Advent: the hour for you to awake

Our reading for Morning Prayer today, the first sunrise of Advent, is from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans. It sets the tone for the season, which is not about "nesting," that is, decorating, baking, flitting about like Martha, instead of intently seeking the Lord, like her sister Mary.

In order to grasp the context of the reading it is necessary to back up a verse, to the last verse of what, in most modern English translations, is the previous section, the heading to which is usually something like the New American Bible's Love Fulfills the Law: "Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law" (Rom. 13:10). Now we move to verses 11-12, which constitute our reading for Morning Prayer and extending it two verses, to the end of the chapter:

And do this because you know the time; it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed; the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness [and] put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh

It is helpful to note that the Greek word for "flesh" is sarx and does not usually mean "body" (there are some exceptions here and there in Paul's writing, but like the meaning of many words, context determines specific meaning) In Koine Greek, the language in which the entire New Testament was originally written, the usual word for body is soma. Sarx, or "flesh," as it is used here by the apostle, refers to decisions and actions that are self-centered, or selfish. Living in this manner is living in a carnal, or fleshly, way and flows from the part of us that is unchanged, not converted, not transformed by God's saving and healing power.

This morning, the first morning of Advent, the first morning of a new Year of Grace, the holy apostle, along with our Lord Himself in today's Gospel, is telling us to awaken those sleepy, untransformed parts of ourselves, to reckon with them in light of Christ's return, or our going to meet Him (whichever comes first). So, the question for each of us today is what in us needs to be transformed by the power of God's Spirit?

"There's no place like home"

Now, amid all of the hubbub swirling around us, threatening to suck us into it's swirling vortex, we enter the sacred, holy, quiet, contemplative season of Advent, which is easily the most counter-cultural season of all the seasons of the liturgical year, which is why it is also the most neglected. Advent is a season of holy waiting and longing. A season of waiting in the dark for the Light to appear and dispel our gloom.

It's easy to forget that this of time year is perhaps the most difficult for many people, especially for those who are alone, in trouble, or in anxious circumstances. Let those of us blessed with home and hearth, good health, adequate wealth and the treasure above all treasures, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, not forget those in need and reach out to them as He undoubtedly would have us do. It's important, too, not forget our own neediness, our own longing, our own fears and anxieties.

Yesterday I drove home from work "amid the encircling gloom." It was getting to be dusk and a storm had blown in, turning the skies a lusterless shade of gray, making everything look lifeless and dull. I was so happy to walk into my well-lit house, to see my family, to be where in a loving, hospitable place. In the immortal words of Dorothy of Kansas, "There's no place like home." This sentence strikes me as a fitting motto for Advent.

I have used this great photo, taken by Ben Bell, for the past four or five years. It's one of those that doesn't wear off

Two years ago my bishop issued his first and, to date, only Pastoral Letter to our local Church. It garnered quite a bit of national attention at the time. His letter, "Waiting in Joyful Hope!" includes this set of reflections:

In the late autumn of the year, as the world darkens, the Church is called to gather and quietly wait in hope for the coming of Christ, her bridegroom, the Light of the World. I am reminded of a song by Marty Haugen: "For you, 0 Lord, my soul in stillness waits, truly my hope is in you."! Is our hope really in Christ? Have we really allowed ourselves to wait in silence and ponder the great mystery of salvation? Have we been changed by our reflection on this mystery so that we live differently as our relationship with the risen Christ deepens? In the darkness, we watch for the coming Lord. We must not let our busyness distract us from that, lest we be caught unawares like the foolish virgins in Matthew's Gospel", The season calls us to be attentive to our preparations for the final day and attentive to the quality of our life in union with Christ.

Already having cited John Henry Newman's 1833 poem Lead Kindly Light, citing the entire first stanza seems a fitting way to beckon this season of holy waiting, this season in which we undertake to fully engage the strangeness of living between the already and the not yet...

LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
           Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
          Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me...

I encourage you to look further into the circumstances under which this poem was written (it was written at sea while Newman was voyaging home to England from being abroad longer than he intended when he left his home).

I also encourage you to read Max Lindeman's post, Avoiding the Advent Trap, which is the best article I have read on Advent in recent memory.

"Soon and very soon..."

It seems fitting on this last day of the liturgical year, which, as does the Solemnity of Christ the King, symbolically puts us in mind of the end-of-time, to share a reflection from the end of C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew.

