Monday, December 26, 2011

Favorite Carol

One of my favorite Christmas Carols is “Good King Wenceslaus.”

The good king looked out his window on the feast of Stephen, that is, on the day after Christmas. The moon shone brightly; a clear sky means a very cold night. The king saw a man gathering fuel to heat his home and inquired who the man was. The king’s page answers that the peasant lives “a good league hence.” A league is somewhere between two and a half and four and a half miles, a long way to go to forage for firewood.

The king responds by having his page gather meat and wine and firewood. He doesn’t sent them out to the man but tells his page that they will take them to the man’s house.

When the page says he can go no further because of the wind and cold, the king tells him to follow behind him, using the king as shelter.

The carol concludes: “Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.” Not just at Christmas, but especially when Christmas has passed.

Octave of Christmas

The prayers for the 7th day within the Octave have some intriguing phrases.

The Collect reads that “God… who, in the Nativity of your Son, established the beginning and fulfillment of all religion.” What does this mean in light of the covenant that was made with Abraham and the covenant that was made with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai? Is Judaism not a religion?

The Prayer over the Offerings asks that “we may do fitting homage to your divine majesty.” The dictionary indicates that “pay homage” is the usual expression.

The Prayer after Communion prays that “your people… with the needed solace of things that pass away may strive with ever deepened trust for things eternal.”

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Ancestors

The gospel reading for the vigil Mass of Christmas is the opening of the Gospel according to Matthew, the genealogy of Jesus. Most parishes that I am familiar with do not use this reading. Instead they use the gospel reading for the midnight Mass, the account of Jesus’ birth from Luke.


The genealogy of Jesus from Matthew has four interesting women in it: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba who is identified only as Soloman’s mother who had been the wife of Uriah.

The footnote in the New American Bible says that these women “bore their sons through unions that were in varying degrees strange and unexpected.”

Perhaps the strangest to our way of thinking is the first, Tamar. She was the wife of Judah’s firstborn son. However, we read he “greatly offended the LORD; so the LORD took his life.” As was the custom the times, another of Judah’s sons, Onan, was married to Tamar to raise up children for his deceased brother. This was not to Onan’s liking and he, too, offended the LORD and died. Tamar had a right to marriage with another of Judah’s sons. However he put this off, for understandable reasons. As time passed and there was no forth coming marriage, Tamar took matters into her own hands. She disguised herself and plopped herself down by the roadside when she know Judah would be passing by. He, mistaking her for a prostitute, had intercourse with her, promising a goat in payment. She obtained his seal as a pledge and promptly returned home after Judah left. When she was reported to be pregnant, Judah’s response was: “Bring her out; let her be burned.” However, when Tamar produced Judah’s seal, identifying him as the father of her child, he recognized that he had wronged her.

The next woman is Rahab, a prostitute of Jericho, who protected the spies that Joshua had sent to recognoiter Jericho. In return she and her family were spared when Jericho fell to the Israelites.

The third is Ruth, who is well known for her loyalty to her mother-in-law, Noemi. Ruth was a Moabite, a foreigner, who became the great-grandmother of David.

The fourth woman is Bathsheba who gave birth to Solomon after her adulterous affair with David.

These are not four of the women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus; these are the four women mentioned, the only ones, other than Mary.

Scripture is quite willing to provide examples of God working in unexpected ways. However in the accounts of the lives of the saints I find a tendency to sanitize the work of God.

I had to chuckle when I read that an account of Pope John XXIII’s visit with prisoners in Rome; he told them that he had a relative who had been imprisoned for poaching. L’Osservatore Romano edited that comment out when they reprinted his talk.

God can work wonders, with fallible even sinful people. That’s good news.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Ineffable Word

Prayer for December 20th

O God, eternal majesty, whose ineffable Word, the immaculate virgin received through the message of an angel…

My dictionary defines ineffable as “incapable of being expressed in words: indescribable , unspeakable, not to be uttered (taboo)”

Strange combination: ineffable Word.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Thomas Merton's Prayer

O Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going,
I do not see the road ahead of me,
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
And that fact that I think
I am following Your will
Does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe
That the desire to please You
Does in fact please You.
And I hope I have that desire
In all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything
Apart from that desire to please You.
And I know that if I do this
You will lead me by the right road,
Though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust You always
Though I may seem to be lost
And in the shadow of death.
I will not fear,
For You are ever with me,
And You will never leave me
\To make my journey alone.

For All the Saints

I enjoy reading about the saints. Even the legends that have grown up around them appeal to me. For instance, in Benjamin Britten’s “St. Nicholas Cantata” we hear that Nicholas leaped from his mother’s arms into the baptismal fount and cried “God be glorified.”

However there is a risk in such stories, a risk that we will see sanctity as something extraordinary, something that few can achieve.

