The Real Twelve Days of Christmas

The main problem with me trying to undergo the year of living liturgically is that I have no idea. I discovered a thought-provoking article about the twelve days of Christmas today - http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/news/2004/dec24.html. I don't necessarily agree with all the statements but it's certainly interesting.

A bit of Christmas fun

Last night at my 'family and family friends' Christmas Eve party, I opened with the Christmas Day Midnight collect and prayer from the Australian Prayer Book and got my four Tay cousins (visiting from Brisbane) to read the four lectionary readings, interspersed with carol singing. Earlier in the day, I had spent some time helping them to pronounce and understand what they were reading - 10 year old Aidan was particularly impressive as he exhorted us to 'renounce ungodliness' and be 'zealous for good works'.

These lectionary readings are well-chosen indeed, and I can imagine a wonderful carols service with selected carols complementing each reading. As it was, we had some incongruous and amusing juxtapositions, like Psalm 96 ("Ascribe to the LORD") followed by "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer". Well, reindeer praise the LORD too, no doubt.

In a less reverential mood, I also thought of three Christian slogans to redeem the vitiated image of Christmas that many people have:

1) Jesus' birth rocked the earth.
2) The baby who rules out maybe.
3) God with us. Worth the fuss.

How are you celebrating Christmas? Can you think of other slogans? =p

Mary the model believer

Across various church traditions, Mary has often been held up as the model believer. Here, when the angel Gabriel reveals to her that God has chosen her to bear the long-awaited Messiah, we catch a glimpse of why this is so. Mary does not put on a show of false humility and declaim her unsuitability for this great role. Nor is she a check-your-brains-at-the-door religious fanatic - she is aware that the situation will look a bit suss and has the temerity to question the angel: How will this be, since I am a virgin? (Read: I may be an uneducated, hitherto unremarkable, young Jewish girl, but even I know how babies are made!)

But when Gabriel informs her that with God all things are possible and cites Elizabeth's pregnancy as contemporary evidence of a similar miracle of the womb, Mary shows humble submission to God even if not all her questions have been answered: I am the servant of the LORD; let it be to me according to your word.

In case it has all been a dream, she goes to check out Elizabeth. Thence issues the Magnificat, in which she praises God and shows that she gets enough about Him to joyfully serve Him in what she does know, not being hung up on what she (still) doesn't (like the how can this be question). I find what Mary does with her questions an encouraging model to follow - ask God, listen to the answer, submit to God's will regardless of whether the answer is fully satisfactory, check out corroborating evidence if relevant, praise God.

I've got the joy joy joy joy...

When I was a kid, we used to sing that catchy song of few words, "I've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart (where?), down in my heart (where?), down in my heart. I've got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart (where?), down in my heart to stay." Yesterday at the airport, amidst the tired and resigned passengers in transit, a small girl behind me was piping away with another of those childhood songs, "If you're happy and you know it, [perform some bodily function like clapping your hands]...If you're happy and you know it and you really want to show it, if you're happy and you know it [perform abovementioned function]."

This week's lectionary readings all have the theme of joy in them: joy in the prophecies being fulfilled, in God coming near in Jesus, in the way God raises up the lowly and poor and humbles the rich and those who think they are self-sufficient, in the sure hope we have that Jesus will return to make righteousness and peace spring up all over God's earth and in His sanctified, glorified people, us! I am praying that God will make this inexpressible joy in Jesus (1 Pet 1) spring up down in my heart and overflow so that it is manifested by various outward responses like my speech and the way I live, whatever circumstances I find myself in. After all, because of Jesus, we have a joy that goes deep and demands to be shown, a joy that is the ultimate word over sorrow or anxiety or fear. Praise God!

Origen on Isaiah 40

The stirring prophecy in Isaiah 40 is one reason to long for Jesus' return - to fully straighten out the crooked and to raise and lower as appropriate, to make a way for the LORD to dwell among us. We have partial fulfilment of this prophecy in Jesus' first coming. Origen (183-253), whatever else he got wrong, has some thought-provoking words on this:

Now let us turn to that part of the prophecy which also concerns the coming of Christ and see whether this too has been fulfilled. The text continues: Every crooked way shall be straightened. Each one of us was once crooked; if we are no longer so, it is entirely due to the grace of Christ. Through his coming to our souls all our crooked ways have been straightened out.

If Christ did not come to your soul, of what use would his historical coming in the flesh be to you? Let us pray that each day we may experience his coming and be able to say: It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Jesus my Lord has come, then. He has smoothed out your rough places and changed your disorderly ways into level paths, making in you an even unimpeded road, a road that is absolutely clear, so that God the Father may walk in you and Christ the Lord make his dwelling in you and say: My Father and I will come and make our home in them. [from Origen, Homily on Luke’s Gospel 22, 1-4: SC 67, 300-02]

Sometimes I wonder how much symbolic reading of the Old Testament we can do before we're reading too much into it. After all, isn't Isa 40's emphasis on the making straight of crookedness on a universal (or at least all-God's-people) scale rather than on an individual level? And yet the universal levelling out in preparation for God's glory to be revealed cannot happen universally if it does not happen individually, or can it? Are we promised merely a levelling out 'whether we want it or not' (every knee shall bow, willing and unwilling) or are we promised what Origen reads into it, an individual transformative levelling out? And if Isa 40 does not directly promise the latter, are we still justified in reading that individual transformation into this passage, in the context of the overall revelation of God's plans and promises throughout Scripture? I'd love to hear your thoughts, so do respond!

(By the way, is anyone besides me able to post? I would like you to be able to participate not merely by comments responding to posts, but by initiating posts too...)