Before departing Narnia for their home world, this world in 1900, Aslan gives Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer a dire warning rooted in the now non-existent world of Charn, to which Polly replies, "But we're not quite as bad as that world, are we, Aslan?" The majestic lion responds:

Not yet, Daughter of Eve... Not yet. But you are growing more like [Charn]. It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things. And soon, very soon, before you are are an old man and an old woman, great nations in your world will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis. Let your world beware.

Queen Jadis of Charn, set loose in London

It would be too much to say that Lewis was prophetic because The Magician's Nephew, while chronologically the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia, was actually the sixth book of the series to be published, being published in 1955, that is, after the unleashing of the atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the firebombing of Dresden and other German cities at the end of World War II, at the height of the Cold War.

In Revelation the end time is depicted as the cosmic Mother-of-All-Battles. Keeping this in mind, let us not lose sight of something terribly important, a matter of life and death, something that St. Paul so emphatically taught is his letter to the Church at Ephesus:

"Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground" (Eph. 6:11-13). Or, prepare ye the way of the Lord.

"let the earth-bound soul arise"

Lake Wobegone is not the only place where it has been a quiet week. It has been very quiet here at Καθολικός διάκονος. This does not mean a bad week, but I don't mind conveying that it has been more than a little difficult in many regards.

One benefit of the post-Thankgiving, pre-Advent quiet is that there has been plenty of time for me to read. Two things I have read that are providing me both comfort and encouragement: Surfing With Mel, a Kindle book by Matthew Lickona that you can purchase and read for all of $0.99; Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World by Walker Percy.

Percy's novel is an amazing commentary on many things, not the least of which is Christianity in the U.S.A. Writing in the character of his novel's anti-hero, Dr. Tom More (a distant relative of St. Thomas More), Percy comments on Ellen Oglethorpe, his lovely Presbyterian nurse from the state of Georgia:

Ellen, though she is a strict churchgoer and a moral girl, does not believe in God. Rather does she believe in the Golden Rule and in doing right. On the whole she is embarrassed by the God business. But she does right. She doesn't need God. What does God have to do with being honest, hard-working, chaste, upright, etcetera. I on the other hand believe in God, the Jews, Christ, the whole business. Yet I don't do right. I am a Renaissance pope, an immoral believer. Between the two of us we might have saved Christianity

Prior this, Percy wrote, "The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic sexual-religious longing I woke with when I was ten years old."

Since Advent begins at sundown tomorrow with the celebration of First Vespers, which is the first liturgy of the new Year of Grace, our Friday traditio is my favorite Advent hymn, "Hark a Thrilling Voice Is Sounding." This 10th century Latin hymn was translated into English by Edward Caswall in 1849. It sings of Jesus Christ, the Sun who dispels the darkness and "shines upon the morning skies." The tune, by William Henry Monk, has been closely associated with this hymn ever since the two were published together in 1850.

Lo! the Lamb, so long expected,
comes with pardon down from heaven;
let us all, with tears of sorrow,
pray that we may be forgiven;

that when next he comes with glory,
and the world is wrapped in fear,
with his mercy he may shield us,
and with words of love draw near.

Solemnity of Christ the King

Readings: Dan. 7:13-14; Ps. 93:1-2.5; Rev. 1:5-8; John 18:33b-37

Time is a slippery concept, yet it is a deeply embedded constituent of reality. In essence, time is a function of change. This is demonstrated easily by thinking about how we measure one second on a traditional clock: the movement of the second hand from one little hash mark to the next, going right to left. Or, as the Smothers Brothers sang years ago: “Whatever happened to time? It doesn’t come around anymore. The last time that I saw time, it was walking out the door.”

In one very reductive and sobering sense, our mortal lives are made up of nothing but time. We speak of killing time, managing time, spending our time, well or poorly, which just goes to show that this is a matter of no small significance. How you spend your time is the best way to see what your priorities are and what matters to you, even revealing, at least to some extent, your view of the meaning and purpose of your life. As we celebrate today the Solemnity of Christ the King, which is the last Sunday of the liturgical year, our readings draw our attention to the end of time.

Our first reading, taken from the Book of Daniel, explains in crisp, clear, and easy to grasp language that “one like a Son of man” will receive “dominion, glory, and kingship; all peoples, nations, and languages serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, his kingship shall not be destroyed” (Dan. 7:14). This is made even clearer by our Psalm response, “The LORD is king; he is robed in majesty” (Ps. 93:1). Who is this “one like a Son of man” who “is king… enrobed in majesty”? It is none other than Jesus Christ.

