Christmas Message 2021, St. Paul's

 

Christmas

https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearABC_RCL/Christmas/ChrsDay1_RCL.html

These are not the circumstances I expected for a Christmas message.

Like all of you I was caught off-guard when in the span of 24 hours it seemed clear that we would have to move back to being church virtually.

I am speaking to you now, trying to reach into your homes through the wonder of modern technology, while what most of us are probably most aware of is the distance between us.

I do know, however, that each of us is doing the best we can with the deck of cards that we have been dealt. The wonder of God's work in us is precisely that God takes who and what we are and works with that. God isn't finished with any of us.

Opening

It’s Christmas. The season of Christmas will stretch for 12 days. It’s all around us and its impact stretches as far as we can see. The supply chain, the success of the economy, images of lights and candles, and stories of generosity and self giving, -- all of these are impacted by what happens at Christmas time. Everyone knows it’s Christmas, but what it means is so many different things.

I was surprised to learn long ago that the sort of Christmas that we have been accustomed to was not always the case. Puritans looked down on Anglicans in the early days of our country thinking them beyond the pale because they celebrated Christmas. Many are aware of the traumatic invention of the consumer oriented Christmas of the last century or so. Similarly many are aware of the association of the winter solstice and the date chosen for the celebration of the incarnation.

If we go back 150 years or 850 years the celebration of Christmas was, of course, very different from what we are accustomed to today. So that if everything that we have been accustomed to seems to be thrown out the door with the realities and challenges of the era of pandemic and covid 19, well -- we're not so very different from where the church has been for the last 2,000 years.

Among other things it encourages me to try to focus on The Essentials, on what really matters about Christmas.

The main thing that has stood out for me over the years is the essential theological understanding of what Christmas is all about; namely, "Incarnation".

"In-carnation"

It's a Latin term made up of words for "becoming something" and "flesh". Not very interesting I guess in terms of grammar or the warmth that we get from hearing Christmas music. But it is a pregnant and rich concept soak in and hold on to. Incarnation means something like embodiment, becoming a body, being made manifest in a body.

Think of these words:

• incantation: making song
• illuminate: making light (the in-luminate doubles the consonate and becomes illuminate)
• incandescent: make glowing
• incense: make censing (burning perfume) # "Embodiment"

"Incarnation" is about embodying. In its Christmas usage: at this festival we celebrate the Incarnation of Jesus -- which is to say, "In Jesus we now have the embodiment of God's very self."

Embodiment. Embodies. Jesus the embodiment of God. Interesting word that -- "embodies".

It connects a noun with a quality.

Think of someone who "embodies"

• love
• generosity
• self-sacrifice
• service to the least of God's children
• kindness
• gentleness
• gracefulness
• courage

The list could be extended quite a ways, I think.

I could get lost in each one of those words, thinking of the possibilities and connections, the examples and -- well the embodiments of them.

I'm not so much interested here in how those words might be embodied in my life (or your life) as I am in the basic proclamation of Christmas; namely, that in the Incarnation Jesus embodied God.

These are days when we tend to hear about these kinds of examples. Just the other day I heard about one. ## Nonprofit "Santa’s Workshop Helps Families In Need" read the headline.

https://www.acn.news/nonprofit-santas-workshop-helps-families-in-need/

Cortney Loften has helped others during the holidays for over a decade but started the Red Sled Santa Foundation nearly two years ago. The nonprofit creates a meaningful Christmas by providing gifts and financial assistance to families in need.

The story that I heard on the news was about a project that the nonprofit was doing with a down syndrome group. They were helping the members to create toys and gifts to give to needy children. Because I have known some down syndrome people and I know how much love they have to give. The story brought tears to my eyes.

---

Teacher raising $

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/19/us/north-carolina-teacher-fundraiser-food-winter-break-durham/index.html

Another story appeared recently.

A teacher raised more than $100,000 to purchase enough food to keep thousands of children from going hungry over winter break

(CNN)Turquoise LeJeune Parker ends every class by telling each of her students she loves them.

The 34-year-old library teacher at Lakewood Elementary School in Durham, North Carolina, does everything she can to prove it, and her recent fundraiser, which collected $106,000 to feed her students in need, is her most recent gesture of love.

Winter break can mean weeks of food insecurity for children and their families, Durham Public Schools spokeswoman Crystal Roberts told CNN.

"It's a basic human right. We're not talking about raising money to buy people a vacation; this is food, a very, very basic thing," Parker said. "We need to make sure we take care of our schools, because when we take care of our schools, we're taking care of our community."

