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:
- Become aware of God's presence.
- Review the day with gratitude.
- Pay attention to your emotions.
- Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.
- 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
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