Monday, January 1 - "He Was Named Jesus"

Eight days after any male Jewish baby was born, he was to be circumcised.  Thus, January 1 marks the eighth day after Christmas.

Luke 2:21-32 reads:

"On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived.

"When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, "Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the Lord"), and to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what is said in the Law of the Lord: "a pair of doves or two young pigeons."

"Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout.  He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him.  It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he had seen the Lord's Messiah.  Moved by the Spirit, he went into the temple courts.  When the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the Law required, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying:

"Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace.  For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel."

In Simeon, we recognize some of the themes we wrestle with around the beginning of the New Year: questions about the purpose of life, arrivals and dismissals, and time as it passes.  Jesus, the one who came down from heaven, submits thoroughly to a holy passing of time as prescribed in God's law: "on the eighth day..."  Simeon also finds that time is not a secular, meaningless thing, but is shaped by holy arrivals and dismissals, and namely by God's coming to his people.

I am fond of Robert Burns' song, "Auld Lang Syne," which is Scottish for "Old Long Since."  It is essentially a defense for raising a toast to the past, the times that have been.  This is a good song to sing in a time of festivity, when there is a collective pause in life's achievement and people ask, "why not sing and raise a glass to all that has been?"  Simeon's song gives us a picture of fulfillment that won't require looking to the past.  It brings to mind the sense that if we meet the face of Jesus, there will be no lingering regrets, no love lost over achievements that were not attained.  The narrative of Simeon's life is the pursuit and the finding of the Messiah who is real, who is there, who has a name.  His acknowledgement of death and the waning of his years is not morbid or suicidal.  It is a reminder to us that death brings an end of sin and brings us to God.

This reminds me of the verse in Genesis when God creates the starry host:

"And God said, "Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days, and years..."  Morning.  Night.  Days.  Months.  Years.  And in a precise second, one year turns to the next.  The Genesis text shows us that even the stars in the sky are there, in a sense, to mark "sacred times."  They are not created out of randomness, but for festivity, for joy, to mark seasons, for growth, maturity, so that we may see more of God's face, and that he may see more of ours.

Finally, George Grant shares a "Prayer for the New Year:"

O Lord,
Length of days does not profit me except the days are
passed in thy presence,
in thy service, to thy glory.
Give me a grace that precedes, follows, guides, sustains,
sanctifies, aids every hour,
that I may not be one moment apart from thee,
but may rely on thy Spirit
to supply every thought,
speak in every word,
direct every step,
prosper every work,
build up every mote of faith,
and give me a desire
to show forth thy praise,
testify thy love,
advance thy kingdom.
I launch my bark on the unknown waters of this year,
with thee, O Father, as my harbour,
thee, O Son, at my helm,
thee, O Holy Spirit, filling my sails.
Guide me to heaven with my lamp burning,
my ear open to thy calls,
my heart full of love,
my soul free,
Give me thy grace to sanctify me,
thy comforts to cheer,
thy wisdom to teach,
thy right hand to guide,
thy counsel to instruct,
thy law to judge,
thy presence to stabilize.
May thy fear be my awe,
thy triumphs my joy.  Amen. (George Grant, Christmas Spirit, 188-189)

Sunday, December 31 - What Child is This?

William Chatterton Dix was an insurance executive by vocation and a poet by avocation.  He wrote the lyrics to What Child is This?:

What child is this, who, laid to rest
On Mary's lap, is sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing:
Haste, haste to bring him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary?

Why lies he in such mean estate
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christian cheer for sinners here
The Silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce him through
The cross be borne for me for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary!

So bring Him incense, gold and myrrh,
Come peasant king to own Him,
The King of kings, salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.
Raise, raise the song on high,
The Virgin sings her lullaby:
Joy, joy, for Christ is born,
The Babe, the Son of Mary!

The first two stanzas explore questions.  The first stanza, taking account of the fanfare surrounding this child, looks again a second time, asking "what child is this?"  The second stanza, now finding the humble surroundings to be discordant with regard to what we now know about the child, asks 'why here?'  The rest of the second stanza provides the linchpin answer: it is not for himself, but for sinners that Christ is in "such mean estate", just as it is not for himself that he ultimately goes to the cross.  The third stanza now imagines that these questions were asked by the Magi, and encourages them to bring their gifts.  Or, it imagines that all singers of the hymn come to Christ as the Magi do: with questions, and it is in asking the questions that we find - not answers - but Christ.  And in Christ we find the answer.

Compare this with the stunning hymn, Who is This, So Weak and Helpless? by William Walsham How:

Who is this, so weak and helpless
Child of lowly Hebrew maid
Rudely in a stable sheltered
Coldly in a manger laid?
'Tis the Lord of all creation
Who this wondrous path has trod
He is Lord from everlasting
and to everlasting God.

Who is this, a Man of Sorrows
walking sadly life's hard way
Homeless, weary, sighing, weeping
Over sin and Satan's sway?
'Tis our God, our glorious Savior,
Who above the starry sky
Is for us a place preparing
Where no tear can dim the eye.

Who is this?  Behold Him shedding
Drops of blood upon the ground!
Who is this, despised, rejected
Mocked, insulted, beaten, bound?
'Tis our God, Who gifts and graces
On His church is pouring down
Who shall smite in holy vengeance
All His foes beneath His throne.

Who is this that hangs there dying
While the rude world scoffs and scorns
Numbered with the malefactors
Torn with nails and crowned with thorns?
'Tis our God who lives forever
'Mid the shining ones on high
In the glorious golden city
Reigning everlastingly.

In How's hymn, we are initially struck by the contrast between Jesus' humble appearance as child, and his divine nature.  Over the course of the hymn, through the consistency of this scheme and the rising intensity of what is taking place, they don't seem to contrast so much.  Christ's humility comes to have a towering, divine, glorious quality of its own.  There is might, vigor, and strength to these questions, so filled with the riveting details of Christ's ministry.  The questions don't shrink before the answers, but anticipate them.  The answers come as an 'Amen!' to what we perceive that the questioner already knows!

Dix teaches us to ask questions at the scene of the manger.  How teaches us not to stop there, but to keep asking through the course of Jesus' ministry, particularly the primary question which comes to the disciples' lips so often, and which turns out to be the central question of the four gospels...

..."who is this?"

Saturday, December 30 - Once in Royal David's City

Cecil Frances Alexander wrote two particularly famous hymns during her life.  One is "All Things Bright and Beautiful."  The other is "Once in Royal David's City."  According to George Grant, Alexander reportedly "wrote this carol for her godchildren when they complained that their Bible lessons were dreary." (Grant, Christmas Spirit, 116)

It's a shame that Bible lessons would ever be dreary.  It is a wonderful thing that people like Cecil Frances Alexander would indwell Scripture so much that they could produce works of art that not only teach those in their lifespan, but continue to teach us today.  Grant notes that this carol has become the traditional opening for the Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols Service from King's College, Cambridge.  It was always the opening hymn in the Christmas Eve service in the church of my upbringing, and those warm opening half notes of the hymn always feel like the perfect prelude to the Scriptures and stories of Christmas.

Here is the hymn:

Once in royal David's city stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her baby in a manger for his bed:
Mary was that mother mild,
Jesus Christ her little child.

He came down to earth from heaven who is God and Lord of all,
And his shelter was a stable, and his cradle was a stall:
With the poor, and mean, and lowly,
Lived on earth our Savior holy.

And through all his wondrous childhood he would honor and obey,
Love and watch the lowly maiden in whose gentle arms, he lay:
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as he.

And our eyes at last shall see him, through his own redeeming love;
For that child so dear and gentle is our Lord in heav'n above,
And he leads his children on
To the place where he is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable, with the oxen standing by,
We shall see him, but in heaven, set at God's right hand on high;
When like stars his children crowned
All in white shall wait around.

Two things strike me.  First, songs of faith that are too focused on the lesson to be learned, or with proper behavior tend to take our attention off God and put it on ourselves.  In that sense, the third verse feels quaint to me.  The third verse makes me want to sigh and paraphrase Mary Poppins: "If they must, they must."  Second, consider how she guides us from the child in the manger to beholding the Risen Christ, reigning from the right hand of God.  If children and adults alike would learn to be "mild, obedient, and good" as Christ, this is exactly where they ought to look: our royal King who has conquered all sin and death, and in sure authority, "leads his children on to the place where he is gone."

Here, I feel I must raise my egg nog and say a prayer for all those who teach the Christian faith to children.  They do a lot all year...and also at Christmas time.  For them, the third verse is very important.  Yelling children can't listen or sing a song.  Children who are looking to impress their friends won't look for the Light of the World.  But one also can't win every battle.  This is a great art.  One must understand the ways of children to then be able to show children the richest truths of the faith.  Great childrens' teachers are like Christ in this way: they draw the children near like a magnet, and the children want to please them, want to make them happy, want to impress them.  Children want to be with Jesus.  They want to be with great childrens' teachers too.  And I've been blessed to know quite a few.  Then, maybe just maybe children will catch the teacher pointing steadfastly to Christ.  The way Cecil Frances Alexander did.

