Just how did Mary and Joseph make their famous trip to Bethlehem?
What did an innkeeper tell Mary and Joseph once they reached the city?
The Rev. Joe Alsay, rector of St. Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church, asked his congregation these and other questions during the Dec. 19 services at the Oklahoma City church, 14700 N May.
O God our heavenly Father, who by the birth of thy Son Jesus Christ has visited us with thy salvation: Grant that as we welcome our Redeemer his presence may be shed abroad in our hearts and homes with the light of heavenly joy and peace; and in all our preparations for this holy season help us to think more of others than of ourselves, and to show forth our gratitude to thee for thine unspeakable gift, even the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
Many Christians, especially those from a tradition like mine that observes Advent scrupulously, not decorating the church or singing carols until Christmas Eve, find themselves playing two games at once during this season. On the one hand there is the usual frantic shopping, wreath hanging, tree trimming, partygoing and overeating. On the other hand there is the deepening mood of Advent, which calls us to a mature, clear-sighted and steadfast faith. A similar split in our sensibility is apparent in Christian bookstores and church gift shops where an austere Byzantine icon will be displayed next to an angel that looks like a Barbie doll. Christmas cards with medieval illustrations sit cheek-by-jowl with designs of Santas playing golf:
It seems to me that this aesthetic confusion contributes to theological immaturity. Grown-up people seem to become addled at this season as they try to recapture their lost childhoods. One of our leading mail-order companies put this verse on its Christmas shipping boxes a couple of years ago:
“May you find among the gifts / Spread beneath your tree / The most welcome gift of all / The child you used to be.” A typical greeting card says, “Backward, turn backward, 0 Time, in your flight / Make me a child again, just for tonight!”
Harmless, you say. But in a culture like ours, where parents have very little time to spend with their children, and where an obsessive pursuit of youth has caused an 800 percent increase in cosmetic surgical procedures in ten years, a focus on becoming childlike at Christmas seems guaranteed to skew the message of the incarnation.
One of the most dramatic changes in my own denomination is the shift away from the adult midnight service on Christmas Eve to a wildly popular “family” service at an earlier hour, which by its very nature cannot offer much in the way of a sermon or more challenging music. I do not want to be misunderstood here; Christmas ritual can indeed be beneficial for the developing faith of children. However, if the children get the idea that Christmas is entirely for them, that there are no privileges reserved for their maturity it does not seem likely that their faith will unfold in the direction of Good Friday.
Almighty God, who in many and various ways didst speak to thy chosen people by the prophets, and hast given us, in thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of the hope of Israel: Hasten, we beseech thee, the coming of the day when all things shall be subject to him, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end.
–Church of South India
O God, who didst promise that thy glory should be revealed, and that all flesh should see it together: Stir up our hearts, we beseech thee, to prepare the way of thine only begotten Son; and pour out upon us thy loving kindness, that we who are afflicted by reason of our sins may be refreshed by the coming of our Saviour, and may behold his glory; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth one God, world without end.
–James Todd
Eternal God, who rulest the world from everlasting to everlasting: Speak to our hearts when men faint for fear, and the love of many grows cold, and there is distress of nations upon earth. Keep us resolute and steadfast in the things that cannot be shaken; and make us to lift up our eyes and behold, beyond the things that are seen and temporal, the things that are unseen and eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
St. Ambrose comments that “in Joseph there was amiability and the figure of a just man to make the quality of his witness more worthy” (Exp. Ev. sec. Lucam II, 5: CCL 14,32-33). “He,” Ambrose continues, “could not have contaminated the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Mother of the Lord, the fruitful womb of the mystery” (ibid. II, 6: CCL 14, 33). Although he had been concerned, Joseph “did as the angel of the Lord ordered him,” certain of doing the right thing. Also giving the name “Jesus” to that child who rules the entire universe, he enters into the ranks of the faithful and humble servants, like the angels and prophets, like the martyrs and the apostles — in the words of ancient eastern hymns. St. Joseph proclaims the wonders of the Lord, witnessing Mary’s virginity, the gratuitous deed of God, and caring for the earthly life of the Messiah. So, we venerate the legal father of Jesus (Code of Canon Law, 532), because the new man takes form in him, who looks to the future with confidence and courage, does not follow his own project, but entrusts himself totally to the infinite mercy of him who fulfills the prophecies and inaugurates the season of salvation.