In this Year of Faith, called by our Holy Father, Pope Benedict, to better hear, receive, and appropriate the teachings of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in the life of the Church, this prophecy from Daniel concerning Christ’s kingship draws us to the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum: “God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New” (par.16 ). Our reading today from the Book of Daniel is a case of the New Testament being hidden, if only partially, in the Old. This points us directly toward our second reading, from the last book of the New Testament, one we rarely hear proclaimed in our liturgical assembly, Revelation.

The Book of Revelation, also known in the tradition as “Apocalypse” (which means “unveiling” so as to reveal, or show), is several things at once. It “is a book of apocalyptic visions and a work of prophecy, but it is also a third thing: a letter” (Mangina, Revelation 41). In the first instance, it is a letter to the seven churches of Asia Minor and, secondly, to us. Taking a cue from both the sixth and seventh verses of the first chapter of Revelation, which make up two of the four verses of today’s second reading, both which end with the liturgical “Amen,” we are placed “in the atmosphere of early Christian worship,” which was “an eschatological atmosphere permeated by a longing for Christ’s future coming” (41).

At the center of Christian worship “is the God who is one, but one by being three – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (41). In verse eight, the final verse of our reading from Revelation, which begins with “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” we hear for the first time in Revelation God’s voice, speaking through the prophet to whom the revelation is being given. It has been observed, “This act of self-naming brings God dangerously close,” indicating that worship is a dangerous act.

In a book of essays and reflections entitled Teaching a Stone How to Talk, author Annie Dillard evokes the danger of worship of the true and living God, “the one who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev. 1:8):

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return

This danger was not lost on early Christians, who daily lived in “the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” It is God’s purpose this very day, the Sunday we most look forward to the end of time, through this liturgy, to draw each of us to a place from whence we can never return, His glorious kingdom, where Jesus Christ, who already reigns, will rule forever and ever.

To acknowledge Christ as King it is necessary for you to desire to live truthfully, in a place where all falsity and illusion, especially those you cling to about yourself are melted away. Pilate’s response in today’s Gospel is instructive: he did not desire the truth because it meant not being able to set his own terms, even as the Truth literally looked him in the face. If we’re honest with ourselves, we suffer from this same problem. We are willing to accept some truth, as long it’s our truth, either one we dictate or at least agree to accept. But this isn’t really truth at all. Our resistance to truth, which is perhaps the most powerful evidence of original sin, goes some distance towards explaining what Revelation goes on to unfold in great and terrifying detail, especially in chapter seventeen, that Christ can only reveal Himself fully at the end, with the termination of riches, status, power, and pleasure all those urges that so dominate our human motivations.

So, at end of yet another year of grace, as we once again move together toward Advent, along with our ancient forbearers in faith (at least those who are now in heaven), we pray that dangerous Aramaic word meaning “O Lord, come!” a word we encounter in the last verse of Revelation, Maran- atha. We do this so that our worship, too, creates an “atmosphere permeated by a longing for Christ’s [glorious] coming” (Mangina 41).

True education requires imagination

Flying on the back of Fledge (formerly known as Strawberry, the used up cab-pulling horse), on assignment from Aslan, over the newly-created land of Narnia, Digory said to Polly, "I wish we had someone to tell us what all those places are." Polly responded, "I don't suppose they're anywhere yet." She continued, "I mean, there's no one there, and nothing happening. This world only began today." To which Digory replied, "No, but people will get there... And then they'll have histories, you know." Speaking in what I can only imagine a bit sharply, Polly said, "Well, it's a jolly good thing they haven't now... Because nobody can be made to learn it. Battles and dates and all that rot."

As with so much of his writing, C.S. Lewis here says a lot by writing very little. In this brief passage from the first of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician's Nephew, Digory and Polly expound two very different ideas of education. One arising from experience and the other from imagination, prompting me to call to mind Mark Twain's timeless quip that he never let his schooling interfere with his education

"We are who we are on our darkest day"

"Carry On" by Fun is our Friday traditio for this day they call Black Friday. I write "they," because it doesn't include me. You'll find me nowhere near a place of commerce today. It's only black if you seek the darkness.

So, our challenge today, as it is each day, is becoming who you are, who you are not only created, but redeemed to be. In Christian vocabulary, this becoming is called sanctification, an on-going process "until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ, so that we may no longer be infants, tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery, from their cunning in the interests of deceitful scheming" (Eph 4:13-14).

But I like to think/I can cheat it all/To make up for the times I've been cheated on/And it's nice to know/When I was left for dead/I was found and now I don't roam these streets