth.”

 

It is in Jesus’ gracious love and authenticity that the Gospel of John says we can recognize the pattern of the universe, see Jesus is the Logos from all eternity.   But he adds-- Jesus is monogenes—one-of-a-kind. We on occasion can transcend ourselves. Despite all the limitations his humanity imposed, Jesus was always Transcendence Itself.

The hymn to the Logos ends by saying, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”

 

 

The Ultimate Meaning of the universe found a place in human flesh, in the person of this helpless baby. This only Son of God offers us Grace and Truth.  He gives us the chance to be adopted as Children of God.  Joy, joy, and thankfulness on our part. 

 

In the name of God, Amen.

 

 

O Come Let Us Adore Him (Christmas C)

 

O Come Let us Adore Him
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2020

Live Streamed Ante-Communion 7:00 p.m.

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP

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. 

 

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.

 

Belief in the incarnation, the enfleshment of god, in the baby Jesus is belief in hope, in embracing messiness without rejecting it or pretending it doesn’t exit.  The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart helps us understand this:

 

“We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity… But if this does not take place in me, what use is it?  It all comes down to this: the eternal birth should take place in me.”

 

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

 

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.

Poisson de Noel (Midweek Message)

 

Poisson de Noël

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

December 23, 2020

 

I spent my first Christmas away from home when I was 19:  I was living in Boulogne-sur-Mer, the ancient seaport on the English Channel from which Julius Caesar had launched two invasion attempts against Britain.  I was serving as a missionary of the Church of my youth, sharing an apartment with three other young men.  We all felt isolated and lonely, separated from our families at Christmas for the first time each.   The worst part about it for me was the absolute strangeness of the holiday as celebrated in France.  There were a couple of carols I recognized, of course, but these were all in French or Latin.  And greenery and even Christmas trees and lights were to be seen, but much more subdued and tastefully done than the ones I had grown up with.   Three of us had received care packages from our parents with familiar cookies and treats; but these were small and limited by our memory’s standards.  I was afraid that Christmas was just not going to be real Christmas without all the familiar rituals, foods, and decorations.  We shared our meager care packages with each other by putting some of their treats in clean athletic socks we had nailed to a wooden panel near our living area.  Instead of our wonted at home Christmas eve devotions, we attended Midnight Mass at the neighborhood Roman Church.   We had no way to have roast turkey or roast beef for Christmas dinner, and we expecting a simple pasta meal like the ones we usually had. 

 

But early on Christmas Day, we got a knock on our door.  It was our Landlord, a prosperous commercial fisherman.  He was still in his raingear, redolent with the odor of the fishing port, just coming back from fishing.  He bore a large cardboard box with a Plastic Red Ribbon taped on.  “Pour votre fête” he said, smiling, adding that he had chosen this one because it would fit our small oven.  He handed us a small branch of fresh fennel and told us to bake our surprise on medium for 45 minutes.  We opened the box to find a large rock fish, clearly only minutes from being caught in the ocean.   “Fish for Christmas?” we asked ourselves, wondering just how much weirder things would get.  But once we had cooked it, sat down, and devoured it (along with fresh baguette and some white asparagus and a little boudin noir our next door neighbor had brought us), we understood why people in Normandy and the Pas de Calais love fresh fish as a staple of their holiday meals.   Over the next few days, we made a point of visiting at home our friends and people in our care, including members of the local chess club we attended every Thursday evening.  It was the first time I had realized that Christmas lasted 12 days, until January 6. 

 

It was a wonderful Christmas!  I learned that the joy and calm of the holiday does not come from familiar habits and routines, but from intentional connection with what the holiday celebrates:  God taking on human form and becoming one of us. 

 

Stripping away the familiar had taught me where the heart of Christmas lay. 

 

As we go into this holiday with all the strange and isolating effects of the pandemic, may we not regret what we have lost.  Rather, may we rejoice and be glad for what we are able to do to celebrate and honor this day and season. 

 

One of my favorite choral anthems at Christmas is John Rutter’s setting of “What Sweeter Music.”  It is a poem that Cavalier poet Robert Herrick wrote just after the monarchy and Christmas celebrations were restored after the Puritans had banned them for 10 years.  I love the poem, and have sung it with several different choirs over the years.  Sing we cannot gather and sing together this year, I share it with you now, and encourage us all to listen to it at some time during the holiday (many good recordings are available on Youtube).

 

What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!
Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?

--Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

May we all during this season celebrate safely and well.  Let us gather with our loved ones by zoom and phone calls.  Even during this time of quarantine and isolation, let us reconcile with each other and mend family and friend relationships that have gone bad.  Let us celebrate with our whole being, since in Christ our whole being is being made one with God.   Merry Christmas, and God bless us, every one. 