Friday, December 29 - She'd-a Rocked Him in the Weary Land

Robert Darden's book, Nothing but Love in God's Water, is a treasure trove of insights into black sacred music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.  The slave spirituals mined the Bible and found so many oppressed heroes to sing about like Daniel and Joseph.  Moses was a common person for them to sing about:

"To overcome an institution as heinous as perpetual slavery, enforced by the armed might of a powerful nation, calls for equally powerful, spiritually compelling heroes.  The Moses narratives from the Old Testament provide such a hero.  In the course of leading his people out of slavery into the Promised Land, the reluctant hero Moses endured many trials and hardship, ordeals that gave him the "spiritual knowledge and power" necessary to confront the Pharaoh and his vast armies.  At the same time, the "empowerment of Moses" represented for African-Americans slaves the "rewards" of maintaining a relationship with God: "Inasmuch as converted Africans believed that "de God that lived in Moses' time jus' de same today," they also believed that He would answer their prayers and empower a deliverer hero from one among their number." (Darden, Nothing but Love in God's Water, 29)

And of course, slaves sang about Jesus too.  An extremely limited list of songs from some of the earliest collections would include titles like: "Tell My Jesus 'Morning'"; "Jesus on the Waterside"; "Jesus Won't You Come By-and-By?"; "No Man Can Hinder Me"; "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had", songs which are all very Jesus-focused.

These songs were deeply Jesus-centered, and in lifting up the authority of Jesus, were very subversive to the temporal authority of the slave-master:

"John W. Work, who also directed the Fisk Jubilee Singers, recounts the story of a group of slaves on a plantation on the Red River in the early 1800s who crossed the river each Sunday to worship at a nearby mission in the Indian Territory.  In time, the slave owner heard that the missionary was from the North and, fearing that the man put ideas of freedom in their heads, ended the practice.  But the slaves began sneaking away at nights to attend the services, singing "Steal Away to Jesus" as their cue.  When the missionary heard the soft singing, he would go to the river's edge to help the slaves ashore." (Darden, 39)

The song vividly illustrates the transfer of authority to Jesus in a way that carried a profound double meaning for slaves.  The song conveyed both the sense of stealing away from the sway of the sinful world, and also a literal stealing away by night from their oppression so they may worship the Lord.

Many of these spirituals found their theme in the birth of Jesus:

"It is then not difficult to understand the slaves' attraction to the Nativity spirituals, where the helpless infant and the refugee parents in an occupied land find shelter in a cave or barn, surrounded by animals.  The infant Jesus is tenderly, lovingly presented in these spirituals: "Sister Mary had-a but one child, Born in Bethlehem / And every time-a baby cried, She'd-a rocked Him in the weary land."

Even the birth narratives of Jesus had, for slaves, a quality that subverted the existing order.  Darden continues:

"But there is sometimes a note of defiance even amid the most tender depiction of Jesus as a baby.  The "sentimental image of a baby in a manger" in a spiritual like "Sweet Little Jesus Boy," Mitchell suggests, should not "be confused with a faith without teeth":

Sweet little Jesus boy, they made you be born in a manger.
Sweet little Jesus boy, they didn't know who you was.
They treat you mean, Lawd; treat me mean, too,
But that's how things is down here; they don't know who you is. (quoted in Darden, 41)

From the mere fact that Christ was ill-treated in this world, the song opens up on the hope for an entirely different realm than we find "down here" in this world.  Songs like this carry the sense so powerfully that people in this world are not often recognized for who they are, and that their true worth and dignity often goes hidden, and that this was above all true of the incarnate Lord.  Accompanying this is the sense that the judgment will bring with it a right ordering of everything.  This is vividly captured in a song called "Had No Room," recorded by Mahalia Jackson and The Staple Singers among others.  It begins in the inn:

Had no room
Had no room
Had no room at the inn 
When the time had surely come
For the Savior to be born
Had no room at the inn
Had no room, had no room

But then it moves to a heavenly courthouse where the servants at the inn will give account as to how the innkeepers withheld compassion from Mary:

Well, there was a bellboy, and a porter, and a waitress, and a maid, and a cook
I know they'll be a witness.
In that great judgment day
When we'll all hear them say
How they turned poor Mary away
Had no room at the inn
Had no room, had no room

These songs are resources for us to remember that in Christ, God became poor and rejected.  Similarly, the slave experience of Jesus' infancy reminds us that the existing power structures of the world are opposed to this baby King, and that if we want to stand with Jesus, we need to be prepared to be uncomfortable.

Thursday, December 28 - The Holy Innocents

In Dorothy Sayer's cycle of plays about the life of Christ, she depicts the scene when Herod sends troops to Bethlehem to kill every male child, hoping to end the threat of the newborn King:

HEROD: Good.  Here's another order.  Take a band of Thracians.  Go to Bethlehem.  Search out every male child in the cradle ---
PROCLUS: Children, sir?
HEROD: From twelve days old ---  No.  I don't trust them.  No.  Take all the male children from two years old and under and put the lot to death.  All of them.  The whole brood of adders.  Do you hear?  Let none escape.  Kill them all.
PROCLUS: Sir, I am a soldier, not a butcher.
HEROD: You will obey orders.
PROCLUS: I won't, and that's flat.  I am a Roman, and Romans do not kill children.  Send one of your own barbarians. (Sayers, The Man Born to be King, 65)

Other research on ancient civilizations would suggest that this is being overly generous to the Romans.  All sorts of ancient civilizations killed their children.  George Grant writes:

"Virtually every culture in antiquity was stained with the blood of innocent children.  Unwanted infants in ancient Rome were abandoned outside the city walls to die from exposure to the elements or from the attacks of wild foraging beasts.  Greeks often gave their pregnant women harsh doses of herbal or medicinal abortifacients." (Grant, The Christian Almanac, 758)

Grant goes on in ways that are so disturbing that I am troubled to quote them.  That something so terrible to us should have seemed so normal to the ancients is extremely disorienting. 

Adam C. English speaks to how normal this was:

"As if disease, malnutrition, unhygienic conditions, and poor medical treatment were not dangerous enough, children were regularly threatened by infanticide.  It is almost impossible to know with certainty how frequently infanticide was practiced, mainly because it was a matter for the paterfamilias, the father, to decide.  Because it was not a state matter, it was not reported.  The head of the house, not the government, decided the fate of the child.  Roman law did not regulate or in any way prohibit fathers from exposing their children to death.  Acceptable reasons for abandoning children included the following: the child was "maimed or monstrous from birth," not the preferred gender, or physically uminpressive, or the family was simply unable to feed one more mouth." (English, The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, 41)

The Christian revolution was ultimately good news for women and by extension, for babies.  Church historian Rodney Stark writes: "Widespread female infanticide had reduced the number of women in society.  "If you are delivered of a child," wrote a man named Hilarion to his pregnant wife, "if it is a boy, keep it, if it is a girl discard it."  Frequent abortions "entailing great risk" (in the words of Celsus) killed many women and left even more barren.  The Christian community, however, practiced neither abortion nor infanticide and thus drew to itself women.  More importantly, within the Christian community women enjoyed higher status and security than they did among their pagan neighbors.  Pagan women typically were married at a young age (often before puberty) to much older men.  But Christian women were older when they married and had more choice in whom, and even if, they would marry." (Rodney Stark, "Live Longer, Healthier, and Better: The Untold Benefits of Becoming a Christian in the Ancient World", from Christian History, 1998)

This continued into the Middle Ages.  In a cycle of plays that were put on by various guilds in medieval Great Britain, the story of the birth of Christ was told.  One of the few surviving songs from this cycle is called "The Coventry Carol."  In it, the story of the massacre of the infants is told through the perspective of mothers who sing their children to sleep lest the soldiers of Herod locate them by their crying:

Lully, lulla, thow littel tyne child,
By, by, lully, lulla, thow littel child,
By, by lully, lullay.

O sisters too, How may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor yongling For whom we do sing:
"By, by, lully, lullay"?

Herod the King In his raging
Chargid he hath this day
His men of might In his owne sight
All yonge children to slay.

That wo is me, Pore child, for thee,
And ever morne and say
For thi parting Nether say nor singe:
"By, by, lully, lullay." (Grant, Christmas Spirit, 172-173)

The event recounted here in this way is, of course, unfathomably sad.  This, being the artistic expression of it, is also the way that societies are transformed.  The stories of Scripture, such as that of the murderous, raging Herod sabotaging his peoples' own heritage by destroying an entire village of youth, had so clearly shaped the people of this British city of Coventry by the year 1300 that they expressed in music all the fear, lament, tenderness, and horror of what Herod had done.  This is a song, and to that extent, a society (which produces and sings the song) that has a new vision of what it means to be pro-child.

