Lectionary Texts for January 1, 2006, the First Sunday after Christmas:

• Isaiah 61:10-62:3


• Galatians 4:4-7


• Luke 2:22-40

The Isaiah passage is set against the background of Israel's return from exile only to find Jerusalem destroyed. These seem like strange words for Isaiah to write at this time:

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
my whole being shall exult in my God;
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,
as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
to spring up before all the nations.

But Israel's situation parallels the situation many of us find ourselves in at the end of each year. After various forms of pain and uncertainty and suffering and struggle, we look forward to a new year in which to make a fresh start. But, when January 1 arrives, we are living the same lives with the same problems as the previous year. Singing "Auld Lang Syne" and clinking glasses of champagne at midnight didn't magically fill our bank accounts or mend our family relationships or cure our bodies or clarify our purpose or alleviate world hunger or even replace our cracked windshield. What in the world do we have to celebrate, except for the final release from this difficult life that will be our entrance into the eternal bliss of heaven?

According to these passages, we have plenty to celebrate in the fulfillment of God's promises that is occurring right here and now. God has given God's people a "new name" and God has revealed salvation in the birth of Jesus. We see a pattern here that God keeps promises and roots the fulfillment in historical ways that we time-bound beings can comprehend.

In particular, the fulfillment of God's promise to Simeon is very compelling for our own practice of faith in such periods of transition as the new year. Simeon does not rejoice at being in the presence of Jesus because he made some stubborn New Year's resolution 50 years earlier to keep on keepin' on until he could see the Messiah. Rather, "It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah" (v.26). Simeon was not bullying his future into a box of his own making, but was guided by the Spirit, living into promises designed and revealed by the Spirit. If we are to follow his example, we'll need to discern the differences between setting our own arbitrary goals (resolutions) and being in constant relationship with the Spirit, who is not bound by the changing of the year.

Simeon's example is not an easy one. Most of us will not be able to make a resolution to be guided by the Holy Spirit and have it be done instantly with the sounding of the midnight chimes, but we can pray for the energy to engage regularly in the disciplines that will make our hearts and minds receptive. For some, this discipline will take the form of regular prayer time. For others, corporate worship or a new kind of worship experience. For still others, it will require a dramatic lifestyle change that will simplify time and finances to minimize society-driven stress. In opening ourselves to cultivating a Spirit-filled life, we will be better able to know and celebrate the joy of the present and the promise of the future, knowing God above all and in all.

Every Eye Will See Him, G. Carol Bomer
collaged pages of an old Pilgrim's Progress, acrylic, medium, on canvas (22"x24")

Lectionary Texts for December 25, Christmas Day

These passages place the Christmas celebration in the context of history and the eternal Trinity. If Jesus is indeed the Word made flesh and if God communicates to people through the Word, we do well to re-visit exactly who Christ is to know what God is trying to communicate through the incarnation. In the passages for Christmas day, we see that:

• Jesus is the victory of God.


• Jesus is comforter and redeemer.


• Jesus is the heir and creator of all things.


• Jesus is life and light.


• Jesus is grace and truth.


• Jesus gives the power to become children of God.

As Christmas is usually a time of celebration, I read these passages with those glasses on. What are we celebrating? It seems like the reasons are many, prompting us to sing with the psalmist, "Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things!" The gift we receive is not the revelation of something new, but the revelation of something that has been present all along--indeed something that is the source of all life.

These texts make me think of the opening passage of Robert Farrar Capon's Fingerprints of God, in which the Holy Spirit, Jesus and God are sitting around before the creation of the world smoking cigars, drinking scotch and going over one more time how this whole redemption thing is going to play out. God and Jesus think that the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection at a fixed point in history are the way to go. However, the Spirit has some qualms, given the nature of human beings as linear thinkers. The Spirit believes that it will be difficult for humans to realize that redemption has been occurring through Jesus from the very beginning--indeed before and above and through and beside and below all of time. The Spirit argues,

Just think what they'll do with a Jesus who stays in history for only thirty-three years. Even if I get John to say that he's the Word who made everything from the beinning, they'll probably imagine him as a pot of holy soup we delivered too late for a good many of our customers. And after they've jumped to the conclusion that the Word wasn't present to anyone who lived before Jesus, they'll leap to the even more dreadful notion that nobody who lived after him can have his benefits until their assorted churches get him canned, marketed and distributed to them.

Since the Spirit's alternate suggestion--an image of the Son hiding in an ever-replenishing box of chocolates in every home--was turned down, we now must discern the revelation of God through the incarnation.

Since the incarnation of God blows the lid off everything we know in a quantifiable, scientific way, it seems like Christmas should be a time to celebrate mystery, to thank God for all we do not and cannot know. We often use the term "word" to describe the bound book that we can hold in our hands, but John is using the term here in a much more expansive way. Jesus is the Word who was, is and shall be forever and ever! Capon writes,

Strictly speaking, the Bible isn't just a book; it's the voice of the Word himself speaking in and to the church. It's the sacrament of a Person really present, not simply a collection of his words faxed in.... The Word speaks all things into being at the beginning. But then, when his creatures deface the world by contradicting his speaking (by denying their own natures as he has spoken them), the Word just keeps on talking. At the very instants of their contradictions, without a single throat-clearing or a moment's hesitation, he counterspeaks their contradiction in his same, original voice. In him, creation and redemption are one act; both have always been going on full force in everything.

