On a week where the feast of Christmas is close, but the fast of Advent has been long, the Church changes just for one Sunday from the penitential color purple to a hopeful rose . . . we await the feast of Christmas with hope. The Advent Carol for this week is Hark the Glad Sound.
Rose Sunday (Third Sunday of Advent)
Sing:
1. Hark, the glad Sound! the Savior comes!
The Savior promis’d long!
Let ev’ry Heart prepare a Throne,
And every Voice a Song.
Reflect:
Every voice has a song.
American Christianity rightly faces criticism for overdoing “individualism,” but the criticism can go too far. In reaction, some people forget that we are all part of God’s people as individuals. He loves us as a people, but also as individuals. He came to set up a Kingdom and to save my soul. He rules the cosmos, but also the throne in my heart.
We are each to have a song in the great Church choir. This is not a matter of harmony, but more a motet: where billions of God’s children raise their voices in independent lines of music that God the great conductor blends into a unity. This great polyphony means that no individual is fundamentally superior to another, each person has something to say in God’s polyphony. There is a message in the whole choir singing together: the whole being greater than the sum of equal parts.
As we pray together in Church today, my voice will be heard by our loving God, so are your own prayers. Imagine this: someday we will hear what has come of the blending of those individual prayers. Our prayers are answered individually, “yes” or “no,” but in our corporate prayer, the music created in the unity of the Church, the answer is always “yes.” The corporate prayer exists to save every individual request, however flawed, in a greater “yes.” The individual prayer, your prayer and my prayer, is necessary and important, because we matter to God.
He hears you and He hears me. He also hears us.
Third Monday of Advent
Sing:
2. On Him the Spirit largely pour’d,
Exerts His sacred Fire;
Wisdom and Might, and Zeal and Love,
His holy Breast inspire.
Reflect:
Jesus did not just come to save us from our deepest problem. He came from the Father and was filled with God’s Spirit and brought great gifts to us. We don’t just give gifts on Christmas Day to remember the Wise Men, but also to celebrate outwardly the awesome inner gifts the Jesus brought us. The great gift was Himself modeling what He can do within us.
He came full of Wisdom and Might.
We often feel so lost. How do I escape my own head? How do I know any experience is real or can be shared? We are so isolated and in despair drift into stupidity and foolishness. Our sins are often less for pleasure, than to assert our own reality. “I am here!” we cry and so we are, but less as humans and more like animals. Wisdom steps back and instead of crying in the face of our finitude, our limits, it rejoices. We are not the Eternal, but we have Eternity in our hearts.
Wisdom produces power: we are not stuck in our heads. We look out to the stars and the Maker of the stars, cry out in humility, and He gives us power. We have the authority to speak in God’s name for justice, peace, and goodwill. The Wisdom of God gives us might by sweeping away the futility of our own schemes. Wisdom and Might are fearful gifts, but Jesus was not finished.
He came with Zeal and Love.
If wisdom can be stark, might awesome, then zeal and love were there to personalize the abstractions of Wisdom’s rule. Jesus lived out power and wisdom in ways that were beautiful, holy, and full of grace. He made the world so we could share in that wisdom and power, but do it with zeal and love. We are not passive . . . zeal consumes us, but the zeal is not undirected, imprudent, or harsh. Wisdom tempers our zeal and love directs it toward grace and mercy.
Again, though we seek the gift, the focus must return to the Giver: Father God. The Father sent His Son and the Son’s great work brought the age of the Spirit of God. All we desire was first done in the person of Jesus. We sing of Jesus and look at His holy life, not merely as history, but also as living reality. The Word of the Lord is for today. Jesus is alive today. The Spirit is abroad today.
We need the Holy Spirit, because without the Holy Spirit, our Christmas celebrations are empty: mere memory of something that was. The Spirit gives life. Come Holy Spirit!
Third Tuesday of Advent
Sing:
3. He comes the Pris’ners to release,
In Satan’s Bondage held;
The Gates of Brass before him burst,
The Iron Fetters yield.
