Ponder:"to wait is a distinct kind of activity"

"A new aspect of the eucharist comes to life when we think of it as a sign that we are waiting for the day of the Lord’s return. To wait is a quite distinct kind of activity. It means recognizing that someone else is the prime mover or principal actor. It means admitting that we ourselves are in secondary roles, so secondary that we do not know the time schedule. It means living in patience and hope. This is the spirit of much of the Bible, especially of the Psalms which are such a regular part of traditional public and private prayer. This is the spirit in which the New Testament speaks of breaking the bread and drinking the cup until the Lord comes."
H. Boone Porter, "The End of Advent"  Covenant, 15 Dec. 2016

The Passing Bell's Question

“Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”  Romans 13:11

I walked down the street from the hospital with my faith renewed, full of joy, grateful to be a priest.  I had been called in a few hours earlier because Gertrude Worrall, my oldest parishioner, had reached the end.  She was 98, baptized at Christ Church when William Howard Taft was president, a saintly woman, greatly loved by her family.  They had surrounded her in the hospital room, four or five generations of them.  We’d prayed and sang hymns together.  There was laughter and tears, and she was delighted by all of it until she slipped peacefully away.  It may sound very odd if you haven’t seen one, but there are beautiful deaths, and sometimes, as a priest, I’m invited to be part of them.

I was walking a few inches above the sidewalk as I made my way back to the church to put away my stole and the communion kit.  And I decided this would be just the moment to expand the use of the passing bell at Christ Church. 

Ponder: "Cynicism is always a practical failure."

“Christians will not quite be able to agree with President Obama’s statement that we are all Americans first. But Christians in our country are at least Americans second, and we should strive to be good ones as the president has urged, by presuming the good faith of our fellow citizens and seeking common ground whenever and wherever these may be had. Prescinding from the process, perhaps to keep our hands clean, is not helpful, and cynicism is always a practical failure, rooted in spiritual despair.

These are, in fact, Christian encouragements that we should know well and be expert in exemplifying, modern political democracy being, after all, a Christian bequest to the secular world in the wake of our own wars of religion and recrimination. The school of Christian unity-in-truth, indeed the gospel itself, includes politics properly practiced in the classical sense, and in the sense presumed by our commitment and call to good order, governance, and shared faith (see Eph. 4).

It would be hard to think of a better theme for the season of Advent, which inculcates preparation for the promised apocalypse of our Lord: the final revelation and unveiling of his return, judgment, and right ordering of all things. As Scripture and our tradition teach, these are always upon us, in this time between the times, and they form our faith and hope for both justice and mercy. Their practical payoff is due “fear” that leads to humility and awe in the face of our fleeting and fragile lives; repentance for our sins, not shifting blame to others (Luke 18:9-14); resolve to remain focused on the most important, ultimate concerns; and the commitment to living faithfully in the interim, that is, with courage, joy, and confidence in the promises of God.”

Christopher Wells, “Come, Lord Jesus; Get Back to Work.”  Covenant. 11 Nov. 2016

O Key of David

O Key of David and Sceptre of the house of Israel, Who dost open and no man doth shut, Who dost shut and no man doth open, come and bring forth from his prisonhouse the captive that sitteth in darkness and in the shadow of death.

He would turn up for the grand occasions in the Chapel when I was a student at Duke.  He was an old man, very distinguished with a craggy face, an emeritus professor of chemistry.  His doctoral robe was Harvard Crimson, and he wore a velvet cap.  And he carried an enormous jeweled staff, with a wide silver head, the mace of the University.  His title was the University Marshall, and that staff represented, I think, the teaching authority.  He bore on behalf of the faculty, who had chosen them to represent him.  When he carried it in on Matriculation Ceremony, or on Founders’ Day or for Baccalaureate, and laid it upon the Altar, it announced to all of us that the university could now get about its business, that the teachers would teach, that students could learn.  He walked very slowly, because he knew that everyone had to wait for him.  His mace was the key that opened the proceedings of a great university.

O Root of Jesse

O Root of Jesse, Who dost stand for an ensign of the people, before Whom kings shall keep silence, and unto Whom the Gentiles shall make their supplication: come to deliver us, and tarry not.