Her endeavor, which she named Mrs. Parker's Professors Foodraiser, used the money she raised to purchase, pack and distribute more than 5,200 bags full of food to students at 12 schools throughout the Durham Public Schools district.

The ways in which those characteristics get embodied is really boundless.

• love
• generosity
• self-sacrifice
• service to the least of God's children
• kindness
• gentleness
• gracefulness
• courage # The embodiment of God

The Word was made flesh

One of the gospel passages which is deeply associated with Christmas is not the "Christmas story". It is the Prologue to John's Gospel.

In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
The Word was with God in the beginning.

Everything came into being through the Word,
and without the Word
nothing came into being.

What came into being
through the Word was life,
and the life was the light for all people.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.

Jesus as "embodiment"

This most amazing truth has been proclaimed from the earliest days of the church. It is in somehow or other God's very self becoming human. One of us.

I was amazed and delighted with a popular song of 25 years ago or so. It was titled "One of us" and sung by Joan Osborne. The opening stanza of the song is:

If God had a name what would it be? And would you call it to his face? If you were faced with Him in all His glory What would you ask if you had just one question?

Then in masterful fashion, she sings the line: "What if God was one of us?"

I was amazed at the popularity of the song at the time. But even more amazed because she is asking one of the most profound Christian questions there is. "What if God was one of us?" Well, that is precisely what the Incarnation is all about. That is what happened. And what does it mean? For us, for the world?

God Himself / Herself is embodied in Jesus.

• God who is beyond gender was manifest in a very real male person
• God who loves and embraces all at all times, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high, was embodied in a 1st c. Palestinian laborer

God became flesh. It is a most breath-taking proclamation.

Advent 4c -- St. Paul's, Monroe

Advent 4

Opening

It's so often happens that I am boggled in my mind with what we say and read in church. I think did we really say that? Did we really mean that?

Take, for example, the Collect of the day we opened our liturgy with.

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

We just let it roll off our tongues. But listen! In just the most simple sort of way, we acknowledge that Almighty God comes to me everyday. I can imagine that might be a kind of theoretical statement whereby we acknowledge that God the creator of the universe is somehow maybe in the universe itself present. But with me? When I'm getting out of bed, groggy from sleep and wanting a cup of coffee? Me when I'm crabby or impatient?

But we are claiming that God comes to visit me in order to prepare me for meeting God's Son Jesus Christ. It's like getting ready for church when I was younger, my mother made certain that I was dressed in my finest Sunday clothes. "You never know who you're going to meet."

But we're not talking just dressing up in fine clothes. No we're talking about the finest mansion. God is visiting us So that we become the finest dwelling place in the land.

The Son Jesus Christ is going to live with us. Amazing. Don't you think. And then there's this whole Mary thing.

Magnificat

Experience

My earliest abiding memory

Today’s reading begins a pivot from a focus on John to Jesus, culminating, of course, in Christmas and the Incarnation of the Son of God. Today the focus is on Mary, his mother.

When I was growing up I didn't know much about Mary other than what I encountered at the annual children's Christmas pageant.

We hear from John in the Gospel, but it’s focused on John’s relationship to “the one who comes after.”

The psalm is that “Song of Mary” that I so treasured at Evergreen camp in my teens.

When I was in my early teens for several years running I attended church camp in Evergreen, Colorado. Many years later I learned that that particular camp had a very significant role in the life of the national church from the 1940s and '50s. I learned also that it was dominated by High Church clergy in the 1960s when I was there. That, I guess, explains why every night we had Solemn Evensong. So imagine a group of 13-year-old boys and girls gathering every evening for prayer with incense and chanted lessons and prayers.

It was at that point that Mary became an active part of my spiritual life with the intonation of the Magnificat -- the "Song of Mary" -- and the petitions in Evening Prayer. There's something about the combination of smell and music that one never quite shakes.

It was there that I first imagined that I wanted to be a priest. I was called to be a priest. I was also a 14 year old trying to find his way in a sometimes strange world.

I heard my first dirty joke, told by a priest. Did that have something to do with it?

I first heard about this author named C.S. Lewis. We read from his space trilogy, particularly the volume named Perelandra. That same priest made the case that in this novel Lewis was painting a portrait of what a renewed and redeemed creation looks and feels like.

