In early religious Rites set at the winter solstice the ancients would gather at night and encircle a fire; they would sing and dance raising their fiery torches towards starry heaven and invite their God to come among them; to empower them to brace against the darkness that closes upon them....invoking God's presence...bidding God to descend again into the fray of life at the darkest time of the year. Indeed we need not look long or far to name the darkness that besets us in our time, as in every time.
This Christmas, set at the winter solstice appropriately, we will continue the practice of the ancients. We will gather around a fiery altar and proclaim God's presence with us in the person of Jesus, a fragile and vulnerable presence...but a presence to be sure. The scribes of the Gospel of John call this presence light...and that the light of Christ is in truth the light of humankind...that is a startling claim....that the light of Christ and the light of the human community are but one light...one light from the same source.
We, as people of faith, people of imaginative conscience, are therefore profoundly implicated in the Incarnation, the enfleshment of God in Christ. Through imaginative and compassionate practice of the faith, the way of Christ, the way of goodness, we are light bearers....bearers of the very fire of God to a darkening world. At Christ's birth the fiery ways of God are born yet again...and we too...we are yet born again into a vocation of light bearing...a vocation of enlightening our world...an unquenchable light vital for the world's salvation...a light by which all flesh will apprehend God's goodness and presence among God's beloved people....and this beautiful radiant light...this light from the source.... this light will cause even the darkness to sing and dance.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Of Singing and Significance
An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. From W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium
According to Augustine of Hippo, and later quoted by Charles Wesley, "One who sings prays twice." The songs and the singing from the Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols this Sunday past are still resonating in my head and heart and soul: the gentle soprano, the mellow alto, the harmonic tenor and sounding bass; each voice become artifice pointing to something or someone near, mysterious and profound.
Yeats the poet is seeking a way to marry the mortality, not just of humankind, but of the creation, to the eternal. His first premise is that it is art that bespeaks the eternal in the midst of a transient life, but the stunning discovery in this poem is that in singing, the singer becomes the artifice, the bearer of the song, and therefore participates in this illusive life eternal. Yeats is re-articulating the romantic high premise that beauty is truth and truth beauty...the means and ends of the eternal.
Indeed singing is a fine metaphor for the life of faith....all of us artisans in the courts of holy Byzantium imagining and building our world, still in its infancy, into what God imagines it to be. If the editors of Genesis had been paying closer attention when they wrote and rewrote the stories of creation, they might have been careful to note that God didn't just speak the world into being; rather the world was sung into being....the singing voice of God begetting the graceful rhythm and harmony of the universe...God's song moving over the face of the deep, ordering the world into a significant ineffable beauty...and we, heirs of the same song, still singing the same song....the song from the source...the song that moves the spheres of the universe entire...the song that will resonate in heaven and earth, the one Soul, forever....and its name among many names is love...love palpable and audible...love that transforms and saves and creates...love that redeems the tatters of the mortal dress of all ways and all things... So even if you think you can't sing...for God's sake sing.
A tattered coat upon a stick
Unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. From W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium
According to Augustine of Hippo, and later quoted by Charles Wesley, "One who sings prays twice." The songs and the singing from the Festival of Advent Lessons and Carols this Sunday past are still resonating in my head and heart and soul: the gentle soprano, the mellow alto, the harmonic tenor and sounding bass; each voice become artifice pointing to something or someone near, mysterious and profound.
Yeats the poet is seeking a way to marry the mortality, not just of humankind, but of the creation, to the eternal. His first premise is that it is art that bespeaks the eternal in the midst of a transient life, but the stunning discovery in this poem is that in singing, the singer becomes the artifice, the bearer of the song, and therefore participates in this illusive life eternal. Yeats is re-articulating the romantic high premise that beauty is truth and truth beauty...the means and ends of the eternal.