 

Incarnation and Sacrament (Midweek Message)

Incarnation and Sacrament

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

December 16, 2020

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”  (John 1:1, 14)

 

This time of year, a major point of our reflection and meditation is the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth.  Incarnation, or God’s taking on of flesh, is a central doctrine of Christianity.  It generates a whole range of beliefs, practices, and feelings in the catholic tradition of Eastern and Western Christianity, whether Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, or Anglicanism.  Anglican Bishop of Oxford Charles Gore, in his magisterial Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation (1890), quotes several earlier Christian theologians on how our view of nature and the world changes in light of the doctrine of Incarnation:

 

“The wisdom of God, when first it issued in creation, came not to us naked, but clothed in the apparel of created things.  And then when the same wisdom would manifest Himself to us as the Son of God, He took upon Him a garment of flesh and so was seen of men” (Hugh of St. Victor, Migne Patrologia Latina V 177 para 580). 

 

“As the thought of the Divine mind is called the Word, Who is the Son, so the unfolding of that thought in external action … is named the word of the Word …  The incarnation is the exaltation of human nature and consummation of the Universe”” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles IV 13).

 

“The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of that Word by which it was created” (Herbert of Bosham, Migne Patrologia Latina V 190 para. 1353.)

 

“Every creature is a theophany” (John Scotus Eriugina, Migne Patrologia Latina V 122 para. 302). 

 

“Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God” (Bonaventure, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, ci. t. ix). 

 

Because of this ennobled view of all creation, in which the Creator took on the limits and weakness of being a creature, catholics (again of all stripes, whether Eastern, Roman, or Anglican) see throughout creation and created things the presence of God.  This is clear in how we understand sacraments, those God-given practices and actions where an inward reality and presence of God is made manifest in an outward sign, one that not only points to the inward truth symbolically, but also which actually helps bring about the very truth it points to.  In baptism, washing in water in the name of the Holy Trinity symbolizes and brings about regeneration and life in God.  In the Holy Eucharist, bread and wine not only symbolize Christ’s body and blood, but make them truly and really present for us.  (It is not so much that they “re-present” Christ’s sufferings and victory over death but rather make us present at the original event.) 

 

But this sacramental view based in incarnation extends much further.  In the words of Fr. Andrew Greeley in his book The Catholic Imagination, we “live in an enchanted world.”  Our lives are full of created objects that hint at and reveal the mystery and light behind and beneath them and all our lives: beautiful art in worship, whether music, heart-felt liturgy, or lovely vestments, be they stained glass, votive candles, incense, images and statues, or holy water or anointing oil.   As Greeley explains, these “paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which … see[s] the holy lurking in creation.   [W]e find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.”

 

In the early 1900s, the Canon at Westminster Abbey, Percy Dearmer, wrote the following hymn.  It sums up better than anything else, I think, this sacramental, incarnational view of our lives:

 

“Draw us in the Spirit's tether; For when humbly, in thy name,

Two or three are met together, Thou art in the midst of them:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Touch we now thy garment's hem.

 

“As the brethren used to gather In the name of Christ to sup,
Then with thanks to God the Father Break the bread and bless the cup,
Alleluia! Alleluia! So knit thou our friendship up.

 

“All our meals and all our living Make us sacraments of thee,
That by caring, helping, giving, We may true disciples be.
Alleluia! Alleluia! We will serve thee faithfully.”

 

Grace and peace,

Fr. Tony+

 

(reposted from Dec. 7, 2016)

 

 

Take Joy (Advent 3B)

 

Take Joy 


Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Advent (Advent 3B RCL)
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 


13 December 2020; 10:00 a.m. Live-Streamed Ante-Communion 


Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon) 


Readings: 
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

Homily begins at 20:00 in this video

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

 

It’s been a hard year.  Pandemic plague, isolating quarantines, economic collapse, a devastating fire here with hundreds of people still homeless, deep tribal and political division in our nation and community, and now the apparent unwillingness of many Americans and their leaders to sustain and support the results of an election that those most in a position to judge have called the fairest and most closely watched in our life time.   

 

A friend of mine made the bitter observation several years ago, “Of course, how can you not expect lies and moral confusion in a nation with a myth of divinely ordained exceptional destiny but which found its space through the genocide of the First Nations living here before and built its economy for 2 centuries on the blood and sweat of enslaved people held as chattel?”  “The truth will set you free,” said Jesus.  I add:  And lies will enslave you. 

Overcoming fear of illness and death, ending oppression, comforting grief, righting wrongs, setting captives free, forgiving debts--these are all what today’s readings from Isaiah and the Psalms is about: Hope amid the things that make us hopeless.   

Some think it is a just question of having a positive mental attitude.  When I was in the foreign service, I saw many people who would have been happy as clams no matter where they were stationed--they took their happiness with them, and remained so whether they were posted in Paris, or Ouagadougou.  And there were those who took their unhappiness with them, no matter where they landed. 

But it isn’t that simple.  There are truly horrible things that deserve our sorrow, our grief, and our anger.  And there are some things that happen that are so magical and unexpected that they just demand joy.   