Lord God Almighty, King of glory and love eternal, worthy art thou at all times to receive adoration, praise, and blessing; but especially at this time do we praise thee for the sending of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, for whom our hearts do wait, and to whom, with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, be honour and dominion, now and for ever.
Almighty Father, whose blessed Son at his coming amongst us brought redemption unto his people, and peace to men of goodwill: Grant that, when he shall come again in glory to judge the world and to make all things new, we may be found ready to receive him, and enter into his joy; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ.
–Frederick Macnutt
O Christ our God, who wilt come to judge the world in the manhood which thou hast assumed: We pray thee to sanctify us wholly, that in the day of thy coming we may be raised up to live and reign with thee for ever.
–Church of South India
Almighty and most merciful God, who has given the Bible to be the revelation of thy great love to man, and of thy power and will to save him: Grant that our study of it may not be made vain by the callousness or the carelessness of our hearts, but that by it we may be confirmed in penitence, lifted to hope, made strong for service, and, above all, filled with true knowledge of thee and of thy Son Jesus Christ.
–George Adam Smith
“Learn from the farmer,” St. James writes, “he awaits with constancy the precious fruit of the earth until it has received the first and the last rains. You too must be constant, strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near” (James 5:7-8). The comparison with the farmer is quite expressive: He who has sown seeds in the field has before him some months of patient and constant expectation, but he knows that in the meantime the seed goes through its cycle thanks to the autumn and spring rains. The farmer is not a fatalist, but is the model of a mentality that unites faith and reason in a balanced way because, on one hand, he knows the laws of nature and does his work well, and, on the other hand, he trusts in Providence, because certain basic things are not in his hands but in God’s hands. Patience and constancy are precisely the synthesis between human effort and trust in God.
O Lord Jesus Christ, before whose judgment-seat we must all appear and give account of the things done in the body: Grant, we beseech thee, that when the books are opened in that day, the faces of thy servants may not be ashamed; through thy merits, O blessed Saviour, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.
As a child during Advent, I fought with my three siblings over Jesus. We didn’t argue about conversion, but rather the right to put a one-dimensional infant the size of a thumbnail onto the Advent calendar made from red felt and glitter glue. My mother devised a rotational system, which meant that every four years, each child would place baby Jesus into his glittered manger on Christmas Day.
For my children, that same Advent calendar represents one step in our preparations for Christmas. (In a more secular waiting game, my cousins use the Elf on a Shelf, that magical spy for St. Nick.)
The start of Advent, this season of waiting and watching, coincided with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. We are not waiting for climate change. It is here. And religious communities are taking the lead with incremental solutions to a warming planet.
O great and glorious God, holy and immortal, who searches out the policies of nations and tries the hearts of men: Come, we pray thee, in judgment, upon the nations of the world; come and bring to destruction all that is contrary to thy holy will for mankind, and cause the counsels of the wicked to perish. Come, O Lord, into our hearts, and root out from them that thou seest, and we cannot see, to be unlike the Spirit of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Harold Anson
Once upon a time, kids had to wait a whole year for The Wizard of Oz to air on TV; now you can pop in a DVD of any show you want any time. Books show up on our Kindles in an instant, as do songs on our iPods. Churches can be different, inviting people to wait and hope, both as a spiritual discipline and also as a recognition of what psychologists are learning about human happiness. Happy people wring as much positive emotion from experiences as possible by spending time anticipating them.
Easier said than done, of course. “The desire to open Christmas presents early is very strong, even for adults,” Kathleen Pluth says. But ideally, Advent services can make people revel in the joy of anticipation ”” of singing Joy to the World in a few weeks’ time.