In Dorothy Sayers' play, the Roman soldier protests that Romans aren't butchers and that Romans don't kill children.  But of course they did.  On the surface, no culture seems as child-affirming as the United States.  But it is important not to be ignorant as the Roman soldier is in the presence of Herod.  Is there a dark underside to our ways?  To be sure.  Richard John Neuhaus was a young priest whose activist heart was set on opposition to the Vietnam War and to racial discrimination.  He spoke at Democratic conventions in the 1960s.  But, as his political tribe came to embrace freedom to abort children in the early 1970s, Neuhaus was stunned.  Though his life is the story of a man who transcended political typecasting, he was always the sort of person who could be counted on to speak his mind, whoever it would offend.  Though in the 1970s, he offended his friends on the left, he would offend his friends on the right in the mid-1990s when he threatened that the generation to come would find "the government that rules them is morally illegitimate."  Harshly rebuked by friends at the time, Matthew Schmitz writes that the twenty years since then have proven Neuhaus to be right, especially in light of new research from the World Values Survey, which shows that belief in democracy is in decline:

"Today, even those undisturbed by the fact that sixty million Americans have been aborted since 1973 should be able to see that all is not well.  Real average hourly wages have not increased for fifty years.  A national increase in deaths from suicide, alcohol, and drug abuse has caused overall life expectancy to decline for the first time since the AIDS epidemic.

"We are told that these outcomes are simply the result of individual choice; to stop them would be an intolerable infringement on the rights of privacy and private property.  This is the logic that has done so much to discredit liberal democracy.  Economics is now treated as less a question of justice than a narrow and technical science.  Politics is confined to policy questions rather than competing visions of right and wrong.  Our regime hopes to maximize happiness by encouraging individual choice.  It accepts abortion and overdose as the price for free love and free trade.  It offers us every personal satisfaction, but nothing we can share.  Even if our regime did maximize individual preference, that would not be enough.  It is not good for man to be alone.  Our good is necessarily common rather than merely personal and private." (Matthew Schmitz, "Neuhaus was Right", published in First Things, January 2018) 

When questioned by Herod, the Roman soldier said "Romans don't kill children."  But we know better.  All societies have been caught up in this cruelest of cruel tendencies to sabotage their own heritage.  So have we.  In our complicity with this most broken quality of human life, we allow the Christmas story to re-orient us in the plight to lift up human life, no matter what the cost.  I close with George Grant's paragraph on the contemporary meaning of the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents:

"It has always been the focus of the Christian's commitment to protect and preserve the sanctity of human life - thus serving as a prophetic warning against the practitioners of abandonment and infanticide in the age of antiquity, oblacy, and pessiary in the medieval epoch, and abortion and euthanasia in these modern times.  Generally set aside as a day of prayer, it culminates with a declaration of the covenant community's unflinching commitment to the innocents who are unable to protect themselves." (Grant, The Christian Almanac, 758)

Wednesday, December 27 - John

December 27 has traditionally been a feast day for the Apostle John.  Many words could be used to describe the Apostle John.  My current favorite is that he is the Apostle of abiding, or 'remaining' in Christ.

From John's gospel, Jesus says:

"I am the vine; you are the branches.  If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.  If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.  If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.  This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples." (John 15:5-8)

John is also linked to Mary, the mother of Jesus.  When Jesus was on the cross, he addressed Mary and John together:

"Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.  When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, "Woman, here is your son," and to the disciple, "Here is your mother."  From that time on, this disciple took her into his home." (John 19:25-27)

Richard John Neuhaus reflects upon this passage:

"Mary is the model of discipleship in her total availability to the will of God.  She had no business of her own.  She was always on call.  To the angel's announcement, she says, "Let it be as you say."  She was dependent on others, on Joseph, for example, and now on John.  By saying yes to the angel and agreeing to be the mother of the Messiah, she had created a situation beyond her control.  Who was to pick up the pieces?  God provides by sending an angel to say, "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife."  Now at the cross she is once again alone in the world.  God provides.  "Son, behold your mother.'  And from that hour John took her to his own home."  In her total availability to God, Mary is totally independent and totally dependent upon God's providing.  True availability to God overcomes the fear of being dependent on others, for God provides.  It is our determination to be independent by being in control that makes us unavailable to God." (Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, 90)

John begins Revelation 12 this way:

"A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.  She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth." (Rev. 12:1-2)

David Chilton comments:

"This Woman, St. John says, is the Mother of Christ: She is seen to be with child (the same Greek expression used of the Virgin Mary in Matthew 1:18, 23), carrying in her womb the Messiah who is destined "to rule all the nations with a rod of iron" (v. 5)." (David Chilton, Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation, 298)

More:

"St. John thus brings together all the Woman-imagery of the Bible for this composite portrait of the covenant community, laboring to bring forth the Messiah: She is Eve, the Mother of all living, whose Seed will crush the Dragon's head; she is also Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Jochebed, Hannah, and the other women of the covenant who gave birth to deliverers, forerunners of the Seed; she is the Virgin Mary, through whom the promises to the fathers met their fulfillment." (Chilton, 299)

We get a hint here how densely John layers biblical symbolism to tell us about Mary, and thus to tell us about Christ.

Here is how Malcolm Guite's sonnet about John ends:

This is the Gospel of all inner meaning,
The heart of heaven opened to the earth,
A gentle friend on Jesus' bosom leaning,
And Nicodemus offered a new birth.
No need to search the heavens high above,
Come close with John, and feel the pulse of Love. (Malcolm Guite, "John" from Sounding the Seasons, 6)

Tuesday, December 26 - Stephen and Wenceslas

Legend has it that the day Christ was born was a day of peace, when there was no war in the world.  Be that as it may, Malcolm Guite reminds us that Christ was already under threat from powerful people almost immediately:

For even as we sing our final carol

His family is up and on that road,

Fleeing the wrath of someone else's quarrel,

Glancing behind and shouldering their load (Guite, "Refugee" Sounding the Seasons, 16)

A good tonic against too much sentimentality at Christmas is to remember Stephen, the first martyr, on December 26.  Though at first puzzling (he doesn't appear in the Scriptures until after Jesus' ascension!), it reminds us immediately how threatening the message of Christ is to business-as-usual.  What are we doing when we pay attention to such things as the liturgical calendar?  It's for the sake of the church.  The church is the body of Christ.  Christ, of course, still has a body.  But the church's life is such that it participates in Christ's life.  And this is what the liturgical year is: a tracing of the contours of Christ's life.  And at every stage, we the church find ourselves addressed about our own life.  Thus, as soon as we are reminded at Christmas that we are bearers of the message that the King of Kings has come to us, we are also reminded of the cost of bearing that message: the cross, always the cross.  Herman Bavinck has said that the life of the church is always "under the cross" until Christ comes again.  This makes for a joyful festival season of Christmas, but only as we make Christ our joy.  December 26 gives us two great examples of Christmas joy over and against the hatred of the world: Stephen and Wenceslas.

Over and against the threats of Saul the persecutor, Stephen testified vividly to Jesus Christ.  As his tormentors stood with stones poised for the throwing, Stephen joyfully beheld the Lord Jesus and forgave his accusers.  The fallout from his murder was the spread of the church around the Mediterranean region, and the conversion of his persecutor, Saul.  Guite writes about/to Stephen:

Witness for Jesus, man of fruitful blood,

Your martyrdom begins and stands for all.

They saw the stones, you saw the face of God,

And sowed a seed that blossomed in St. Paul. (Guite, "St. Stephen," Sounding the Seasons, 17)

King Wenceslaus was a king in the Slovak regions of East Europe in the 900s.  His reign was remarkable for being characterized of a particularly biblical form of justice: care for the poorest, prison reform, the sort of compassion for the least which was always enjoined upon Israel - to remember that they had been slaves who were then redeemed.  Indeed, the source of all Christian love, of fulfilling the Golden Rule, is to remember how much God has shown his love to us.  Wenceslaus is linked with Stephen in two ways: first, when he was killed by his brother and an angry mob on his way to church, he forgave them all with his dying breath, as Stephen did.  The joy with which he gladly used what he had for the poor, was the joy with which he died.  Second, through the Christmas carol, "Good King Wenceslaus."  It tells a vivid story of Wenceslaus' determination to feed a poor beggar he has seen on December 26, St. Stephen's day.  When his page hesitates on account of the bitter cold, Wenceslaus' encouragement helps the page to press on through the literal cold of the bitter Eastern European winter and also through the figurative cold of his own heart, which puts up excuses to not serve the poor, rather than persevering for the blessing.  As I write this, it strikes me that both the story of Stephen and Wenceslaus together provide a picture of how we should look for Christ: in the persecuted, for Christ told Saul that when he persecuted Stephen and the rest of the church, he was persecuting Christ.  And, in the poor, for Christ told a parable in the Gospel of Luke about how when people were generous to the poor, they were being generous to Christ.

Here are the lyrics to "Good King Wenceslaus:"

Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the Feast of Stephen,

When the snow lay round about,

Deep and crisp and even;

Brightly shone the moon that night,

Though the frost was cruel,

When a poor man came in sight,

Gathering winter fuel.