The Bible, Capon contends, ought to be read like a mystery story, as opposed to an operating manual or an account of God's emergency measures to patch up a broken humanity. In reading Scripture like a mystery story, we can follow the technique of any good detective in looking for fingerprints, that is, seeking out the unique evidence of self God has left throughout all of human history, up to the present time. Capon writes that, in spite of all of our efforts to scientifically explain and identify the historic person of Jesus Christ,

The Incarnate Word, in all his guises (early or late, fetching or not) remains the star of the show who has left at least the mark of his thumb on every act. And the Holy Spirit has handled it so thoroughly that the whole of it bears witness to the "Finger of the Hand Divine," who never wrote anything but the same old story: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. The only thing we need to do is gaze long enough at those fingerprints to trust the three Persons who left them--and then to let our love answer theirs as best we can.

If we use this year's festival as a celebration of mystery, we would do well to celebrate by indulging our imaginations and channeling all of our love and doubt and knowledge and uncertainty and questions into praise of that which we do not understand, but which we sense is graciously pulling us to itself.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation (1898)

Lectionary texts for December 18, the Fourth Sunday of Advent

The first theme that emerges for me in reading these texts is that of trust--trust occurring in the context of a living, adapting relationship with God. Nathan first tells David to go pursue the thought of buiding a better "house" for the Lord, but then God speaks a different word to him that elaborates on the house metaphor and reveals more of who God is. In order for David and Nathan to be faithful to this word, they will have to trust that, although David's instinct to create a house for the Lord that is better than his own reflects a desire to honor God, they need to hear the voice of the Spirit guiding them to understand the Kingdom in a broader sense. They are prompted to discern how God has interacted with God's people previously and consider who's the one in charge of building houses in the future.

This story is connected to the story of the angel's revelation to Mary in a couple of ways. First, the human characters are asked to change their plans. For David, the plan was to build a temple. For Mary, the plan was to build a life in faithful marriage to Joseph. Second, the human characters are receptive to revelation: Nathan directly from God (it seems), David through a prophet, Mary through an angel. And the epistle text adds another dimension: God revealed through others.

The epistle lesson also in some ways serves as a summary of what's happening in the other two passages. "Obedience of faith" involves a willingness to recognize a reality that goes beyond what we can see, in fact to realize that all reality is God. There is a way of seeing and being here that is modeled in both stories, but most poignanty by Mary. She is waiting, thoughtful, accepting and open to change.

Kathleen Norris in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith has a chapter on the Annunciation, in which she explores the nature of "virginity" as a state of being. She writes:

Thomas Merton, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, describes the true identity he seeks in contemplative prayer as a "point vierge" at the center of his being, "a point untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth...which belongs entirely to God, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of absolute poverty," he wrote, "is the pure glory of God within us."

It is only when we stop idolizing the illusion of our control over the events of life and recognize our poverty that we become virgin in the sense Merton means.

Norris goes on to describe this state of "virginity" as possessing the conviction of a pure, core self and acting appropriately out of the knowledge of that self: being hospitable, discerning and open. Noting how Mary embodies this virginity, Norris writes,

Mary's "How can this be?" is a simpler response that Zechariah's ["How will I know that this is so?"], and also more profound. She does not lose her voice but finds it. Like any of the prophets, she asserts herself before God, saying, "Here am I." There is no arrogance, however, but only holy fear and wonder. Mary proceeds--as we must do in life--making her commitment without knowing much about what it will entail or where it will lead. I treasure this story because it forces me to ask: When the mystery of God's love breaks through into my consciousness, do I run from it? Do I ask of it what it cannot answer? Shrugging, do I retreat into facile cliches, the popular but false wisdom of what "we all know"? Or am I virgin enough to respond from my deepest, truest self, and say something new, a "yes" that will change me forever?

The story of Mary's response is not just a quaint example of humble faithfulness relevant to a "personal" spiritual walk; we don't know what would have happened had Mary refused to be a vessel for the incarnate Lord, but we do know that her acceptance had (and still has) profound implications for those who seek the light. The "blessed" among women turns her blessing into a blessing of God, the One who "looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant." In her song of praise, she proceeds to list those things that have happened, are happening and will happen. God is once again, in faithfulness to recorded promises, announcing a presence that will reorder or "reset" the human community. If we are proud, powerful and/or rich, we will be scattered, brought down and empty. If we are humble, lowly and hungry, we will be lifted up and filled--a reversal that will ultimately lead to the perfect balance of the kingdom! Is it any wonder that in the 80s, the government of Guatemala banned The Magnificat? The faithfulness Mary embodies is not an allegiance to the status quo that can be manipulated for human ends, but a compelling openness to the mystery of the light, an eternal perspective that values justice for the present and believes God's promises for the future.

We live into our faith in flesh-and-blood community with others, but there is a spirit that would have us believe that the aggressive consumption of the American Dream can comfortably co-exist with religious devotion. But we see this dualism leading, quite literally before our eyes, to a consuming fear of physical and spiritual insecurity. Those who realize the ultimate reality of God, however, strive for an ability to perceive and follow the Spirit, knowing that God is in and through and around and above and below all things. In living out this realization, we submit to a mystery.
One of my favorite quotes is from Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard:

To be a witness does not consist of engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist.

May we all find Advent a time for learning how to embrace and embody the mystery of God, revealed to us through the obedience of a young girl so many years ago.