This, then, was the first time I encountered the notion that -- the Gospel, the faith, God's very self and presence, -- might be communicated through fiction or other kinds of writing. Later I would encounter it again and again in poetry.

20’s

In my 20s I became particularly interested in experiencing and understanding contemplative style prayer of various kinds. During that time I experimented with the well-known Catholic practice of praying the Rosary. I wasn't trying to be Catholic, but trying to be closer to God, in some sense or other made a "mansion". Interestingly, some years later I learned that more and more Protestants were praying the Rosary for just the same kinds of reasons I had. Eventually there developed a method for Anglicans, the aptly titled "Anglican Rosary."

In ministry

By the time my children came along, I was committed to praying with them and trying to ensure that they didn't remember a time that we didn't pray together. Among others, at bedtime we prayed the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary -- though I modified both of them slightly. I didn't use the word "hallowed" in the Lord's Prayer because I figured my kids would never use that word in a normal sentence, that it was not a real word in that sense. I also didn't use the phrase "at the time of our death" in the Rosary, figuring that young children didn't need to be daily reminded of death. They would be exposed to that enough in time.

"Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus."

Marianists

Much later in life, I began a close relationship with the Marianist community in Honolulu. It began with my spiritual director telling me to find a Christian community outside of my own community and commit to worship with them at least once a week. As their name implies, the Marianists have a particular devotion to Mary.

Mary sentimentalized

Taking Mary seriously

In my view, Mary has for too long in the tradition been sentimentalized and even trivialized. It's a way of seeming to idolize her without taking what she represents seriously in our lives.

Putting Mary on a pedestal

The church had regarded Mary's place in the gospel as central from the very beginning. Early on the tradition gave her the title God bearer -- theotokos in the Greek.

In the Middle Ages she was regarded as the paramount model of chivalric love and figured prominently in poetry, art, and song.

Later in the Roman Catholic tradition her place was so elevated that she seemed almost to be on a par with Jesus himself. It was one of the points of contention at the time of the Reformation.

That may seem to contradict my claim that Mary was not taken seriously. When we exalt someone so high -- "Queen of Heaven" is one of her titles -- that person is so remote that she is inaccessible by us mere mortals.

I had experienced in my own prayer that Mary was very real and very much a part of my every day life. Others had the same sort of experience.

Mary’s humanity emphasized

I was moved to discover representations of Mary in the 70’s and beyond that reacted against the sentimentalizing of Mary. Her pregnancy and child-rearing were portrayed – well, the way real people are.

It didn’t make her less important in my prayer life, but more. What Mary had to say to me became more and more important. Not the least of these was the song of Mary, the Magnificat.

This canticle begins with a wistful, spiritual sounding cry from Mary:

“My soul magnifies the Lord.”

It is the tenor of that phrase that I first resonated with, Mary helping me to turn my inner eyes and heart toward the awesome mystery of God.

But the song continues to be firmly planted in the world we all live in.

Rather closer to a revolutionary

Her song rings out the message:

• God has mercy on those who fear him.
• God Scatters the proud in the height of their hubris.
• God Casts down the mighty when they think they're most powerful.
• God Fills the hungry with plenty to eat while the wealthy go without.
• God Fulfills the promise of Abraham and his offspring.

Mary speaks the language of the Gospel that her son would later preach. The expectations that we place on the world are over-turned when God does the preparing. Mary is in harmony with the gospel from before Jesus was even born.

The Magnificat and the Beatitudes are very close and speak to the same divine reality, the same promises of God that are already (but not yet) fulfilled.

Mary's voice is at the heart of the Gospel that we preach. Not because she is exalted in heaven, but because she lives in the world that we do.

We live in a world where the proud appear to be victorious. We live in a world that takes advantage of the poor and the weak. We live in the world where power is the be all and end all.

Mary courageously proclaims that in God's mansion, those values are turned upside down. She is something of a revolutionary, at least in a manner similar to the way Jesus was a revolutionary.

Closing

On this last Sunday before Christmas, Mary is the featured speaker. A mother. A mother who would go through all the pangs and anxiety associated with becoming a mother. But a mother, also, who would one day be at his side as he was executed for being a danger to the state.

Mary knows the utter devastation of seeing it all come crashing around her. But she believes in God's promise that, in the end, the poor are lifted up and the proud are put in their place.

This Sunday is sweet in the cycle we call Advent. The promise of things to come is almost tangible, almost a taste on our tongue, almost within reach. She exemplifies for us the world we live in, in which we are called to put our faith in that which we don't yet see. Some have called it the "already but not yet" of Christian hope.

