Living word by word

sliding into Epiphany

  

Even though it's a rare 2nd Sunday after Christmas January 4, we're going to slide into Epiphany on January 4 this year.  See my former post on the Gift of the Magi for thoughts on the Matthew text.

    And, though it commits the usual sin of melding Matthew and Luke's nativity stories, I'll be reading my kids  Humphrey's First Christmas as the Magi approach. Humphrey is a child-like camel who wants nothing more than a blanket like the other camels -- until he is moved to give it to the baby Jesus.

 Our ace nanny gave this book to my son, who treasures his blankie above even his trains. The illustrations are what really make this book a treasure -- something about camel's teeth brings home the way the Incarnation is a gift to all creation.

mining the old stuff

I'm feeling the need to stay a little more in the real world this week, so I may not blog much, but if you wish you might backtrack over some previous stuff:

• A defense of the not-so-historical parts of the Christmas Story
• John 1  and the absolute qualities of light
• A bit on drawing out twelve days of Christmas (and no, it's not, as one store around here recently had it, the twelve days before Christmas).
• If you dare consider the slaughter of the Innocents on December 28, see Remembering Rachel at Journey with Jesus

Christmas blues

Most years it seems -- pastorally -- that this time of year is more likely to produce funerals, crises and general difficulties in the flock.

This year its more personal -- one friend received a very hard cancer diagnosis last week and another just died last night after a four year struggle with cancer.  Two vibrant, bright, strong women in their 40's.

I don't really know whether the anecdotal evidence that this all happens more around the holidays is true. I suppose it's just true that these events SEEM much harder in the sparkly, tinkly, making-merry atmosphere that our culture imposes on Christmas.

But either way, it sucks.

Advent 4B: Magnificat

What do you do when you are facing trouble? You sing.

I thought of this as I sang, again, the words of the Magnificat at vespers last week. Every year these words gain another layer of meaning for me as I sing them in worship, both on Advent Sundays but perhaps more so on Wednesday evenings when we gather by candlelight. Perhaps it’s the candles that make us all lower our guards, secure that others can't see every expression on our faces.

But I am being watched – in fact I sing the annunciation as a solo -- and I still find myself choking up some weeks.

"My soul proclaims your greatness O God, and my spirit rejoices in you. You have looked with love on your servant here and blessed me all my life through." (Holden Vespers)

I remember singing these words, pregnant, full of a secret hope I had not yet shared with the congregation. And I remember the miscarriage that followed on its heels.

I remember singing them again the next year, very heavy with child, unsure if I’d be there the next week to sing them again.

I remember singing them the week our choir director’s two-year-old son died.

I sung a few minutes after announcing at worship the sudden death of a long time member.

I continue to sing them, week after week, looking out at people struggling with cancer, addictions, and painful relationships, and I think especially of my own friends who face this Christmas with very different hopes than last year’s.

How is it that the same words can possibly fit all these occasions? Surely there are times when we would just say, “no, not tonight. Tonight we cannot say, “You have looked with love on your servant and blessed me all my life through.”

But we do sing those words, no matter what the circumstances

And why not? Mary wasn’t exactly looking at a pile of blessings realized either. Here she was, no different than before the angel came, except that now she was pregnant.  She had nothing more than the angel’s promise to go on that this unlikely pregnancy would be for the good of all God’s people. "Blessed among women?" she might well have asked, "that remains to be seen."

Is it possible that in singing them, the church has claimed that same promise for ourselves? In praying Mary’s words we link ourselves in to that blessing which is still now-and-not-yet, not because we “feel” blessed or see blessing in every circumstance, but because we trust that God can work through all things, that, really, “nothing is impossible with God.”

lectionary rant: Advent 3B

Warning: this is just a gripe. I have no constructive solutions. . . yet.

I love, love, love the season of Advent and its imagery of darkness and light, waiting and hope. But I hate, hate, hate the way the lectionary throws us around in this season. It's bad enough for those of us who understand how it all fits together, but imagine the poor soul who might reasonably be expecting some kind of linear progression.

We begin the season on Advent 1 announcing a new start to a new year, and, behold! a different Gospel for the year! But then, -- and it's worst of all in this Year of Mark -- they get Mark 13, then Mark 1, then John the Baptist AGAIN in John 1, then Luke 2, then John 1 again, then Luke 2 AGAIN, then John 1 AGAIN, then Mark 1 and John the Baptist AGAIN! 

Maybe most people aren't in church enough to be irritated by the skipping around and the repetition, but it sure doesn't encourage them to come back and feel like the pieces of the puzzle are fitting together.

It's enough to make one think those churches that are just preaching the "meaning of Christmas" in four parts for the month are on to something. . .

recovery reading

I'm reading The World Without Us, recommended to me by a number of friends as "more hopeful than it sounds." In parts, it is. There are many places which are a testament to human ingenuity and the resiliency of nature. But there are places where I've just had to stop reading. I understand why most people find it easier to deny climate change.

