Song of Eternal Presence

For this season after the Epiphany I have been focusing on the songs sung by all those players in Luke's nativity narrative.  Luke wants the world not only to recognize that Jesus is the beloved Son of God, the Christ but to celebrate the extent to which this gift has its effect on all the wrongs and misdeeds causing imbalance and suffering for the nations and for Israel.

Much of what Luke has his players sing is not new.  Simeon's song harkens all the way back to Abraham and Sarah who are released to the peace of their fathers as God promises to watch the generations after them.  Zechariah's song is full of the ancient Psalmist's praise. You can hear echoes of Hannah in the songs of Elizabeth and Mary.

How fortunate it was that the scroll was opened to Isaiah that day when Jesus returned to his home and stood to read in the synagogue:

18  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

19  to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Heady stuff and before the subtlety of those words hits home they all puff up a little that they know this Jesus and his family.  But as they come to see that the reading says as much of what is not happening yet and what they are preventing or at the very least not accomplishing themselves their puffery turns to offense and they shout to throw him off the nearest cliff.

It is often, too often a fault of human making.  Most of us have a view that reduces our lives to mechanisms of cause and effect.  Even some of the best arguments for the existence of God are those unmoved mover, first to love, creator of creativeness arguments.  So much of how we understand the world and its workings is to describe a linear process with beginning, middle and end.

What if what Jesus was sharing of Isaiah's song was about another way to understand God's relationship with us?  Wouldn't a "normal" word to the poor be to blame them for their lack of initiative or cast blame on some greedy oligarch or landlord?  Shouldn't the oppressed just rebel against their oppressors?

But Jesus/Isaiah just proclaims it, the year of the Lord's favor.  It is a Jubilee year and all debts are forgiven, prisoners freed.  The blind can see.

Who are these blind ones?  No others benefitting from this reversal of fortune are so singularly situated.  Aren't the poor part of the system of cause and effect imbalanced by greed and inefficiency?  Aren't the oppressed someone's victims?  Do not captives have jailers?

Could the blind ones be someone besides the victims of oppression, besides those made poor by another, besides those imprisoned?  Could it be that the blind are the oppressors, as well?  Could the greedy be missing something, blind to the same truth.

Could it be that this well-remembered home boy Jesus is calling the wrong people blind?  It could, couldn't it?  Could it be that in our small world of cause and effect we have imprisoned everyone -- oppressor and oppressed -- away from God's Jubilee?  What if the way God relates to us is as much eternal presence as a divinely begun progression of cause and effect?

I keep hearing Martin Smith's reminder, "you can never talk behind God's back" so now I'm wondering will we ever sing Isaiah's jubilee, knowing that God is always and fully with us?

Annual Letter to Advent

To the saints of Advent,

I’m excited.  We have a chance to do a new thing.  Thanks to the good work and undefended hearts of so many: our Bishop, his Canons Schuster-Weltner and Thompson-Quartey, vestry members -- both current and those rotating off -- parishioners and non-parishioners we can look ahead without fear but with confidence and hope.

Our recent past has been hard and it has changed us.  Changed and blessed us with a vestry of 6 careful, spiritually mature people who believe that God loves us and abides with us in all that we do in faith. 

Even in the face of challenge we are blessed, repeatedly and constantly.

I am grateful beyond measure for the blessing of the strong institutional sense and active leadership of Terry Blum as our Senior Warden.  At every step with our Bishop’s Canons and consultants she was informed and ready to forward their work to its best result. 

Our blessings are constant even as they include the closing of Alicia Ramfos’ and Rick Crown’s terms of service on our vestry.  Their commitment is exemplary and their gifts will be hard to replace.  

One surprise blessing has been in the service of Debbie Permar as she joined the vestry through appointment and is continuing to serve by finishing the terms of two who resigned.  Debbie has also stepped up to continue the work of our much beloved and greatly missed Ginger Kroeber as registrar. 

Another blessing was the “future charting” gift of “The Madisonian.”  The clear donation of Vicki Mooney’s beautifully renovated and restored property has added an unexpected dimension to our lives in community.  

Let me not fail to mention the careful and conscientious work lead by Terry and our newly formed Financial Advancement Committee that helped us to incorporate this addition.  The process has reminded us of the value of all those offering opportunities beyond our pledges and volunteerism. 

As the new Rectory indicates a future we are just learning to consider let me mention a few other items on the chart of what’s ahead. 

Tim Pridgen and others have been keeping before us the question of how we will best be “Aging in Place.”  The conversation is expanding and new connections and possibilities make the coming year an exciting consideration. 

OJ Booker has adopted our website and is expanding it to provide better communication between each of us and to the world around us.  Thanks to Dan Jubelt for his years of support in the past.

Holly Schreiner has stepped up to follow Sue Baldwin as treasurer.  Thanks to Sue for caring so deeply for our fiscal operation in the interim.

And those are just the highlights of this life of blessing and opportunity.  There are immeasurable ways in which each member has added to our lives through our guilds and through individual volunteering.  Just think bread, grass, flowers, food, worship . . . etc.

All of these blessings and opportunities come by way of God’s abiding love of us, are reflected in our care for each other and will be sustained in a love that is spilling out each day we work for the sake of others.

That’s why I’m excited.  There is still love and God continues to bless us in it. 