However, I think that sanctity has more to do with God at work in our lives. We see this in the way Paul opens many of this letters. Paul addresses his letter to “all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints.” And to the Corinthians, that church community torn by dissention, he writes his first letter to “those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints,” and his second to “to the church of God that is at Corinth, including all the saints throughout Achaia.” He writes also “to the saints who are in Ephesus,” “to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi,” “to the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae.”

Paul is aware of the shortcomings of his readers. But he is even more aware of the grace of God at work in the churches that he founded. His thinking is in keeping with the Jewish tradition that gave us the Old Testament.

Look at the heroes of the Old Testament. Noah, with whom God made a covenant in the clouds, lay naked in a drunken stupor. Abraham was a polygamist. Jacob, with the connivance of this mother, cheated his brother out of his birthright. Joseph “made slaves of them (the people of Egypt) from one end of Egypt to the other.” Moses killed an Egyptian and had to flee for his life. The great king David was an adulterer who plotted the death of Bathsheba’s husband.

The gospels relate Peter’s denial of Jesus, Thomas’ doubting the resurrection, Paul’s murderous campaign against the early disciples.

God did not choose any of these people because of their perfection. God simply chose to work in and through them. God chooses each of us to accomplish his will in us. God loves each of us as we are, not as we think we ought to be. Faith is first of all, not believing things about God, but coming to trust that God loves me jus as I am.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Men

“For us men and for our salvation… and became man.” No change here in the Creed. Why not?

Latin (like Greek) has two words, vir for males and homo for human person. From these roots, we derive the English expressions, virile and “ad hominem.”

In the Gloria, we pray for “peace to people (hominibus) of good will.” And later, the priest says of the bread and wine, “the word of human (hominum) hands.” Why, then, fail to translate the Creed’s “homo factus est” accurately? This is not the formal equivalence that the new rules for translation call for.

Nor is it good pastoral practice. One of the things that parents teach their sons and daughters is that the sign, “Men” indicates a restroom for boys and men, one that is not to be used by girls and women. Very early on, children lean that “men” is not an inclusive word.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

St Nicholas

Each Advent, I enjoy listening to Benjamin Britten’s “Saint Nicolas Cantata”. Saint Nicholas, according to tradition, was bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey in the early part of the fourth century. His feast is on December 6th.

Britten’s cantata begins by acclaiming that “Nicholas was born in answer to pray and leaping from his mother’s womb he cried: ‘God be glorified’”.

The cantata then summons Nicholas who tells us that when his parents died, he sold his lands to feed the poor; he gave his goods to charity.

On a trip to Palestine, he calms a storm at sea and prays: “O God, we are all weak, sinful, foolish men, we pray from fear and from necessity,… forgetful of thy grace. Help us, O God to see more clearly... Teach us to ask for less and offer more in gratitude to thee; pity our simplicity.”

Nicholas is chosen bishop and promises to defend God’s servants and to comfort widow. He suffers imprisonment during persecution.

In time of famine he feeds the people from the Emperor’s grain ship with no diminishment of the supply of wheat. When a butcher seized three young boys in time of famine, Nicholas restores them to their families. He provides dowries for three daughters of a poor family, saves an innocent person from execution, walks upon the water, and sits among the bishops who were summoned to Nicea where he boxed Arius’ ear.

The cantata concludes with: “He was a spendthrift in devotion to us all. We keep his memory alive in legends that our children and their children’s children treasure still.

The stories of Nicholas should sound very familiar for they are echoes of the Gospel. In the lives of the saints we find the message of Jesus incarnated in men and women of different ages and cultures. We do well to keep their memories alive.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Waiting

How much of our lives, how much of our energies are spent in waiting? We wait in line at the grocery store, at the bank, at the Post Office. We wait on the phone for someone to take our call. We wait on line for the computer to start up, for the program to load, for the video to download.


We wait for a commercial to end, for the mail to come, for a pot to boil.

Some wait for a child to come home from school or a spouse to come home from work. Some wait for a call back from an interview. Some wait for the results of a pregnancy test, of a cancer biopsy, of an HIV test.

Some wait for labor to begin or for the doctor to emerge from surgery. Others wait for a son or father or husband to return from military duty.

Some wait for the rain that will end the drought. Others wait for the waters to recede from their homes and farms.
Many wait for the violence to end. Others wait to return home from exile.
Some wait for death to come.

Who do we wait with? For what do we wait?

What does it mean to wait for the One who will bring about the Kingdom of God, who will bring an end to all waiting, who will bring all to completion?

You who

The Collect for the 3rd Sunday of Advent begins: O God, who see how your people faithfully await the feast of the Lord’s Nativity…


My spellchecker wants to change the “see” to “sees” which would be what one would expect in English. However, the Latin evidently uses the second person, i.e. (you) who see. The translator seemingly sought to avoid the yoo-hoo and dropped the “you.”

This construction (God who see) occurs in a number of Collects in the course of the Liturgical Year.