The House of Jesse was a stump.  That’s where this majestic passage from Isaiah 11 begins.  God had revealed this to Isaiah, when to all outward appearances, it seemed likely to have a fairly secure future.  He’s talking about the royal house, Israel’s line of kings.  Jesse was the father of David, the greatest of kings, and it was David’s descendants who ruled in Jerusalem in Isaiah’s time.  It will become a stump, Isaiah begins, cut off violently after so many warnings went unheeded.  The patience of God would be exhausted, and it would fall like a great tree in the forest.

And great trees, generally, do not rise again. The ruin of what once was, the death of a promising future.  It’s the natural lesson of this time of year, of course, when the greenery of summer is dying off.  The trees have shed their leaves, and the wind whips through the branches, and the sap moves very slowly if it moves at all.  It’s dark and cold, and life seems chased from the earth.

Emmanuel: God with us.

O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Expected of the Nations and their Saviour, come to save us, O Lord our God.

O Emmanuel—it is a resonant name, “God and man hyphenated,” one author calls it.[1]  It means, “God is with us,” and the One whose coming we expect, Jesus the Messiah, His name, Saint Matthew tells us, is Emmanuel.[2]  You know this name perhaps, from the prophecy in Isaiah chapter 7, which we have just heard.  But you probably know it best of all from the great Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”  It is a translation of a medieval Latin hymn, which is in turn a versification of a series of beautiful antiphons.  These are one sentence anthems designed to be sung before and after Mary’s Song, the Magnificat at Evening Prayer during the last eight days before Christmas.  In that series of antiphons, and in the original Latin hymn, O Emmanuel is the last one, the antiphon for the Eve of Christmas Eve.  But when the great John Mason Neale was translating the hymn, he put it first instead, and so we know the whole hymn by that immortal plea, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”

It was a wise choice, I think, for it is the finest of the antiphons, and in a way it is the summary of all of them.  The antiphons and the verses of the hymn chart a series of images, drawn deep from the well of Old Testament prophecy, mostly from Isaiah, the greatest prophet of the Old Testament.  O Wisdom, O Lord of Might, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Dayspring, O Desire of Nations: but together, in their prayers for wisdom, for protection, for fulfillment and deliverance and peace—all of them can be summarized, O Emmanuel, O God be with us. 

Rend the Heavens: A Meditation for Advent

“O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down.”  Is. 64:1

The Church’s faith and proclamation seldom clashes as sharply with the world as in the early days of December.  The world is well into its “holiday season,” a time of meaningless jollity, excessive consumption, and a sentimental delight in the vague pleasantries of the comfortable home and the stable family. 

But the Church is keeping Advent.  We sit with those “who dwell in deep darkness” and follow the Baptist out into the desert.  We call for the Lord to come with power and set this sad and broken world to rights.  We scan the distant mountains for the first rays of the coming dawn.

Drugs or Jesus

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.”  St. Luke 21:34

I’d been asked to give the prayer for the Law Day ceremony.  This was an annual event in the little town where I last served, a gathering of the County Bar Association in the chamber of our handsome Victorian Courthouse.  They’d recognize new lawyers, remember those who had died.  There was a prayer and then an address, presented this year by Judge Burns, long respected on the bench, looking the quintessence of judicial dignity in his long black robes.

I was expecting something suitably grand and rhetorical on the meaning of law, liberally sprinkled with quotations from the Constitution and Blackstone’s Commentaries.  But Judge Burns told us instead about a pending crisis.  Cheap heroin was beginning to flood into our rural community.  The police aren’t equipped to handle it, he said.  We don’t have nearly enough treatment facilities.  Petty crime is going to go through the roof.  We’re going to see overdoses among the young, a whole new class of people incapable of holding jobs and participating in civic life. 

For Meditation: Feelings for holy men in winter

“Such is the frame of mind which befits the end of the year; and such the frame of mind which comes alike on good and bad at the end of life. The days have come in which they have no pleasure; yet they would hardly be young again, could they be so by wishing it. Life is well enough in its way; but it does not satisfy. Thus the soul is cast forward upon the future, and in proportion as its conscience is clear and its perception keen and true, does it rejoice solemnly that “the night is far spent, the day is at hand,” that there are “new heavens and a new earth” to come, though the former are failing; nay, rather that, because they are failing, it will “soon see the King in His beauty,” and “behold the land which is very far off.” These are feelings for holy men in winter and in age, waiting, in some dejection perhaps, but with comfort on the whole, and calmly though earnestly, for the Advent of Christ.”

J. H. Newman, quoted in Will Brown’s “The Deterioration ofNature: On the Running Out of Time.”  Covenant.  24 Nov. 2015