Reflect:
We are our worst enemy, but not our only enemy. Humankind chose to blow it, a decision we confirm daily. That would be bad enough, but the cosmos is a complicated place. Beings more powerful than humanity also rebelled against the good, the truth, and beauty. These devils delight in pulling us into the pit, because this is the closest to joy they can now experience.
They have no wisdom, so they delight in facts. They have no power in themselves, so they love lies. They have no zeal, so they urge us to sluggish spiritual passivity or despair. They have no love, so they hate: themselves, us, and God. CS Lewis called them “macrobes” infecting us in the metaphysical realm as the microbes do in the physical.
I have known two kinds of Christians: those who cast demons out of everything (demons of fat, demons of philosophy, demons of poverty) and those who react to the first kind of Christian and will not talk about demons at all. The truth, as usual is not in the middle, but in rejecting both bad ideas. What is the truth? Demons are real, they harm us, and Jesus has defeated them.
We could discuss the details of how this works, and theologians should discuss the details, but for today let’s resist them. We side with Jesus and not with devils. We are not ignorant they exist, that they whisper in our minds, increasing our despair.
Depression can be the result of disease or bad behavior, but devils are there to increase whatever problems we might have. You cannot “cure” a disease by getting rid of devils, but you can make the cure easier. Removing their background noise will not solve all problems, but it is good to silence them. They don’t want us to go to medical doctors: we will go. They don’t wish us to seek therapy or spiritual mentoring: we will go. They don’t wish to be defeated: Jesus will help us defeat them.
We cry out to Jesus for His salvation and reject the devils and all their works.
Third Wednesday of Advent
Sing:
4. He comes from thickest Films of Vice
To clear the mental Ray,
And on the Eye-Balls of the Blind
To pour celestial day.
Reflect:
An important fact about bad behavior is that there more it is indulged, the less conscience can warn. We see most clearly at the moment of our first choice to fall short of God’s will and often our guilt is great. We can even see the harm we have done to ourselves and others. After time, we can blind ourselves to the harm we are doing. The crooked isn’t any straighter, but we are so immersed in crooked visions that they become normal to us.
We celebrate our crookedness. We call the broken, whole. This is the unpardonable sin: the sin that we no longer call sin. We are not fighting and losing to our brokenness. We are celebrating our brokenness. I have known angry men who come to see their abusive anger as a strength and manliness. They are proud of their vice.
So it is with all of us, especially me. I fall into gluttony and gain weight. At first this bothers me, but eventually this is the new normal. I think my overindulgence is just “my way.” There is no way to escape moral blindness once enough sin has filmed my vision: a moral cataract needs a surgeon. Nobody can operate on their own eyes!
Jesus has a solution, but often do not like it. Turn on a light suddenly in a dark room and we ae dazzled. We see less well with the light at first than we did in semi-darkness. “Turn off the light,” Vice says. Jesus turns up the intensity. He wants to bring the Day and light sweet Night with the Christmas Star. He wants the light, like a laser, to burn away the film of vice on my eyes.
Will I let Him? “Yes,” I pray, “but have mercy. I am dazzled and in pain.”
I once was blind, but now I see.
Fourth Thursday of Advent
Sing:
5. He comes the broken Heart to bind,
The bleeding Soul to cure,
And with the Treasures of his Grace
‘T enrich the humble poor.
Reflect:
God has gifts for the poor, but nothing for the rich. Since nobody is, in fact, rich, this is good news. A problem is that many of us think we are rich, or at least spiritually middle-class. We don’t get it.
We are hurting, but we think: “Everyone is hurting.” This is true, but does not make the problem any better. If all the world got a plague, I would not be less sick. Misery may love company, but how miserable is that?
How do I know I am spiritually poor without Jesus? First, there are good things I would do and I do not do them. Second, there are bad things I wish I did not do and I do them. Worst, however, even when I get it right for an entire day, I am part of a social system where the poor are oppressed, injustice is perpetrated and all the good I have done is part of this great evil.
What can be done? I can ignore it and still it corrupts me. I can become a social justice warrior (and to some extent I should), but that is exhausting The revolution, if it came, would do more injustice and I would have been directly a part of that! Even the visible Church is infected by vice . . . even if the spiritual Church is perfect.