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete or “Rejoice” Sunday.  That's why the chasuble I'm wearing and the candle of the Advent Wreath today are rose.  We call it “stir up Sunday” not, contrary to many of our mothers’ explanations, as a reminder to mix and cook the Christmas puddings that need to rest and be fed brandy before the holiday.  No, it is because of the collect, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us.”

 

Surrendering to our loving Lord, submerging ourselves in Jesus’ light and life, this brings joy, hope, and power.  It brings the Year of Jubilee, of release from debts and worries, described by Isaiah.  It makes us, in the words of Thessalonians, rejoice in the Lord always.  Those who have sown in sorrow come back from the fields in joy bearing ripe sheaves. 

God stirs up his power, Jesus, and comes mightily to save.  Joy comes in the morning.  In joy, we open ourselves to thankfulness and kindness.  We shake of the stupor of the night.  But it is up to us to grasp onto joy. 

 

It is not a question of understanding how everything fits in, or where things are going.  It is simply a question of letting that hope and vision of Jesus give us the wherewithal to be present in our lives, our real lives, with all their ambiguities and fears.  Thomas Merton, the great contemplative who died 52 years ago this last week, writes, "You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope."

 

When we let ourselves, like John, be witnesses to the light, all becomes clear.   Jesus takes us by the hand and guides us.  He heals our wounds and helps keep us from wounding others.  In his light, we see light, and know that the day is breaking and the shadows are fleeing away.   This is because God is love, as Jesus revealed, and in the presence of this love, all that is broken will mend, and all that is darkness will pass.

The starting point in this process is as simple as showing compassion for others: that is the point of the parable of the sheep and the goats we read just a few weeks ago. 

It grows from where our hopes lie, where we find our joy. 

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us have our eyes fixed on the stars.” 

If our eyes are fixed on the stars, we cannot lose our bearing in the shadows about us.    Having a clear hope and vision of joy, grounds us and keeps us oriented.  In her wonderful novel Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver writes, “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” 

This is the openness of heart and clarity of vision discussed by the 2 Thessalonians passage:  giving thanks always and remaining open to the critical vision of prophets in our midst who tell us uncomfortable truth. 

Hope comes, like the Muse, unbidden.  Joy comes in the morning.  God acts.  We recognize it and feel it when we are thus thankful and open. For this we must be present, alive, and honest. 

On Christmas Eve in 1513, an Italian Humanist (possibly Fra Giovanni Giocondo) wrote the following letter to a colleague: 

“I salute you. I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got. But there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instance. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy! Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty . . . that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it, that is all! . . . And so I greet you, with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.”

Advent is a time of awakening.  It should be for us like a hot cup of coffee in the sleepy morning, a brisk shower as we try to shake of the stupor of the night.  Part of that awakening must be an honest discomfort with what just isn't right in the world, in us.  Part of it is feeling the grief, sorrow, regret, and fear that comes with being a spirit living in this broken, broken material world.  But the awakening cannot come without a trust in God and the recognition that all things will be well with the world, and all manner of thing well.  Because God is love, and judgment is setting things right, not evening scores. 

The day breaks, and the shadows flee away. 

Thanks be to God.

 

Spotless (Mid-week Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Spotless

Tuesday December 8, 2020

 

“Almighty and Everlasting God, who stooped to raise fallen humanity through the child-bearing of blessed Mary:  grant that we, who have seen your glory revealed in our human nature and your love made perfect in our weakness, may daily be renewed in your image and conformed to the pattern of your Son Jesus Christ, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.”

 

Today in the Church of England’s Calendar is the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  In the Roman calendar, it is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin.  “Immaculate” in Latin means “spotless, or stainless” since macula means a stain.  This doctrine is not to be confused with the virginal conception of Jesus Christ by Mary; rather, it celebrates Mary’s own conception in the womb of her mother St. Anne.  The Roman doctrine was defined only in 1854, and is rejected by most Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants.  Though most of us agree in greater or lesser degree that Mary was free of personal sin (Martin Luther himself called her “a spotless virgin”), we shy away from the Roman doctrine because it assumes Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin (explicitly rejected by the Orthodox), and obscures the fact that Mary was merely human like all of us and makes it harder to affirm that Jesus was not just True God, but also fully human.   However you understand it, the feast is timed to be eight months ahead of the September 8 feast of the birth of the Mother of our Lord. 

 

Just as the Jews were chosen to be God’s agents of salvation for the nations, Mary was chosen to be the means by which God would be made flesh.  C.S. Lewis writes:

 

“To be quite frank, we 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, Man. 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.”  (Miracles: A Preliminary Study (pp. 187–191). New York 2001: HarperOne.)

 

We honor the Blessed Virgin as our Lord’s mother and model for us all, and see in her birth the first glimmerings of the light of his incarnation and saving work.  We see in it the love of God for us all. 

 

Thanks be to God.