O God, by whose command the order of time runs its course: Forgive, we pray thee, the impatience of our hearts; make perfect that which is lacking in our faith; and, while we tarry the fulfillment of thy promises, grant us to have a good hope because of thy word; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Gregory of Nazianzus (approx. 329-389)
Make us, we beseech thee, O Lord our God, watchful and heedful in awaiting the coming of thy Son Christ our Lord; that when he shall come and knock, he shall find us not sleeping in sin, but awake and rejoicing in his praises; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Gelasian Sacramentary
The season of Advent is a challenging time for Christian people. In the span of only four weeks, we are presented with several (huge) themes and messages: the Second Coming of Christ, God’s judgment, our own preparations for those events and the record of God’s direct intervention into human life through the miraculous conception of Jesus in the Blessed Virgin Mary. Furthermore, Advent also uniquely fuses our experience of past, present and future. This is the time when we look at what God has done in the past, what God is doing and saying to us today and what God promises about the future through a single lens, making all of that inseparable ”“ a single, living reality that directs our lives….
What does Advent offer? The famous biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann gets at it best: “A past without gifts, and a future without hope, gives us a present filled with anxiety.”
Christmas is one of the great European exports. You’ll meet Santa Claus and his reindeer in Shanghai and Dar-es-Salaam; a long way from the North Pole. More seriously and less commercially, the story of the Nativity is loved even in non-Christian contexts (I discovered that one of the best and most sensitive recent film re-tellings of the story was one made by an Iranian Muslim company). The weary annual attempts by right-thinking people in Britain to ban or discourage Nativity plays or public carol-singing out of sensitivity to the supposed tender consciences of other religions fail to notice that most people of other religions and cultures both love the story and respect the message.
It isn’t difficult to see why. For a start, the story is a compelling and dramatic one. A long journey through a land under military occupation; a difficult birth in improvised accommodation. And alongside these harsh realities, the skies torn open, and blazing angelic voices summoning a random assortment of farm labourers to go and worship in the outhouse; or a mysterious constellation in the heavens triggering a pilgrimage by exotic oriental gurus to come and kneel where the farm labourers have knelt.
The story says that something is happening that will break boundaries and cross frontiers, so that the most unlikely people will find they are looking for the same thing and recognise each other instead of fearing each other.
Stir up our hearts, O Lord, we beseech thee, to prepare the way of thine only begotten Son; so that when he cometh we may be found watching, and serve thee with a pure and ready will; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
O great and glorious God, holy and immortal, who searches out the policies of nations and tries the hearts of men: Come, we pray thee, in judgment, upon the nations of the world; come and bring to destruction all that is contrary to thy holy will for mankind, and cause the counsels of the wicked to perish. Come, O Lord, into our hearts, and root out from them that thou seest, and we cannot see, to be unlike the Spirit of thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Harold Anson
Tell us how this service got started.
The service as we know it started in 1918 in King’s College Chapel, and it was started by the chaplain, Eric Milner-White. He had taken a concept that had been used in 1880 in Truro by Ezra Benson, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, so it wasn’t a new idea, but he made it what it is today. You have to visualize December 1918 in Cambridge. This is a university where somewhere in the area of half of all of the undergraduates had gone off to war, and a third of them never came back. On December 24, 1918, six weeks after the end of the war that was going to end all wars, you’ve got a congregation which is probably largely made up of widows, girlfriends””in those days they would’ve been called fiancées””children there to somehow deal with this horror that they’d just been through. Most Americans, because we weren’t as deeply involved in the First World War, don’t understand the impact that war had on Europe. I grew up, we all grew up, really, being talked to about appeasement and how we gave Hitler too much and blaming [Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain, but in fact if you look at what the British had gone through less than twenty years before you can understand. I mean, 900,000 Britons were killed in that war compared with only 300,000 in the Second World War, even with the Blitz and everything else. The war had taken the best and the brightest, and [Eric Milner-White] put together a service of what he called Nine Lessons and Carols, and the nine lessons were things from the Scriptures in, at that point, of course, the King James Bible. There were four from the Old Testament foretelling the birth of Christ, four from the New Testament telling the Nativity story, and one from the Book of John, “In the beginning was the Word,” and so on, and he interspersed them with carols.