When I was in college I studied the 14th c. English mystics. Among them was Julian of Norwich. She was one of the reasons that we named our 2nd child Julian. Julian (or Juliana) of Norwich lived in a time of pandemic. It was called the "Black Death." When she looked around her there was not much evidence that God's promises would be victorious. And then she got sick and was near death. There she received a series of "Revelations" which she wrote down so that we have them in our own day. She did not see all that was wrong in her world. She did not see all the things that weren't working and were tearing people down and apart.

She saw what Mary saw. In words that I first encountered and memorized in T.S. Eliot's long poetry sequence the "Four Quartets":

All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

That is hope -- an Advent hope. Amen.

00-st-pauls-rite-1-early 00-st-pauls-late-rite-1

Advent 3c St. Paul's, Monroe

 

Tis the season

It is Advent.

We are swiftly moving through Advent, now. The time is running short. Do you feel the pressure?

Maybe your goal is to be ready to travel wherever you're going for Christmas. Perhaps it is to get things in the mail on time.

I know in our house we've missed deadlines related to Christmas by weeks and even months.

Such is the season.

Why is it that the harder we try the behinder we get? What are the barriers that somehow we erect to hinder ourselves in going forward?

Advent a time for self-examination

Advent is precisely the time for asking those kinds of questions. It is a time for looking at ourselves with sharp eyes. And it is a time of becoming more sharply aware of what is the goal.

And the goal isn't really about letters, or packing, or any of the myriad things we fill our days with. The goal is our encounter with the living God.

Paul to Philippians

Paul seems to present us with a list of things of that order.

• rejoice always
• Don't worry about anything
• ask God with thanksgiving in your prayer (as if it's already completed?)
• The peace of God will settle around you

I'm really inclined to think of this as pretty much outside of my realistic zone of expectations. It really feels like Paul is laying other worldly expectations on us. Something along the lines of, "Yeah, right."

Yet the season calls us, somehow, deep within. Paul really is providing us with a goal for us to live by.

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins,...

Zephaniah

There's singing in the air. People sing in December who don't sing any other time of the year. There's somehow an expectation of hope for gifts in this season, even if the kind of gift shifts with our age.

Our hope is different at age 5 and age 15. Remember those years. For many of us the struggle is to remember those ages of our children.

The hope of the season is for Grace.

The singing we hear within us is for the grace of God to liberate us from all that has held us back.

Cry aloud, inhabitants of Zion, ring out your joy, * for the great one in the midst of you is the Holy One of Israel.

Self-examen

Baptismal promises

At St. Paul's this year we are in the midst of preparing for an event just on the other side of Christmas and Epiphany. The bishop's visit on Jan. 9. There we will be renewing our baptismal vows as Bp. Sam will confirm Lizzie Becker.

This year one of the great blessings, as I see it, is that we are setting our anticipated Christmas in the context of baptism.

In my view, everything we do as Christians ought to be in the context of our baptism. There we proclaim our faith and trust in the living triune God and we promise to God that we:

• Renounce: spiritual the forces of darkness, evil powers of this world sinful desires drawing us away from God;
• turn (conversion, repent, metanoia) to Jesus Christ;
• put our "whole trust" in his grace;
• and promise to follow and obey Jesus Christ.

These are awesome promises that we make and our only hope for even coming close is two-fold: 1) we put our whole trust in God, and 2) we daily work at living into the goal.

Each day ought to feature a look at ourselves in the light of those promises. One traditional time when that takes place is in the evening or the night, when the busy-ness and tasks of the day are past.

We find this in the office for night-time prayer in the prayer book. It's titled "Compline" and it begins with a confession, using familiar language: "We have sinned against you, through our own fault, in thought, and word and deed, and in what we have left undone."

For many centuries that kind of self-examination -- known as a "daily examen" -- has been followed by Christians.

The Daily Examen is a technique of prayerful reflection on the events of the day in order to detect God's presence and discern his direction for us. The Examen is an ancient practice in the Church that can help us see God's hand at work in our whole experience.

One version of it breaks the process down as follows:

1. Become aware of God's presence.
2. Review the day with gratitude.
3. Pay attention to your emotions.
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
5. Look toward tomorrow.

Note how this outline is not marked by sorrow at all the ways we've fallen short of our goals. It starts with an awareness of the constant and eternal presence of God -- which we are all too commonly unaware of.