"Hither, page, and stand by me,

If thou knowest it, telling;

Yonder peasant, who is he?

Where and what his dwelling?"

"Sire, he lives a good league hence,

Underneath the mountain,

Right against the forest fence,

By Saint Agnes' fountain."

"Bring me flesh, and bring me wine,

Bring me pine logs hither;

Thou and I will see him dine

When we bear them thither."

Page and monarch forth they went,

Forth they went together;

Through the rude wind's wild lament

And the bitter weather.

"Sire, the night is darker now,

And the wind blows stronger;

Fails my heart, I know not how,

I can go no longer."

"Mark my footsteps, my good page,

Tread thou in them boldly;

Thou shalt find the winter's rage

Freeze thy blood less coldly."

In his master's steps he trod,

Where the snow lay dinted;

Heat was in the very sod

Which the saint had printed.

Therefore, Christian men, be sure,

Wealth or rank possessing,

Ye who now will bless the poor,

Shall yourselves find blessing.

Monday, December 25 - Water from the Rock

God once asked his thirsty people to get water out of a rock.  In the Bible and on Christmas morning alike, wondrous things can come from the unlikeliest of packages.  Water can come from rock.

Various stories about Ahaz and Job show us the rock out of which comes the water of Christ.

Colin Nicholl writes about King Ahaz during the time of the prophet Isaiah:

"In Isaiah 7:1-25 the prophet was challenging the covenantally faithless king of Judah, Ahaz, to trust in Yahweh through the crisis precipitated by the Syro-Ephraimite invasion of Judah in 734/733 BC rather than turning for help to the regional superpower of his day, Assyria.  To encourage Ahaz to have faith in the God of David, God offered him an authenticating sign:

"Again Yahweh spoke to Ahaz, "Ask a sign of Yahweh your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven."  But Ahaz said, "I will not ask, and I will not put Yahweh to the test."  And (Isaiah) said, "Hear then, O house of David!  Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also?  Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.  Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." (Isaiah 7:10-14)" (Nicholl, The Great Christ Comet, 197)

Ahaz can name whatever sign he chooses.  'Deep as Sheol' suggests something seismic in the earth.  'High as heaven' suggests some sort of celestial wonder.  But Ahaz declines.  Nicholl describes Ahaz's response as 'pseudo-piety', drawn from Deuteronomy 6:16, but he is really only covering up his resolute unwillingness to trust God: "Ironically, Ahaz, by his refusal to specify a sign, was in fact "putting Yahweh to the test." (Nicholl 199)  Ultimately, this led to Judah becoming a vassal state to Assyria.  In the meantime, since Ahaz had refused to specify a sign, Yahweh chose one for him.  Poor Ahaz.  He could have asked for any kind of sign he wanted.  Something really obvious.  But he preferred to hold God at arm's length.  And God gave him something obscure and difficult: "The virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."

Christmas is obscure.  After today, the world will continue to go on as usual, as though nothing happened.  One senses that this was the case for the people around the child Jesus, and his very ordinary family.  An ordinary family - hardly the great sign that would encourage our faith in God.

But Christmas also shows God to be generous and abundant.  Though Judah failed to be generous in asking for a sign, God did not only give this one obscure sign.  According to Nicholl, Isaiah 9:2 describes how in the former times - the times of Ahaz - the land of Judah will be "brought into contempt" but in the latter times, a certain type of glory will be seen:

"the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shone." (Isaiah 9:2)

Nicholl notes that this is the sign that Ahaz "spurned." (210)  He didn't expect much from God.  He didn't have much to ask from God, and he certainly didn't want to expose himself to any sort of excuse to change his stubborn ways.  But in the latter times, God would grant what Ahaz couldn't even ask for - a sign literally as high as heaven, a sign that had Gentile astrologers from the east come running to worship this Jewish Messiah, the greatest of all signs - the star - pointing in its generous splendor to the obscurity of Jesus.  Generosity in obscurity.

Thus, in God's generosity, do common shepherds find themselves the recipients of lavish signs of what is happening.  John Milton captures the mundane quality of the shepherds keeping their watch:

The shepherds on the lawn,
Or e'er the point of dawn,
Sat simply chatting in a rustick row;...

Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep,
Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep. (Milton, "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity" quoted in Malcolm Guite, Waiting on the Word, 97)

Not much going on here.  'Silly thoughts' staying busy.

And then Milton continues with a grand description of the worshiping host of angels:

When such musick sweet
Their hearts and ears did greet,
As never was by mortal finger strook;
Divinely-warbled voice
Answering the stringed noise,
As all their souls in blissful rapture took:
The air, such pleasure loth to lose,
With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.

Nature that heard such sound,
Beneath the hollow round
Of Cynthia's seat, the aery region thrilling,
Now was almost done,
And that her reign had here its last fulfilling;
She knew such harmony alone
Could hold all Heaven and Earth in happier union.

At last surrounds their sight
A globe of circular light,
That with long beams the shamefac'd night array'd;
The helmed Cherubim,
And sworded Seraphim,
Are seen in glittering ranks with wings display'd,
Harping in loud and solemn quire,
With unexpressive notes, to Heaven's new-born Heir.

Such musick (as 'tis said)
Before was never made,
But when of old the sons of morning sung,
While the Creator Great
His constellations set,
And the well-balanc'd world on hinges hung;
And cast the dark foundations deep,
And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep. (Guite, 97-98)

In describing the music the angels sang the morning Christ was born, Milton suggests these shepherds and their 'silly thoughts' are hearing the music that created the world.  More than that, in stanza four, Milton suggests something impossibly bold.  He takes us back to the book of Job.  Job suffers evil, causing him to bang relentlessly on Heaven's door in prayer.  God questions him with regard to various things listed in Milton's fourth stanza: the world's foundations (38:4), channels for water (38:25), constellations (38:31-33), morning stars singing, and angels shouting for joy (38:7).  Job is humbled, for no one knows these things.  That is, not until a bunch of shepherds experienced it all musically in a field one night.

All of God's blessings, all of God's generosity are poured out at the nativity of Christ.  What Ahaz couldn't bear to ask for is given freely and doubly.  What Job discovered only after endless pleadings is lavished on 'silly', sleepy, soporific shepherds.  The water of the New Covenant comes from the rock of the Old.  It is as Jesus put it in the Gospel of John: "Your Father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad." (John 8:56)  The whole Old Testament leans in with us on this glad morning...all of God's people from all times and places peer happily with us into the manger.  Drink deep!

Sunday, December 24 - What Star Is This?

What star is this, with beams so bright
more lovely than the noonday light?
'Tis sent to announce a newborn king
glad tidings of our God to bring

What star is this?  Around which, all the heavenly scene is set.  The greater lights and the lesser lights are poised to harmonize to the tune sung by this light, this Christ star.  To those who know the stars, who are familiar with the stories they have long been reputed to tell, even they have cause to ask "what star is this?" - the star, perhaps a comet, likely a comet, seen at its rising, till it had risen, then it began to fall and fall some more with a shower of light in its train, paying its celestial testimony.  What star is this which asks "what child is this?"

'Tis now fulfilled what God decreed
"From Jacob shall a star proceed"
and lo! the eastern sages stand
to read in Heaven the Lord's command

Numbers 24:17 records: "I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near.  A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel..."  Revelation 12:1 tells us "a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head."  The twelve tribes of Israel have "given birth" to a son, and he will rule with a scepter, perhaps imaged by the pole-like shape of the comet in the midst of the Virgo constellation: read in the Scriptures and in the heavens alike by Eastern astrologers, otherwise strangers to the people and ways of Israel.

While outward signs the star displays
an inward light the Lord conveys
and urges them with tender might
to seek the giver of the light

From the time of seeing the star, it is thought that the Magi journeyed 500 miles to pay their respects to the great King who was being born.  Was the inner journey as great as the outer?  Clearly it was, as it ended with a bow before the King of Kings.  Is there anything more mighty in its sheer scope and universal theatricality than the stars?  And yet is there anything more tender and quiet than their silence, their distance, their vastness?  The uncountable stars, the uncountable seed of Abraham?  The voice of David in Psalm 8: "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them?  Human beings, that you care for them?"  I was occasionally prone to write lullaby-type songs, one of which had this line: "even if your thoughts could be charted on the wall, they could not be numbered, were I to count them all."  The thought that the stars could evoke tenderness, that "What Star is This" could be sung to a tune as tender as Puer Nobis is surely a Christian development.  In the pagan world, the stars foretold fatalistic and fearful things.  In the Christian world, they shine upon the Bethlehem door of a mother and her young boy.