What do you think he wanted to do? How would this Christmas service have had an impact on those who had suffered so much?….
Drape the stage with purple, and also the footlights. It is antiquities’ color for royalty, and preparing for royalty is what Advent is all about (though some troupes these days are using a blue tint). It is not just that we prepare the audience during this season for an annual celebration of Christ’s birth, of course we do that.
What is often forgotten, however, or altogether missed by the secular stage and many non-liturgical playhouses as well, is that the first movement of Advent is to put us in mind of the Second Coming of Christ. Consequently the background music should have mystical qualities now and then. As I’ve mentioned on previous occasions, Advent begins with the end in mind. Therefore the opening scene trumpets Jesus’ promise that he shall come again in glory at the close of the age. Wisely we begin with this reminder of how it all shall end. It’s like this, if you’re going to move a piano the first thing you should know before setting your shoulder to the upright is where you’re going to move it. Similarly, when you begin afresh a new theatrical year the pertinent question to ask is where or at least how things are going to end up. If you know in advance the denouement of all performances and the plot of every play will climax in the reign of Christ and his kingdom on earth then it is helpful to take reconnaissance of that before writing a script for how you’re going to spend your time. You don’t want to miss the final curtain call because you decided to take a coffee break or made a wrong turn….
In Jesus’ parable, the wise bridesmaids were responsible in a relatively simple task: having enough oil on hand. Our baptismal task is more complex: Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us (John 15:12). Paul exhorts us “through love [to] become slaves to one another (Galatians 5:13). The task is clear, memorable, hopeful ”“ and challenging. Imagine the chaos of the foolish bridesmaids after their lamps ran out””racing around the village in all directions trying to find more oil. Arguing with each other about who was to blame for their negligence. Furious about being locked out. Imagine, also, the celebrations of the wise bridesmaids””mouths filled with laughter and shouts of joy in fellowship and song.
Perhaps the deepest Advent practice””and life discipline””is to learn where it’s hardest to love and to begin your prayer right there. Perhaps the deepest Advent experience is to serve someone, in love, with whom you disagree. Christ is coming, and we need our lamps to be lit and reservoirs to be filled. Christ is coming, and our common life needs to be painted on the canvas he gave us. For in us, in his disciples, he is indeed already here.
O Gracious God and most merciful Father, who has vouchsafed us the rich and precious jewel of thy holy Word: Assist us with thy Spirit that it may be written in our hearts to our everlasting comfort, to reform us, to renew us according to thine own image, to build us up into the perfect building of thy Christ, and to increase us in all heavenly virtues. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the same Jesus Christ’s sake.
–The Geneva Bible
Utah’s Catholic bishop is putting the brakes on Christmas.
In his first pastoral letter to Utah’s 300,000 Catholics since becoming their shepherd in 2007, Bishop John C. Wester asks that members hold off celebrating Christmas until the season actually begins Dec. 24.
Catholics, Wester says, ought not have early parties in their homes or churches, light up their trees or decorate their schools with more than simple wreaths and boughs of green.
Instead, the bishop writes, Catholics should remain faithful to Advent, a four-week season that began Sunday and focuses on prayer, reflection and the joyful expectation both of Christ’s birth and his return at the end of time.
O Eternal God, who has taught us in thy holy Word that love is the fulfilling of the law: Pour into our hearts that best of all thy gifts, that loving our neighbour as ourselves we may live as children of the day and of the light; for the glory of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Frank Colquhoun
O Lord Jesus Christ, who at thy first coming didst warn us to prepare for the day when thou shalt come to be our judge: Mercifully grant that being awake from the sleep of sin, we may always be watching and intent upon the work thou hast given us to do; who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end.
Stir up our hearts, O Lord, we beseech thee, to prepare the way of thine only begotten Son; so that when he cometh we may be found watching, and serve thee with a pure and ready will; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.