It proceeds through paying attention to the gifts (the grace) of the day for which we are grateful.

It then pays attention to our body, our emotions, our gut, our intuitions, our "feelings", for clues as to what's going on inside.

From there the process asks us to choose one thing that emerges in our examination and in whatever way makes sense to us we place it before God, we "pray about it."

And then we "hope". We "expect" what is to come tomorrow.

It's so "advent".

Advent: a time of Preparation

Preparing ourselves to meet the Lord.

As I suggested last week: each of us has some variation of the vocation to precede the Lord's appearance, preparing those we encounter to be ready to truly meet the Lord when he comes.

Advent(us) is Latin for "coming". It is about anticipation, expectation, getting things ready.

And as I suggested last week, that is a process closely associated with John, the John who is again this week so vividly present in our passage from Luke's gospel.

John:

John is full of fire and brimstone -- appropriate for a time of facing our own demons and failures.

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance.

Whoever doesn't bear good fruit will be pruned. Yes, we know those prophetic warnings.

But there is much more to hear today. John asks us to look within and without for the signs of the coming Lord.

How will we recognize the Lord when he arrives?

They were questioning in their hearts whether he might be the Messiah. Is this the one? Is it some other?

How will we know when the living God comes into our midst, touches one of our loved ones, touches us?

John's answer is that the one coming after baptizes not just with water but with the Holy Spirit and Fire.

I know I was taught that these might be read as symbolizing sacraments, baptism and confirmation, perhaps.

As with so much else about my faith these days I'm inclined to hear it much more metaphorically.

If my task is to sweep the impediments away, to clean the pathway that others will come down, it is up to the living God to find the right time -- usually a surprising time -- to touch the ones who come after me.

I've watched it happen, sometimes from a distance. Someone who is struggling sees something, hears something, understands something, and they are startled. "Wait! What?" is the look.

Often with tears, always with a sense of tenderness, the person recognizes that they are loved. The living presence of God has touched them -- and they are changed.

The purpose of our lives is to prepare for those moments.

Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love.

00-st-pauls-rite-1-early # Notes

Lectionary

Homily Advent 2c

 

Advent 2

lectionary

Opening

It was many years ago. I was still a youth. I'm not sure where I learned it. Was it that I had a physician and a nurse for parents? Was it that I was an oldest child? Was it learning about people like Mother Teresa? I don't know. But I knew, deep down, that the lives we lived were not primarily for ourselves, for our enjoyment or fulfillment, but for others.

Man for others was the title of an address by the head of the Jesuits in 1973. ¹

I also may have heard it in connection with the movement of the 90's, focused on men and led by the football coach of the Colorado University football team: Promise Keepers

Called to prepare the way

We are not here for ourselves. We are here for those who come after us. That is a startling thing to acknowledge. It is shocking to try to put it into practice.

If we are not for ourselves but for others, it is clear that we are not not even here for our generation, but for those we will not even meet in the next generations.

That is a frightening set of claims if we pay any attention to them at all. But perhaps it is even more frightening not to pay attention.

We are not here for ourselves but for those who come after us.

Transition between eras

Last week I spoke about the anxiety that occurs as one era passes from one to another. The times we live in are part of the passing of eras that are measured in decades and centuries, not weeks or months.

It is not only our generation that is living in an "in between time". It is our parents and our children as well.

The former times are passing away, and the long-expected "world to come" has not yet arrived.

The prophets of Israel centuries ago spoke of these things. Prophets of our own time are well aware themselves. Prophets appear for us and are sent for our benefit because they can see the passing of times. They are a link between eras.

Word of God came to John and he was empowered to be a link -- a go-between if you will -- between the age that was passing away and the new era emerging, by Christians it is understood from the Old Covenant to the new Covenant.

The collect for today describes the vocation of the prophets and our responsibility to pay attention to them:

to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer...

Canticle: Song of Zechariah

The canticle associated most closely with morning prayer uses these words for Zechariah (the father) describing the vocation or calling of his son (John):

You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, * for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,

To give his people knowledge of salvation * by the forgiveness of their sins.

In the tender compassion of our God * the dawn from on high shall break upon us,

To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, * and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

I began regularly praying the Canticle of Zechariah while still in my 20's. By my 30's I somehow interiorized the words, made them my own.

It has been both a gift and a burden to understand that I am responsible for going ahead of others, "before them", in order to prepare the way for the Lord of heaven and earth to enter into their lives.

Of course, I'm not the only one responsible. That's the whole thing. We've all been called to that.