O Jesus while the star of grace
Impels us on to seek your face
let not our slothful hearts refuse
the guidance of your light to use

Why does God come to us this way?  Why does the universe become a theater for him to depict his ways to us?  Human beings are always worse than they seem.  And yet human beings are always better than they seem.  Blaise Pascal wrote: "All men seek happiness.  There are no exceptions.  However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal.  Yet, all men complain...what sort of freak then is man!  How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious!  Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!" (Pascal, quoted by Richard Horner in Comment Magazine)  I was speaking with a friend about the power of affections in the Christian life, and how what I spend my time doing or thinking about or spending money is clearly what I really want out of life.  When a sinner like me turns to God and considers the heavens, the vastness of the stars in the sky, how God made them all, and then turns back to my individual soul, a space I had come to believe was quite small, cramped, and boring, I find that the world inside me is at least as vast and mysterious and unknowable as the heavens above.  As is my hunger to know and be known.  Only Jesus can satisfy this hunger inside of us.

To God the Father, heavn'ly light
To Christ, revealed in earthly night
To God the Holy Ghost we raise
Our equal and unceasing praise

(The stanzas in Italics come from the hymn "What Star is This".  I am indebted to The Great Christ Comet by Colin R. Nicholl for some of what I write about the star.)

Saturday, December 23 - O Emmanuel (God with us)

The last of the great 'O Antiphons' is 'O Emmanuel':

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God

Malcolm Guite prepares us to think about what it means for God to be with us:

"I sometimes think that Christianity is not so much a propositional religion as a prepositional religion: everything turns on the prepositions, the tiny little words that define and change relationships.  So much of pagan religion was about God's aboveness, immortals over against morals, eternity in contradistinction to time, about transcendence, disconnect and otherness.  But Christianity brings these little words: in, 'Christ in you, the hope of glory' (Colossians 1:27); for, 'if God is for us, who is against us?' (Romans 8:31); through, 'we make our prayer to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit'; and most supremely in this Advent and Christmas time, with, 'God with us'.  This little word 'with' is good news for a world without; so often without hope, without love, without meaning...Perhaps it is only when we grasp the fundamental gospel, the 'good news', that in our Emmanuel God is with us, that we can seriously begin to be with one another." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 88)

Early on when I was at college, I experienced deep yearnings for success, good relationships, renown, influence, beauty, and joy.  Yet, I also experienced deep frustration at my own lack of discipline, compassion, or courage.  I felt it acutely painful to yearn for such wonderful things while I was also beginning to fear what it would mean to live my life without them.  Without success.  Without relationships.  Without beauty.  As I read the Bible, often by the light of a single lamp late at night, I found it beautiful that Jesus Christ seemed to forbid me much leeway to define any of those things - success, influence, beauty, and the rest - apart from him.  He was a hiding place which didn't hide.  He was a narrow road which expanded once you were on it.  It looked cramped from the outside, but on the inside was unbelievably big.  Though 'prone to wander' now until I die, as the great hymn puts it, he is increasingly found to be everywhere, including, as Guite puts it, in prepositions.  God with us.  And in Christ, I found then, and continue to find, I haven't lost anything.  In feast or fallow, all drives me closer to him.  To be with him.  To live my life as a continual abiding in him.

As I wrote on the first Sunday of Advent, Christ is coming again.  Yet, it won't be as though he's been absent.  Rather than gone, he's been hidden.  His second coming will make his authority apparent.  In a small way, each Advent, we prepare ourselves and keep the flame of our yearning for Christ healthy, strong, and ready to last.  This is what led folks from many centuries ago to spend the last week before Christmas singing these 'O Antiphons'.  Many Advents of many years had not caused them to grow callous, but through prayer, to become creative, to dwell within God's word, so that, centuries later, the word dwells richly within us.

They left a hidden joke too.  Medieval people, as Philip Pfatteicher tells us, delighted in stuff like this.

O Emmanuel
O Rex
O Oriens
O Clavis
O Radix
O Adonai
O Sapientia

Ero cras: the Latin words meaning 'Tomorrow I will come!' (Guite, 89)

Friday, December 22 - O Rex Gentium (King of the Nations)

The sixth 'O Antiphon' is 'O Rex Gentium':

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

Guite draws attention to the motif of the hidden king, reminding us of how Jesus subverts the normal idea of kingship.  The purple he wore on the cross was a mockery.  The only crown he ever wore was one of thorns.  The Gospel of John puts it this way: "he came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him." (John 1:11)

Guite looks to Shakespeare and Tolkien, and how their stories have featured hidden kings:

"...from King Lear, out on the heath, in the storm, willingly so to feel alongside poor Tom O'Bedlam the worst of life, and calling on other kings to do the same,

"take physic, pomp, expose thyself to feel what wretches feel..."

"through to the story of Henry V, moving in disguise among the campfires of his own soldiers; to its most recent and powerful iteration in the figure of Strider in The Lord of the Rings, the ragged ranger who walks with the Fellowship on the long road, before they eventually discover that he is their true king.  Perhaps we love these stories of the hidden king because we realize that is how God has come to us." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 85)

There is also a reference to Genesis 2, when man is described as being formed from the dust.  Christ is the one with the authority to save because it is he who formed us from the clay.  Guite likens the ongoing way that Christians are shaped over time to the way clay is shaped in a potter's hands:

"I don't think this making and shaping is over.  We are still being formed by the divine hands, from the dust of the ground.  I remember being at a Christian music festival and wanting to rebuke the teenagers in the tent next to mine for having kept me up all night with their exuberance and music, but then one of them emerged from his tent wearing a T-shirt that read 'Be patient, God hasn't finished with me yet'.  I took the rebuke, and was glad to know that God hasn't finished with me yet either.  Indeed, as Advent calls us to look for the fruition of all things, for the coming of the kingdom that is both here and yet to come, it is good to know that not only we ourselves, but our whole world are clay in the potter's hands." (Guite, 86)

Thursday, December 21 - O Oriens (Dayspring)

The fifth 'O Antiphon' reads thus:

O Dayspring,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death

Malcolm Guite's sonnet ends with these lines:

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.

These lines raise the question of when in our lives we are truly greeted by the light.  The first line suggests a birth.  The sun rises.  A new day is 'born.'  The second line, however, suggests a death, and a great light that occurs afterward.  Which is it?

The first seems chronologically appropriate.  The sun rises in the east and the day is new.  As the sun makes its way across the sky, the day wanes, the light dims, and the sun finally sets.  Guite:

"It is a traditional poetic metaphor, the point of being a cliche, to think of the early morning and first light in the east as analogous to the beginning of our lives, our childhood and youth, of the noon as representing our years of full vigour and strength, and the declining of the sun as representing our waning years.  This is why we have to endure such dreadful names of retirement and nursing homes as Sunset View." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 80)

The first line is right, but then so is the second.  The second line, which also ends the sonnet, seems more spiritually appropriate.  Guite cites 2 Corinthians 4:16: "Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day."  In other words, even though our lives end in the 'night' of death, Christ has accomplished a re-orientation for us, literally a turn toward the east, toward the dawn.  Instead of journeying deeper and deeper into western dusk, we find that in Christ, we are facing an eastern dawn, so that our life not only begins in the dawn, but ends there too:  'Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.'  After death, comes the light.

Guite shows that C.S. Lewis was aiming at a powerful illustration of this sort in his Narnia book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  In pagan literature, people made magical journeys to blessed isles in the west, whereas in Lewis' book, the voyagers sail eastward toward sunrise until even the water becomes drinkable light, a 'dayspring'. (Guite, 81)  They are dawn treaders.

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year.  As was mentioned in a previous post, when the world without is dark, and also when the world within is dark, we remember that as Christians, we are 're-oriented' away from the world, away from the flesh, away from the death that comes to us all.  The old hymn is right on when it says, "Oft in sorrow, oft in woe, onward Christians, onward go."  But it is also true to say that every Christian's 'onward' is toward a glorious, ever-renewing dawn.

Wednesday, December 20 - O Clavis (Key)

The fourth antiphon of Advent, 'O Clavis', reads thus:

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

Guite connects the image of a key to Christ in two ways.  First, through the complexity of a key, and second through the grinding, cutting that makes a key.

First, Guite quotes G.K. Chesterton from his book Orthodoxy as he writes about the Christian creed as necessarily having a strange and complex shape:

"When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science.  It shows how rich it is in discoveries.  If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right.  A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident.  But a key and a lock are both complex.  And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key." (Chesterton, quoted in Guite, Waiting on the Word, 78)

In the sense, Chesterton is inviting us to reflect on the Christian faith as a key and the world we live in with its myriad challenges as a lock.  Does the key fit the lock?  Does the account of God as triune, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who reveal themselves to one tribe of people on the eventual behalf of the whole world, ultimately writing themselves into the story of the world for the sake of redeeming and renewing human life from the inside out - is it a key that fits anything?  One of the aspects of this faith that continues to feel like a key to me is that God himself is a wealth of community.  To paraphrase the famous Solzhenitsyn line, the line of individualism runs through every human heart.  So much of the good I seek to do is selfish: I want people to love me!  But God already has all he needs in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  He doesn't need the world.  But, he loves the world.  And within himself, he suffers on behalf of the world, even to death on a cross.  Our individualistic world - my individualistic heart - is exactly the sort of lock that needs a key like this.