Song of Simeon's Reprise

I've been thinking about the "songs of Luke's gospel."  Most of them have become canticles we chant more regularly in Morning and Evening Prayer and frequently but less so in our Sunday celebrations of Holy Eucharist.

For the Sunday after Epiphany we will sing with Simeon, his nunc dimittis.  I have already written about how this song has more to it than we'd expect from it's fixture in Compline.  In short, there's much more to it than going to rest peacefully.

It can be understood as celebrating the "next day" of enlightened living with "the nations and . . . your people Israel."  So, not just a happy ending but a glorious beginning is ours now that God has set us free in the person of Jesus, son of Mary.

This is another reminder that to God our lives matter now, and enough that he would be with us as much as possible.  Indeed, there is no higher compliment that God can pay us. It is greater and includes the glory of his having a "chosen people."

Simeon wanted Israel's dream to come true and he did all he could to survive until that assurance was real.  He expected God's love of Israel to be good for the world.  And it was.

He also expected to see a Messiah who would elevate Israel to the high calling of being a blessing that blesses.  Granted Simeon wasn't alone in his expectation.  Many if not most of the Hebrew people were obsessed with the idea, the dream of, the hunger for a champion to set things right.  Sadly, too many of them wanted that "right setting Messiah" to be exclusive, as exclusive as a holiness code or a genealogy.

But Simeon's song is bigger than that.  It sings of more than vengeance and zeal, more than final solutions.  Simeon's freedom and shalom and vision and inclusivity and hope and glory is exactly what God wants for Israel AND the nations, for the whole world.

I've been reading Compline every night since Christmas.  But the dream come true that is Simeon's is as exciting as it is comforting, as inspiring as it is restful.  Some nights it's hard to go to sleep.  But what better way to find rest than in the confidence of the morning already having what it needs?

Set Free: The Song of Simeon

I'm still attending to the songs that Luke's narrative includes to focus and accent the story of Jesus being born and the world's response to that good news.  Mary and Joseph abided by the jewish law and 40 days after the birth of her firstborn son brought Jesus to the temple to be officially "presented" and from that point counted among the chosen people.  Kind of like our parents present their infant children for Holy Baptism. 

It happens that an old, faithful Jew named Simeon is also there that day and has his dream of meeting the Messiah fulfilled.   His song is a standard that capitalizes Luke's early chapters and allows for the story to shift farther into Jesus' life as an adolescent, which is the last of those moments that Mary "cherishes and ponders" what she has been called to do and become, theotokos - "God bearer."

Simeon's song, known to us by the Latin title, Nunc dimittis, is song at the close of that precious night-time prayer office known as Compline.  I'm reading compline EVERY night on my own throughout this ordinary time after the Epiphany.  You can read/pray it too.  It starts on page 127 in the Book of Common Prayer.  It's brief and can be completed in just a few minutes. 

The liturgical custom is to read Compline while standing in those minutes before one might climb the stairs to bed.  That's embedded in the name: Compline completes the day's prayers. 

Simeon's song works beautifully to speak a comforting release from the previous day's troubles that leads to freedom and peace because we know that Jesus is with us. 

Lord, you now have set your servant free * 

to go in peace as you have promised;

For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, * 

whom you have prepared for all the world to see:

A Light to enlighten the nations, * 

and the glory of your people Israel.

And with our candle clutched we go to our night's rest in silence so as not to disturb the ease of which we were just assured.  (The rubrics could prescribe a "sigh-like exhalation with a gently descending intonation" and it would seem automatic for many of us.)

But there's something that Luke's narrative also means to indicate to us.  Jesus' arrival is as much the start of something as it is the close.  Simeon is saying now the nations are caught up in the light of the Messiah's presence and the purpose of God's chosen people has been fulfilled and Israel can share in that glory.  

So let us do close our days with that sweet release and sigh that is a "day is done," "let it be," "resting in Jesus" spirit.  But let us also think ahead to how we might greet the morning with a similar comfort and confidence.  That's world for whom God's "light of Christ" is born.  That's world into which we have been set free.  

Magi: Three Kings?

Caspar, Balthasar, Melchior. These “three kings of Orient are” found, complete with crowns and camels, in nearly every nativity scene. Yet if you look closely at the gospel account of the Magi (Mat 2:1-12), you won’t find these names. 

Actually there is no mention of how many Magi there were or that they were kings riding camel-back. This is a testimony to something some Bible Christians would like to deny: that all who read a text of Scripture do so in the light of some tradition, through some lens. If it is the right lens, it magnifies the text and allows us to get at its true meaning. If it is the wrong lens, we get a distorted image.

As modern celebrants of the "ongoing-ness" of the incarnation we have to hold these things gently and understand how faithfulness has found different expressions year after year, century after century.

I know early christians hungered for a way to tell the story of Jesus' birth so that the world was implicated. Paul's constant accommodation of gentile inclusion in his fledgling church is evidence of it.

That even a "worldly" wisdom was capable of understanding God's signs says a whole bunch about exactly that the incarnation was for us all.

 So we sing anyway and we celebrate our inclusion:

We three kings of orient are,  

Bearing gifts we traverse afar 

Field and fountain, moor and mountain, 

Following yonder star. 

Oh, star of wonder, star of night,  

Star with royal beauty bright. 

Westward leading, still proceeding, 

Guide with thy perfect light.