So, as recovery, I'm re- reading a book I already knew I liked, Leaving Church. I was irritated the first time around that Barbara Brown Taylor had, in the end, left parish ministry. I'm still not happy about that, but this time I can read her spot-on descriptions of parish life and simply enjoy the good writing. For example:

"On my worst nights I lay in bed feeling like a single parent, unable to sleep because I knew I did not have enough love in me to go around. God was the boundless lover, but for many people God was the parent who had left. They still read about him in the Bible and sang about him in hymns. They still believed in his reality; which made it even harder to accept his apparent lack of interest in  them. They waited for messages from him that did not arrive. They prepared their hearts for meetings that never happened. They listened to other Christians speak as if God showed up every night for supper, leaving them to wonder what they had done wrong to make God go off and start another family."

One of the things I love about Advent is that the season of waiting is a time we're allowed to acknowledge our sense of orphanhood, our worry that God has indeed given up on this world. I know it is not true, but I also know the worry, the longing , is so very, very real. It's good to hear a writer as gifted as Taylor acknowledge it.

praying for snow

Carol  Howard Merritt at Tribal Church has written an insightful piece on prayer, prompted by her daughter's request to God for snow. Her concern is that her daughter not get the wrong idea about prayer. My comment, which you can read at the site, is that snow is not the equivalent of praying for a bicycle, or another such purely personal request.

We pray for snow a lot at our house. Yes, we want to play in it. But more than that, we want snow because it is a sign that winter is not going away forever. We want snow because it blankets the earth and lets northern plants do what they are supposed to do for the winter. We want snow because it reflects sunlight back into the atmosphere and holds down the temperature just a bit more.  We want snow because if we don't get it now, the drought which began earlier this year is going to be much, much worse next spring.

We pray for snow in the same way we pray for peace -- not because we expect global climate change to halt at our request, but because we pray that our pleas, our actions, our change of heart might also be assisted a bit by a God who wants the planet to survive as much as we do.

where is the light?

Every time my California parents come to visit us in Minnesota, they ask, "how is it that the Christmas lights are up already [if its November], or still [if it's January]?"

 I answer, "They are NOT Christmas lights. They are WINTER lights. It's dark here a really long time."

 The longer I live this far north, the more forgiving I am of "out of season" holiday festivities. Yes, I still believe in making Advent a time apart, but there's no way I'm sitting in darkness all that time. Liturgical Nazis can whine if they want, but the truth is, it's dark NOW. We want light, we want candles, we need music NOW to remind us that the night will not last forever.  So let Advent have its own light -- just as long as it reminds us where the real light is that shines in the darkness

Keep your lamps trimmed and burnin'; Lectionary 32A

I can't hear this Sunday's parable -- the wise and foolish bridesmaids from Matthew 25 -- without the voices of the St. Olaf choir in my head, turning a simple unison spiritual into a humming, burning, driving plea for watchfulness.

It's an Advent theme in early November (indeed, I'm persuaded by the argument that Advent really begins with these eschatological lessons in November), one likely to be overshadowed by the need of most congregations to "do stewardship" before Thanksgiving. Ah, well.

In tough economic times, it might be easy to hear this parable as one about prudence, about conserving resources (not that that's a bad thing) so as to be ready for tough times.

Next week's gospel will go after the "caution as stewardship" model, but this week perhaps the question is to simply ask, "What kind of oil are we talking about here?" What kind of lamps are these? We're not talking about keeping the lights on at church.

I submit that the oil that watchfulness requires is cost-free and carbon-free. To wait and watch for the bridgegroom's coming is to expect God to show up, and to accept that you don't know when. To wait and watch means you keep at it even when you can't control the circumstances (a good thought for an election eve), to expect that God is up to something even when you have no idea when God's action will be evident.

The oil we need is clean-burning. It's the oil of hope, the oil of prayer, the oil of everyday, non-stop acts of kindness and justice and love that the world won't notice. It's the oil burned by the saints gone before us (I'm mindful particularly of Barack Obama's beloved grandmother on this night). It's the oil of God's grace which never runs out, and which fills our lamps again and again when we keep watch for God's promises to be fulfilled.

On the tenth day of Christmas

On the tenth day of Christmas, I still don't know all the things my true love has given to me. Yes, there are still gifts under our tree, even for the kids. I know, people will think we have aliens for children, but it really is possible to stretch the gift-giving out for twelve days, and some of the enjoyment that goes with the gifts as well. If anything, as the new year begins and routines resume, the hardest thing is finding the time to all sit down together to open them.

Actually, probably the biggest argument against this prolonging of gift exchange is that there are aunts and uncles and grandparents who start to wonder where they rank in the order of things. It's not a speed dial hierarchy; we really don't order the gifts in any particular way except to make sure that the first gifts after the stockings are some things that can be played with on Christmas Day. But still, I get the sense that some relatives think we're either handcuffing the children to prevent them from opening more, or just plain disappointed we didn't dive into their boxes first.

Today we made sure the wise men were "on the way" to the creche in time to arrive there by Epiphany. Somehow we got into a discussion at breakfast about the textual accuracy of "three kings," which prompted my daughter to go through various permutations on how more than three magi could have offered three gifts. "Well, two magi could have brought one gift each, and and two more could have just brought one together, OR six magi could have . ."(and so on ).

It's really a shame that the Passion story doesn't invite the same playfulness that the Nativity does.