Second, Guite recalls the sensory experience of seeing a key being shaped:

"The other, deeper and older memory was of being taken by my mother as a child to see a key being cut; not a little Yale one, but a big, old-fashioned, complex one.  I remember the locksmith clamping the blank in the vice beside the key to which it would conform, and then the noise and violence of what followed, the high-pitched scream and whine of the metal cutter - in Seamus Heaney's words, 'the unpredictable fantail of sparks' - and the miracle of the finished thing, still cooling in the hand." (Guite, 78)

The cross shapes Jesus ultimately into the key that fits.  Close your eyes!  Consider that the Eternal God became a human person with a heart, with hands, feet, eyes, voice, laughter!  What sort of heart is that?  What sort of eyes does he have when he looks at you, or me, or the world?  And that body of inestimable worth, which is the source of you, me, or all that is, all the gifts we wrap, and the paper we wrap it in, was crushed on a cross.  Let the sentimentality pass.  Let the sense of condemnation pass.  Let the distraction pass.  Just sit with it.  That all the brutal truth and condemnation about each one of us would freely be taken up by him on his own shoulders in loving victory - does that not make your heart sing?  Wouldn't you yearn for a physician like this who, the second he diagnoses, cures?  Don't you love him?  Is this not a key to whatever kind of lock lies hidden in our own souls?

From Guite's sonnet:

I cry out for the key I threw away
That turned and over turned with certain touch
And with the lovely lifting of a latch
Opened my darkness to the light of day.
O come again, come quickly, set me free
Cut to the quick to fit, the master key (Guite 76-77)

Tuesday, December 19 - O Radix (Root)

The 'O Radix' antiphon reads thus:

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

Malcolm Guite's sonnet focuses in on the image of the root with these lines:

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.

Guite writes that he finds it "particularly ironic that we have chosen the word 'virtual' to describe the apparently amoral and essentially unreal free-play of cyberspace, where people can be constantly tempted to explore and make a display of their vices." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 75)  This is the sense of the phrase, 'virtual reality'.  It looks like reality and feels like reality, but ultimately isn't.  The trees, people, speech, and interaction of the online world may not be real, but they are virtually real.  They are simulated.  It is ironic to Guite because the deepest meaning of the word 'virtue' means 'intrinsic strength or power'.  It is intrinsic goodness, in the sense that all of creation is proclaimed good by God in the beginning: night, day, stars, birds, fish, trees, fruit, man, woman, the Sabbath. And this intrinsic goodness, the real virtue of the created world, is precisely what our 'virtual' devices preclude.  The tree on my shallow, thin, ever-thinner device, my 'wide-screen world' conveys nothing of the heft, feel, life-giving, fruit-bearing, nest-supporting, little child weight-bearing power of a real tree in the real world.  This is what Guite alludes to when he says "we find no virtue in the virtual."

'O Radix' then gives us a chance to see that Christ is the root not only of trees, seeds, people, stars, and more, but also the root of these devices we carry in our pockets.  He is the virtue that undergirds even the virtual.  He is more real than they are.  At Christmas, many have the tradition of keeping a Jesse tree, which traces Jesus to his ancestor Jesse, the father of David.  This antiphon reminds us that Jesus, though the seed of Jesse, is also the root of Jesse.  He is the root of all.

We might also remind ourselves of the way the Apostle John begins his gospel: "In the beginning was the Word."  He deliberately echoes the beginning of Genesis, conveying to us that there was a relationship between Father and Son prior to every act of creation.  Knowing Jesus as Lord and Savior, we enter into that eternally satisfying relationship which the Son has always had with the Father.  God being restored to us, the world is restored to us as well because we see that it is his.  Knowing Jesus at the center of our lives, at the root of our lives, helps us to live wisely.

Monday, December 18 - O Adonai (Lord)

The 'O Adonai' antiphon reads thus:

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

Malcolm Guite remembers becoming a Christian in college:

"When I became a Christian as an undergraduate I remember an anthropology student sneering at me, saying, 'The God of the Old Testament is just a tribal god.'  In this sonnet, I finally answer back and say, 'Yes, it's just as well he dared to be, dared to come out of the invulnerable realm of ideas and into the bloody theatre of history, that he might change and redeem it from within.'" (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 72)

From Guite's 'O Adonai' sonnet:

O you who dared to be a tribal God,
to own a language, people and a place,
who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face.

To the anthropology student's point, Israel was not atypical from other ancient societies.  Their laws and covenants were similar to those of the Code of Hammurabi.  In fact, the Bible itself concedes this point: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were not chosen because they were particularly godly.  They didn't ascend up to God, but Scripture maintains that God came to them, the common ancient people that they were.  That student thought that the Israelites just happened to make up a god who would fit their temperament and needs as a society.  Guite seems to diagnose the scorn for this ancient tribe - because they were ancient, because they were this particular group of people, of course their 'god' couldn't be the real god of the universe.  Some local people in a corner of the world make up a god who conveniently fits their corner of the world.  As Guite points out, people who feel this way would be much more comfortable with the god who is 'sapientia' or wisdom - yesterday's word:

"'O Sapientia', taken by itself, might leave us free to agree with one another vaguely on an equally vague and amorphous religion in which something undoubtedly holy was generally everywhere, but no one need make any particular claims or have any awkward personal encounters: a high religion for the high-minded, but no earthly use." (Guite, 71)

Instead, Guite describes the Christian faith, and the Jewish faith before it, as religions that demand that we face the scandal of particularity of a God who "meets particular people in particular places, and from one small encounter builds a nation and changes everything." (Guite, 72)  Who lives in tabernacles, travels with the descendants of individual people he's made covenants with, who appears in a burning bush, who engages in tribal skirmishes between Philistines and Israelites as if the story of the universe is at stake, because it is, because it is through an Israelite woman that the Lord God himself, YHWH, who appears to Moses, will be born a tiny infant.  And that through Jesus, the nations will come to know the true God.

The final two lines to Guite's sonnet are:

Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
and blaze again like fire in every leaf

It is fitting that the burning bush story from Exodus 3 plays such a key role in the antiphon and in Guite's sonnet.  First, that's where Moses is shown the divine name, YHWH, which Israelites protected by using the name 'Adonai'.  Second, the story shows both the nearness and the strangeness of God.  Moses might have easily passed by the bush, but only in noticing that the bush doesn't burn up, does he realize both aspects at once: God is here - this bush, this mountain, this country, this world.  He's in this place.  He's near.  And then...God is here, the strange, unknowable God is here, and then Moses is removing his sandals on this holy ground.  The name 'Adonai', translated "LORD" in our Bibles, also conveys this combination of strangeness and nearness.  Its a word spoken constantly with fervor by Israelites who know him.  He's near.  But the word itself is a stand-in for the holy name of God which was not to be spoken.  Strange.  Unspeakable.  Unknowable.  Both together in one event.  And it occurs again and again throughout the Bible.  Mary's womb becomes something of a burning bush.  It contains the Holy Lord of God, yet she is not destroyed.  Jesus himself too.  He is God, yet he is human.  And, as Guite shows, it informs our faith too.  Inseparable from the fear of realizing that God has come to my sinful soul - my "bare branches of unbelief", on this bad day, at this inconvenient hour, is the wonder and joy that God - the God who is not in the least defined by those particularities, and yet enters into them graciously - has come to us, right here, as we are.

In these ways, 'O Adonai' shows us the God of all wisdom becoming radically, and uncomfortably (for us) particular, to the point that he's born in a manger.  But also, that this has been the way of God throughout the Old Testament: he draws near.  As Moses put it in Deuteronomy:

"Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away.  It is not in heaven, that you should say, "Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?"  Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?"  No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." (Deut. 30:11-14)

One more thing: I walked through the 'village of Bethlehem' in the Loft with my son at church, and among other things he noticed a 'campfire' with little red flames made of shimmering paper.  Before his nap at home, we read in the Jesus Storybook Bible about the burning bush (at random, his choice), after which, he thanked God for the "burning bush".  Sitting down to write this post (he literally just woke up from his nap : - ), I find I'm also thankful for the burning bush.  I'm thankful that the eternal God draws near to us.

Sunday, December 17 - O Sapientia (Wisdom)

The first antiphon, 'O Wisdom' draws on two passages from the Apocrypha which praise wisdom.  Some, perhaps many, Protestants will know the Apocrypha as the books that are in Catholic Bibles but not in Protestant ones.  These books largely come from the inter-testamental times, between 400 B.C. and the birth of Christ.  The sense that the Jewish Bible excluded them led the Reformers to do so as well, but these books have fed Christian reflection for centuries.  It was the Bible St. Augustine read.  As Guite writes, "sapientia is part of what John means by the Logos, 'the Word (who) was with God' (John 1:1), the coming Christ."

Here is the antiphon:

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence

Here is the conclusion of Malcolm Guite's sonnet:

Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.