Advent: season of hope and waiting

Nov 30 AD 2008: First Sunday in Advent

Advent is a season of waiting for Christ's return. The Israelites in our readings today were longing for God's presence to restore them; they wanted God to come down so they could see Him face to face and be saved. We in turn wait for Jesus to come again so that we can experience the full realization of the hope we have as Christians. I value the reminder that Advent is to keep awake – I often forget to really long for Jesus to return: my mind is frequently bound by the mundane realities of this world or plans and anxieties that are temporal.

I've started reading a fascinating book by a guy called Adrian Nocent called “The Liturgical Year” (there are 150 pages on the Advent season, though – I will only be able to dabble! =p). He asks a good question: Is there a Christian way of hoping? Here is some food for thought from Nocent:

“Péguy, in one of his brilliant theological intuitions, saw hope as a little girl who goes off to school between her two big sisters, faith and love, holding each by the hand. He explains his meaning in his La porche de la deuxième vertu: In the eyes of those who see the three sisters passing, little hope is being guided by the other two; in fact, however, little hope is pulling forward the two who seem to be leading her...for the believer, his personal hope is inseparably connected with the hope of the entire Church and when united to the hope of the Church, it is oriented in two directions: toward Christ and toward the renewal of the world.

Christ? We await during Advent the actualization of his incarnation and then we celebrate Christmas, but we still hope and wait for his second coming. This is a hope that the non-believer cannot share, for it is contrary to what hope should normally be. This Christian hope is indeed a strange thing...why? Because the Christian hopes for what he already possesses! In the inscription of Pectorius we read: “(You hold) the Fish in your hand.”...Christian hope is thus compounded of certainty: that is, we hope for what we already possess. The powerful dynamism that inspires this hope of a reality we already possess and grasp, though we do not see it, is an intense light for faith and a joyful spur to love.”

What's the Year of Living Liturgically about?

"We confess that we have often lost the fullness of our Christian heritage, too readily assuming that the Scripture and the Spirit make us independent of the past. In so doing, we have become theologically shallow, spiritually weak, blind to the work of God in others and married to our cultures. … We dare not move beyond the biblical limits of the gospel; but we cannot be fully evangelical without recognizing our need to learn from other times and movements concerning the whole meaning of that gospel." (from "The Chicago Call: An Appeal to Evangelicals", 1977)

What does it mean to know God deeply and to be part of the 'holy catholic church' that we affirm our participation in whenever we say the Creed? Is spiritual discipline something you want to grow in? Do you want to explore and meditate on God's word in a way that connects passages throughout the Scriptures and that connects you with the cloud of witnesses through the last three hundred years (give or take a few revisions =p)? Do you sometimes feel like your 'spirituality', such as it is, could be richer, fuller and more steeped in the wisdom of the saints, both dead and alive? Have you ever thought that a more contemplative and reflective approach to your faith could help you to live as Jesus' lights in a less culturally-straitjacketed and bordering-on-superficial way (maybe not in those words)?

Let me invite you to join me in the Year of Living Liturgically. Starting with the first Sunday of Advent (four Sundays before Christmas) this year, Nov 30 AD 2008, this community will start observing the liturgical calendar, to a greater or lesser extent, but at least consisting of meditatively completing the lectionary readings each Sunday (conveniently available from http://divinity.library.vanderbilt.edu/lectionary/). I suggest that we reflect on our liturgical explorations on this blog.

I suggest that we observe Advent, Lent and other times and major feasts in the Christian calendar, and that we use this year to read and otherwise explore traditions of liturgical worship through church history and among modern evangelicals (see article links at the end of this email). We could use collects (prayers) from the Australian Prayer Book (1978). We could read reflections on the lectionary readings by people from various traditions within the church and from various historical eras and cultures and share our engagement with these ideas on the blog. All these are suggestions: the only thing you're committing to if you choose to be part of this exploration is to read through the lectionary and to try to live according to the rhythms and structure of the basic Christian calendar.

Obviously there are congregational aspects to the liturgy which we cannot adopt, but I am suggesting this year as a spiritual discipline to practice on top of, not instead of, our active participation in the life of our local congregation, however liturgical or non-liturgical such a congregation might be.

My aim is for us to grow to know God better together, as we try to avoid the predilection of evangelicalism at its worst to assume the superiority of the modern and the culturally 'relevant'. Sure we want to be relevant to our community and we can thank God for the freedom we have in the modern church to worship in various ways; sure we want to avoid legalism and mindless ritual and routine; sure we want to keep the gospel central and not get sidetracked into a 'different gospel'. But I think we can do all these things - and I strongly suspect, do all of them better - by drawing on the spiritual resources of the wider church, starting with a foray into liturgical living.

I am very far from an expert on the liturgy, incidentally, so we will all be learning this together. My personal story is that for years, I have loved saying the various Creeds and knowing that by doing so, we are acting out the spiritual reality of the universal church - it awes me to know that God's people through the ages have said and believed those same things! I have grown to increasingly appreciate the liturgy that my church, St Jude's, weaves into our otherwise low-church, contemporary services - such as reading Confession prayers off the Data Projector and our Holy Communion service. I am passionate about discovering a way for us to be Christians who know God deeply and worship him in every way possible, and who are connected with our heads, our hearts, and our history and heritage.

I discovered that there is nothing new under the sun in this case either, and that other evangelical Christians have similar desires and perspectives. So this Year of Living Liturgically is a chance for me - and you, if you will join me - to participate in the 'ancient-future church' movement within the Evangelical tradition. =)

Let the blogging begin!