I am indebted to those who made me who I am, and I am accountable to those who come after. Preparing the way. We are preparing the way for those who come after us.

Ultimately, this becomes an identification with the prophets. We walk in their shoes. It's an awesome responsibility. We walk in their shoes. Accountability is passed on to us.

John's Day

This Sunday is John's day like no other. He is the featured voice.

John has an out-sized place in the gospel as we have received it. He appears at the beginning of each of the 4 gospels. His message seems to have been passed on to Jesus who then molded it and shaped it in his image.

Cf. Advent 2 2019

All four gospels provide testimony that John was the forerunner of Jesus. He was older and part of an older tradition.

I have said this to you before, but it is important and worth repeating. There are only a few elements of the gospel narrative that are present in all 4 gospels.

They tend to be the basic building blocks of the narrative:

• crucifixion and death
• condemned to death by the Romans
• accused by Jewish authorities
• betrayed by one of his own
• triumphal entry into Jerusalem
• feeding of the multitude
• Peter’s profession of faith
• calling of the disciples
• John the Baptist as a forerunner and (as it were) introduced Jesus to the world

Clearly John’s place in the Good News of Jesus Christ is important.

In the hands of the gospel writer, John is linked to the prophets through the words of Isaiah:

"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ...
'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,...'"

The work has begun.

There is a rich heritage at St. Paul's. The memories run deep here. I have been asking folks for months now, "Why did you come to St. Paul's? What attracted you in the first place? Why did you stay?"

Many of you have pointed to "the people." "It is the welcome and acceptance I experienced."

This speaks to who we have been. And it is a noble and respected placed. Paul the apostle would be proud of you just as he was of the Philippians.

But we are in the transition to a new era. If we grew and were strong because of our care for one another, now we are in a different posture. We look to a future that is only beginning to emerge.

A new day is dawning.

You may know that a "day" in Judaism is reckoned to begin at sunset. I used to think that that was just a quirk -- and not the way we measure a day.

More recently I have come to see a deep wisdom in experiencing a new day beginning with sunset. It means that a day begins in the dark. "It's darkest and coldest just before the dawn."

We really experience that. Physically, out in the slowly changing dark of night, the air is crisp, but it seems colder somehow. And then the fiery ball peaks over the horizon. And it seems better.

But we experience it figuratively, too. In the transition to a new job. A new project. A new relationship. Living alone where once we were a we. Living as a we where once we were alone. So many transitions. From time-past to time-future.

It often seems to be most difficult just before the breakthrough when it becomes -- what? becomes good again.

The rock group "U2" wrote a song titled "Yahweh." It includes these lines:

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don't make a fist
Take this mouth
So quick to criticize
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

We are in this place where we have begun a good work. Our prayer, our hope, our expectation is fulfilled in what comes ahead.

Paul, writing to the church in Philippi, gives thanks for all that the church has accomplished. They have begun a good work and that is a cause for rejoicing and praise.

But there is more. There is expectation and hope, focused on the coming "day of Christ." It will not be easy and it will be a labor of love, "having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God."

As the sun rises over the horizon, it signals a time for us to rise up, not a time to rest. Our equipment is the love of Christ that it may "overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight."

Our first reading from the book of Baruch provides a vivid image of the hope and expectation I am describing.

We don't hear from Baruch very often in church readings. The only other place it is scheduled is at the Easter Vigil.

Today the words are addressed to Jerusalem -- as if in song.

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God.
Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God;
put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting;
for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven.

As St. Paul's begins a new work for a new era -- the "Jerusalem" in Monroe, NC -- let us put on the "robe of righteousness" and may we wear the "diadem of glory" to be a light to reveal "the glory of the Everlasting."

Note for e.g. of contemporary prophet

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/12/philip-agre-ai-disappeared/ author: By Reed Albergotti August 12, 2021 at 1:30 p.m. EDT

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Philip Agre predicted technology’s pitfalls and then he disappeared - The Washington Post

Excerpt

Philip Agre earned his PhD in 1989 in computer science, but his greatest impact came when he left the technical side of the field and helped create the field of social informatics, or the study of how technology and humanity interact. Then he disappeared, leaving behind a legacy of work that was eerily prescient in predicting how technology would impact society.

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1. https://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/men-for-others.html MEN AND WOMEN FOR OTHERS by Pedro Arrupe, S.J. Superior General of the Society of Jesus 1973, Valencia, Spain↩