Guite writes about composing the sonnet:

"Writing the poem led me in the end to a strange paradox.  The psalmist is taunted by the question, 'Where is now your God?'  And it's a question that some more militant 'scientific' atheists of our own day still use to taunt Christians.  And in one sense we cannot directly point to God because 'Sapientia, this underlying coherence and beauty, is not to be found anywhere as an item in the cosmos; it is not a single being, but the ground of being itself - not a single beauty but the source of all beauty.  And yet, for the very same reason, there is a real sense in which we can point to everything, 'from one end to the other' of the cosmos, and say, 'There, can't you see?'  For wisdom is both hidden and gloriously apparent." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 69)

In this regard, consider what Paul says in Colossians 1:15-20:

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross."

Christ is the ordering power for all the symmetry, patterns, rhythm, music, mathematical precision that we find on this earth and even beyond, such as astronomical orbits.  All things, all people, are made by Christ for Christ.  To this end, where we find resistance to Christ within the creation, we trust that the creation itself is not alien to Christ.  It is his own.  As Dallas Willard writes in his book The Divine Conspiracy, we find in Jesus a mastery, a brilliance, an innate understanding of all things.  This is some of what we can call to mind to consider that he is Wisdom.

Saturday, December 16 - O Come O Come Emmanuel

In the devotion for the First Sunday of Advent, I referred to how Advent is not a time to pretend Jesus hadn't been born yet.  This is true, in the sense that the 'Advent', or 'coming' that we expect now is not the coming of the infant Christ, but the second coming of the risen and ascended Christ.  Even so, Malcolm Guite, in speaking about the seven "O Antiphon" prayers that eventually composed the famous hymn "O Come O Come Emmanuel", thinks its important to go back:

"The whole purpose of Advent is to be for a moment fully and consciously Before Christ.  In that place of darkness and waiting, we look for his coming and do not presume too much that we already know or have it.  Whoever compiled these prayers was able, imaginatively, to write 'BC', perhaps saying to themselves: 'If I hadn't heard of Christ, and I didn't know the name of Jesus, I would still long for a saviour.  I would still need someone to come.  Who would I need?" (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 67)

Guite answers his question with the words that make up the "O Antiphons": 'Wisdom', 'Lord', 'Root', 'Key', 'Dayspring', 'King of Nations', and 'Emmanuel'.

I heard an interview with Malcolm Guite with Ken Myers on 'Mars Hill Audio'.  Guite spoke of the richness of these words for speaking about Christ with people who had soured on religion.  I read two of Guite's books recently.  I highly recommend them both: Waiting on the Word is an anthology of Guite's and other peoples' poetry for every day of Advent and Christmas, with Guite's annotations.  Sounding the Seasons is a book of sonnets written by Guite that move through the whole Christian year.  I just gave a copy to my mother for Christmas...OOPS, I mean...(just kidding, she already unwrapped it : - )

Through December 23, we'll move through these O Antiphons with the help of Guite's sonnets.  Here are the verses of John Mason Neale's hymn, "O Come O Come Emmanuel", taken largely from the reprinting of them in George Grant's book, Christmas Spirit:

O come O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice!  Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, Adonai,
Who in thy glorious majesty
From Sinai's mountain, clothed in awe,
Gavest thy folk the elder law.

O come, thou Branch of Jesse!  Draw
The quarry from the lion's claw;
From the dread caverns of the grave,
From nether hell, thy people save.

O come, thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heavenly home;
Safeguard the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.

O come, O come, thou Dayspring bright!
Pour on our souls thy healing light;
Dispel the long night's lingering gloom,
And pierce the shadows of the tomb.

O come, O King of Nations, bind
In one, the hearts of all mankind
Bid all our sad divisions cease
and be thyself our King of Peace

Friday, December 15 - Nicholas of Myra, Part Three

Nicholas' biographer, Michael the Archimandrite, tells the tale of Nicholas' gifts, as quoted in Adam English's book, The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus:

"Acting with caution, (Nicholas) gathered in a cloth a sufficient sum of gold coins which he secretly threw through the window of the man's house, and quickly returned to his home.  When daylight came, the man got up from bed and found in the middle of the house a pile of money.  He could not hold back his tears but was overjoyed, amazed and stunned.  He gave thanks to God but also tried to understand the meaning of this good fortune.  Deciding to accept the gift as if it had been given by God, the father of the girls took the serendipitously found gold and noticed that the sum corresponded to the amount of money needed for a dowry.  Without delay he adorned the bridal chamber of his eldest daughter.  And so his life once again became good, full of joy and peace of mind, thanks to the intervention of the holy Nicholas, who had created a way for his daughter to marry.

"Becoming aware of what the father had done, the man of God and generous alms-giver, Nicholas, seeing that his charity work had resulted in the festivities of a beautiful wedding and created an atmosphere of new joy, went again to the same window, tossed in a similar amount of money, and quickly returned to his home.

"When the father of the girls awoke and got up in the morning, he picked up the new and completely unexpected gift of money and fell on his face before God with cries of gratitude.  He was almost unable to open his mouth at the arrival of this new gift.  Deeply moved, he turned to God with words half-formed in his mind, praying in his heart with sincere supplications: "Tell me, O Lord, what good angel from among the people you designated for us.  Tell me who has prepared this banquet full of delicious treats.  Who is administering the riches of your immense kindness to humble people like us?  Thanks to that person we have been released, beyond all hope, from misery and the spiritual death of sin that had ensnared us.  Behold, for your indescribable gift allowed me to legally marry my second daughter, freeing her and me from the ugly desperation and wickedness in which we had fallen.  Glorify your holy name, and glory be to your great goodness without end - which is for us, your unworthy people." (English, The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, 60-61)

English notes that the story tugs on the heartstrings, yet may verge on melodrama and be overly sentimental.  But despite this, English says, it makes for a compelling story:

"This may be in part due to the fact that Michael fixes our attention on the father's spiritual journey, and this is what he communicates with clarity.  The father's salvation was not only from the misery of financial catastrophe but from spiritual crisis: the spiritual death of sin.  In his prayer, the man shows gratitude to God and to God's secret agent of grace.  The gifts were divine answers to desperate prayers." (English, 61)

Let's pick up the end of the story with Michael, as quoted extensively by English:

"Having conducted the marriage of his second child like the first, the father, who had enjoyed the gifts that God had sent him through his servant Nicholas, spent the following nights in vigil.  Staying sober and alert through the night, he hoped that the stranger would bring a dowry to his third daughter also.  Because he had brought gifts to the other sisters without being recognized, (the father) would have to remain watchful so as not to miss him while sleeping.

"While the man tried with great effort to remain awake through those long nights, Nicholas, the worshiper of the Trinity and a servant of the one Christ of the Holy Trinity, our true God, came in the night to the usual place.  He wanted the third daughter to be able to marry in the same way as the others.  Surreptitiously throwing an equal amount of money through the window, he turned away in silence.  But soon as the gold landed inside, the father of the girls, who had been expecting the return of our saint, immediately ran out and caught him.  Recognizing who he was, (the father) fell prostrate at the feet and broke into tears and sobs.  He thanked him warmly and with many words praised him before God as the savior of him and his three daughters.  He said: "If it were not for your goodness, which was stirred up by our Lord Jesus Christ, I would have long since consigned my life to ruin and shame."" (English, 61-62)

Again, I highly recommend Adam English's book to anyone.  In closing, I'll quote from English's observations about the story's meaning:

"First, Nicholas demonstrated the value of intentional, targeted giving, that is, giving in order to meet specific needs as opposed to giving randomly for the sake of generosity or for ridding oneself of possessions.  Second, Nicholas' choice of recipients imparts important implications.  By giving his money to three world-forsaken girls so that they might marry, Nicholas affirmed the moral value of marriage in an age when its worth was being severely tested.  Third, Nicholas offered a compelling model of ordinary goodness in which good deeds need not be miraculous, angelic, or incredible.  The episode shows that Christian generosity can be mundane; anyone might do what Nicholas did.  Fourth, Nicholas laid down the highest challenge to those who would strive for Christian virtue: anonymity.  Nicholas' example calls those who would take pride in their good words to give in secret." (English, 66)

Thursday, December 14 - Evermore and Evermore

"Of the Father's Love Begotten" was written by Spanish poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, who lived from 348-413 A.D.  Here is how George Grant describes Prudentius' life:

"Prudentius was a well-educated lawyer, judge, and chief of Emperor Honorius' imperial bodyguard.  He exchanged all his worldly success for spiritual contemplation when he entered a monastery late in life." (Grant, Christmas Spirit, 56-57)

Here is John Mason Neale's English translation of Prudentius' hymn from the original Latin:

Of the Father's love begotten
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the Source, the Ending he.
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see Evermore and evermore.