Indeed singing is a fine metaphor for the life of faith....all of us artisans in the courts of holy Byzantium imagining and building our world, still in its infancy, into what God imagines it to be. If the editors of Genesis had been paying closer attention when they wrote and rewrote the stories of creation, they might have been careful to note that God didn't just speak the world into being; rather the world was sung into being....the singing voice of God begetting the graceful rhythm and harmony of the universe...God's song moving over the face of the deep, ordering the world into a significant ineffable beauty...and we, heirs of the same song, still singing the same song....the song from the source...the song that moves the spheres of the universe entire...the song that will resonate in heaven and earth, the one Soul, forever....and its name among many names is love...love palpable and audible...love that transforms and saves and creates...love that redeems the tatters of the mortal dress of all ways and all things... So even if you think you can't sing...for God's sake sing.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Of Heaven's Advent
The great German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, makes the assertion that the Christian faith and life is a perpetual Advent, that we live in an eschatological tension between a certain hope of God's saving presence, and God's final consummation of heaven and earth, a time when God will be "all in all." I want to suggest that Moltmann's premillennialist sensibilities get the best of him. Premillennialism is the theology that we all live in a fallen state, in a spiritual winter, as it were, until the rapturous coming of Christ to set all things right; in the meantime we wait in hope for this decidedly future event.
This theology is pervasive in popular western Christianity, and I think it encourages a passive life of faith, a life of faith that only looks to a future manifestation, and we are rendered somewhat powerless by it. This is a predisposition for projecting our responsibilities as people of faith onto an aloof God decidedly absent from creation, or at least most of the time.
I want to offer a different take on the concept of God's Advent. Yes, the Christian faith and life is a perpetual Advent, but this coming is happening as we speak; hope and salvation breaking into present time. "What do you see? " John the Baptiser asks Jesus' would be disciples who wonder whether Jesus is the real deal or not. "We see the sick being healed, the poor being clothed and sheltered and fed; the marginalized dignified; we see justice for the dispossessed and outcast," they answer. (my paraphrase) This coming, this Advent is not just about the coming of Christ, the incarnation of God with us, but this Advent first and foremost is about a way of life breaking into the world, Jesus the archetype for such a life; and the means of this Advent rests with us and all people of faith bearing the life blood of this kingdom of God; we and all people of faith, the new Incarnation, the means of the way of heaven in earth. Advent is about the coming of the Way of Jesus, a way in which we participate with all our heart, and soul, and mind; and when the way of the kingdom of heaven is enacted by the people of God, then the kingdom comes now, and we see it in the flesh, a present, beautiful and glorious reality....We see that even now God is all in all; indwelling God's people....E'en so Lord Jesus, quickly come.
This theology is pervasive in popular western Christianity, and I think it encourages a passive life of faith, a life of faith that only looks to a future manifestation, and we are rendered somewhat powerless by it. This is a predisposition for projecting our responsibilities as people of faith onto an aloof God decidedly absent from creation, or at least most of the time.
I want to offer a different take on the concept of God's Advent. Yes, the Christian faith and life is a perpetual Advent, but this coming is happening as we speak; hope and salvation breaking into present time. "What do you see? " John the Baptiser asks Jesus' would be disciples who wonder whether Jesus is the real deal or not. "We see the sick being healed, the poor being clothed and sheltered and fed; the marginalized dignified; we see justice for the dispossessed and outcast," they answer. (my paraphrase) This coming, this Advent is not just about the coming of Christ, the incarnation of God with us, but this Advent first and foremost is about a way of life breaking into the world, Jesus the archetype for such a life; and the means of this Advent rests with us and all people of faith bearing the life blood of this kingdom of God; we and all people of faith, the new Incarnation, the means of the way of heaven in earth. Advent is about the coming of the Way of Jesus, a way in which we participate with all our heart, and soul, and mind; and when the way of the kingdom of heaven is enacted by the people of God, then the kingdom comes now, and we see it in the flesh, a present, beautiful and glorious reality....We see that even now God is all in all; indwelling God's people....E'en so Lord Jesus, quickly come.
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