There is no answer in this life. My secular friends give up on answers. They ignore the question and try to live life as best they can, but the poor are still oppressed, vice still corrupts virtue, and willful ignorance of this reality is worst of all.
My soul bleeds. I am poor in spirit. Yet I long for healing and riches of spirit. Nothing superficial or physical cuts it. Someone once told me to stop carrying bricks . . .as if one could just let go of the load of the brokenness of the world. This person is very angry and hurt. He has let go of spiritual hope, but not spiritual pain.
I have made many of these bricks and I refuse to dump them on the world in an ugly pile. God help me . . . Eternity came on Christmas to bind the broken heart and cure the bleeding soul. Eternity is rich with time to make all things well. Some of this healing and cure will be now, a taste of what is coming, but most is in Paradise.
Christians are accused of pushing pleasure off to the next life. We do not push it off to the next life as much as recognize that this is the only place where a total cure is possible. Any other Utopian promise leads to no place.
I have hope this Christmas, because the wound is bleeding less, the cure is progressing. Death will mark the final surgery, the full cure. Merry Christmas without end!
Fifth Friday of Advent
Sing:
6. His Silver Trumpets publish loud
The Jub’lee of the Lord;
Our Debts are all remitted now,
Our Heritage restored.
Reflect:
One week to Christmas. One week of reflection and fasting to go before we keep the feast.
I can hardly wait . . . I miss meat. I can wait, because when the Twelve Days Begin, they will start disappearing. Right now I have all of them to anticipate. That points to the problem of the Holidays in this life. The better they are, the sooner they seem to end.
We must go back to regular time. I love my job, but regular time loses the joy of the Holidays, the time, the space for family. Despite what Dickens claims in A Christmas Carol we cannot keep the spirit of Christmas in our hearts all year long. It becomes as dead in July as our tree would be if we left it up.
Yet we have heard the silver trumpets. We experience the freedom from the grind of daily life that is the Jubilee of the Lord. Unlike our consumerist holiday, debts are all paid in the real Holiday and we know the pleasure that would be. When we get out the old family ornaments, we recall our heritage, but when we put them away, we experience loss. Every year time robs us of a memory or even (God help us!) a member of the family circle.
Christmas is coming, but Christmas is going.
This is why Jesus will come again. He will come to bring an end to this cycle of gain and loss. He will bring a new economy where love leads to greater love and where the first day of the Holiday is not one less, but one more. This is the full restoration, the complete payment of debt, and the day of Jubilee when our slavery is fully ended. Normal time will be Holiday time . . . and the Holidays will just be an intensification of every day.
How?
The Holy will come and dwell in our midst. The family circle will be unbroken forever. I can’t wait.
Sixth Saturday of Advent
Sing:
7. Our glad Hosannas, Prince of Peace,
Thy Welcome shall proclaim;
And Heav’n’s eternal Arches ring
With thy beloved Name.
Reflect:
Jesus is the Prince of Peace. Peace is the default position of His Cosmic Kingdom. War exists as an aberration brought on by rebellion of the ugly against beauty. As a result, no Christian ever rejoices in war. War is the price we pay for injustice and we long for peace.
The struggle, even the spiritual struggle, is not the object of our life, but a means to end the struggle. As a result, when we look at our lives and our spiritual struggle, we must be long for peace . . . not further struggle. We fight, but we pray for peace.
The good spiritual struggle is won. We have many problems, but God will deal with them grace-fully. As a result, we should pause as we pray and ask if we are fighting the particular battle that God wishes us to fight. God does not call us to lost causes and full redemption will not come death and glorification with God in paradise. We don’t ever justify our failings, but we also cannot try to end them all simultaneously. We must be content to take on the problems that God is empowering us to conquer just now.
We fight, but we do not fight without hope for peace. The day is coming when all our weapons will be turned into tools of peace and we will make war no more. The pacifist is the arrogant man that thinks he lives in Paradise now, but the militarist is worst because he thinks Hell is Heaven.
We fight, but never for the sake of war, but to bring peace.
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