O that birth forever blessed!
When the Virgin full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bore the Savior of our race,
And the babe, the world's Redeemer,
First revealed his sacred face Evermore and evermore

He assumed this mortal body,
Frail and feeble, doomed to die,
That the race from dust created
Might not perish utterly
Which the dreadful Law had sentenced
In the depths of hell to lie Evermore and evermore

This is he whom once the sibyls
with united voice foretold,
Whom the Scriptures of the prophets
Promised in their faithful word.
Let the world unite to praise him,
Long desired, foreseen of old Evermore and evermore

O ye heights of heaven adore him!
Angel hosts, his praises sing!
All dominions bow before him,
And extol your God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert ring Evermore and evermore

Christ, to Thee, with God the Father,
And, O Holy Ghost to Thee,
Hymn, and chant, and high thanksgiving,
And unwearied praises be,
Honour, glory, and dominion
And eternal victory, Evermore and evermore

Anthony Esolen comments on the 'evermore and evermore', or 'saeculorum saeculis' which closes every stanza:

"The first time I heard this hymn, sung to the chant Divinum Mysterium, those words evermore and evermore, the final line of every stanza, moved me nearly to tears.  How simple they are, yet how well they capture the meaning of Christ's dwelling among us!  Before that night in Bethlehem, before there was a universe at all, Christ was begotten of the Father's love: corde natus, born from the heart.  Prudentius knew there was no time before the Son of God was begotten.  But the word natus expresses the intimate relation of the Son to the Father, for He is begotten from the Father's heart, His inmost being.  Then if all things past and present and to come spring from the One begotten in love, and have their clausula or completion also in Him, they too partake of this love, not only for a time, but saeculorum saeculis, for the ages, eternity." (Esolen, Real Music, 81-82)

Wednesday, December 13 - Lucy

Malcolm Guite reflects upon the tradition of St. Lucy's Day in northern European countries:

"...many people will be familiar with the Scandinavian celebrations in which the eldest daughter of the family rises early, robed in white and with a crown of berries and lit candles on her head.  She brings holiday food to her family while they sing 'Sankta Lucia', and thus the first celebration of the coming Christmas season is ushered in." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 53-54)

Lucy means 'light', and December 13 was once the winter solstice day before calendars shifted.  In a season when all the days seem to be dark, the solstice marks the darkest of these days.  So, as Guite notes, it made sense for an early Christian martyr whose name means 'light' to have her festivities on the year's darkest day. 

That day, of course, is now the 21st.  But you and I may yet need an excuse to hold out for light on this, the 13th of December, even if it isn't the darkest day of the year!  Monday night, I returned with my wife and son from a trip to Dallas, and I drove our car from Orlando to Jacksonville beginning at around 8:45pm.  Since my son fell asleep instantly, the car stayed quiet.  The frenzy of the Orlando traffic amidst the twists and turns of I-4 gave way to the quiet, subdued, monotonous quality of I-95.  Today, I awoke to people to see, small festivities with colleagues, laughter and merriness.  Bright times!  Yet, I was subdued and weighed down.  It is the season of cheer.  Yet, I felt all day that the wick was burning low.  I was in coffee shops and happy meetings, yet I still felt like I was driving out on that dark road, staying focused on the lights in front of me.  Many members of our church travel during the week for work.  I enjoy my long conversations with them as they are on 'windshield' time.  They are en route - physically, emotionally, spiritually.  I think of friends who suffer from depression, for whom there is a darkness weighing them down throughout the year, and not only when the world is darker than usual.

Clearly, the solstice has changed dates over time.  And so it does for each of us.  In winter, when the days are darker, there are some days that are darker than others.  More sad.  More bleak.

A friend taught a class tonight that clued me into the way the dark and light complement one another on Christmas Day.  At midnight, the congregation gathers in the dark beneath the star to remember the angels announcement of the birth of Christ.  At dawn, the congregation now gathers at the manger itself to behold the gift of this new life - God in the flesh, the new birth which contains within itself the new birth of each Christian to come.  Adding a moral dimension to the light and dark, the Apostle John writes: "the light shines in the darkness and darkness has not overcome it." (John 1:5)

Even if there is no 'Lucy' to greet you with breakfast in bed and crowns of berries in her hair, 'Lucy' may greet you tomorrow as she greeted me today - in repentance at my self-pity, in prayerful yearnings for health to come to all the sniffling, coughing people I know, in compassion toward all the people, so many people, who are way more exhausted than me today.  When its cloudy, dark, and dreary, or even if its sunny, but everything's cloudy on the inside, look for the light.  Look for 'Lucy'.

Tuesday, December 12 - Tree of Life

Trees have often been objects of religious symbolism.

Francis Weiser writes about the origin of Christmas trees:

"During the sixteenth century the people in western Germany, on the left bank of the Rhine, began to combine the two symbols they had in their homes on December 24 - the Paradise tree with the Christmas light.  Was not the Paradise tree itself a beautiful, live pyramid?  Why not transfer the decorations from the lifeless wooden pyramid to the tree?  This is exactly what they did.  They took first the glass balls and tinsel from the wooden pyramid and put them on the Paradise tree (which already bore apples and sweets).  The "star of Bethlehem" was transferred from the pyramid to the top of the tree; and the Christmas crib, which had been standing at the foot of the pyramid, was now put under the tree." (Francis Weiser, Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs, p. 81)

James Jordan comments:

"The Christmas tree has its origins in the medieval paradise tree, decorated with apples, and the North European Christmas light, a treelike stand decorated with boughs and candles.  The stylized fruits (balls and ornaments) of our Christmas tree, and its electric lights, still speak of glory and beauty, and point us to the nativity of Christ, the Tree of Life." (James Jordan, Through New Eyes, p. 93)

Boniface of Crediton was a Christian missionary who lived from 680-755 A.D.  One night, there was going to be a pagan sacrifice at the sacred Oak of Thor, and a young girl was to be sacrificed.  Boniface made it to the scene in time to disrupt the sacrifice.  He told of the ultimate sacrifice Christ made on the cross, and how there was no need for others.  George Grant picks up the story from there:

"After explaining to them the once and for all provision of the Gospel, he turned toward the sacred grove.  With the sacrificial knife in hand, he began hacking off low hanging branches.  Passing them around the circle, he told each family to take the small fir boughs home as a reminder of the completeness of Christ's work on the tree of Calvary.  They were to adorn their hearths with the tokens of His grace.  They might even chop great logs from the grove as fuel for their home fires, he suggested - not so much to herald the destruction of their pagan ways but rather to memorialize the provision of Christ's coming.  Upon these things they were to contemplate over the course of the next four weeks, until the great celebration of Christmas." (George Grant, Christmas Spirit, 88-89)

Monday, December 11 - Nicholas of Myra, Part Two

In situations of extreme poverty in the ancient Roman empire, when families had to pay the provincial tax collectors but did not have the means, they sometimes had to resort to the soul-crushing decision to sell their own children.  In his book, The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, Adam English shows us what we learn about this vile trade from the ways people, even emperors, tried to stop it.  The Roman emperor Constantine made public funds available in Africa and Italy to provide food, clothing, and even cash for families in crisis lest they be tempted to abandon or sell their children.  In one sermon, Basil of Caesarea remembers being in a marketplace and witnessing a father selling his children because of his debt.  Another early Christian pastor, Ambrose of Milan, tries to imagine the impossible decisions of such moments:

"Who, he asks, "should be sold first?  The father miserably sifts through his pathetic options and decides: "I will sell the firstborn.  But, he was the first to call me father.  He is the first among the children and the one who will bring me honor in my old age.  So, I will put up the younger.  But that one is so tender and in need of love.  I am ashamed to sell one and I pity the other."  Ambrose makes the pain of the decision palpable.  Who could possibly look his child in the eye and say, "My son, I am selling you so I can eat?" (English, 58)

On one occasion in Patara, we're told by Nicholas' biographer that a neighbor had become so desperate that he resolved to sell his daughters one by one into prostitution.  By law and by custom, the family of the bride was required to give a dowry of "property, business, or money to the husband's family as part of the marriage agreement.  It was a tradition that dated back to the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1790 B.C.) and continued as a widespread practice into the nineteenth century of our own era; it is still in effect in some cultures to this day." (61)  Unable to pay a dowry, the man had no prospects to find a marriage for any of his three daughters.  So, "'desiring to provide for his own survival and abandoning hope in God,' the father decided to do the unthinkable and sell the sexual services of his daughters." (58)

In all we've seen so far, despite society's disapproval and the church's condemnation, this was something the father could do.  Nicholas' biographer describes how God, "who does not want the work of his hands to slip into the guilt of sin" sent Nicholas to rescue the family from poverty.  English reminds us of prostitution's prevalence in the ancient world, that the city of Pompeii supported a number of brothels, one of which was divided into ten separate rooms, that there are lurid scenes and inscriptions written upon the walls of the ancient baths, and that Nicholas must have wondered what he might do to rescue these girls from this fate.  Having turned to the Scriptures for consolation, reading in the Proverbs the way that virtuous action on behalf of the poor is emphasized, he resolved to become their "protector." (59).  "Compelled by the Scriptures and his Christian convictions, he placed a few gold coins in a small money-purse, tied the string, and in the dead of night tossed it through an open window into the man's house." (59-60)

(to be continued on December 15)