Second Sunday in Advent 


A meditation on the liturgy for this Sunday's service. 

Today at Trinity children lit the second Advent candle. As I've written last week, I am putting my attention on the meaning of this season.

This was another fine service today, but the highlight by far was the choir anthem. This was the Paul Manz composition E'en So Lord Jesus, Come Quickly. If you haven't yet heard it, you must. There is a fine free rendition of it provided by the Lycoming College Choir, located in Williamsport, PA. if you don't know a lot about Paul Manz, one of our nation's premier church organists, serving the Lutheran Church in the upper midwest for decades. You can hear an hour long program about him on Pipedreams.

I sat and listened to our Trinity Choir's rehearsal of this piece. Our choir director masterfully shaped the beauty of this fine piece with its glorious four part harmony and spare organ accompaniment, the perfect majestic but ethereal setting for the words of this song:

Peace be to you and grace from Him who freed us from our sins.
Who loved us all and shed His blood that we might sav-ed be.
Sing Holy, Holy to our Lord, the Lord Almighty God
Who was and is and is to come, sing Holy, Holy Lord.
Rejoice in heaven all ye that dwell therein.
Rejoice on earth, ye saints below.
For Christ is coming; He’s coming soon.
The Christ is coming soon.
And so, Lord Jesus, quickly come, and night shall be no more.
They need no light nor lamp nor sun
For Christ will be their all.

I have learned from my EFM study that these lyrics embody none other than an important component of the kerygma, the apostolic proclamation of salvation through Jesus Christ. My now two and 1/2 year long study has also helped me to understand how we got to such a proclamation from the earliest of Jewish writings. Indeed, to those who have ears to hear, the official readings of the Episcopal Church for Sunday, December 4 also do an excellent job of tracing how we got to such a proclamation.

While Stephen practiced with the choir, I reviewed EFM chapters related to the readings. According to these sources, the book of Isaiah, really contains writings from three periods of Jewish history. The first 39 chapters of Isaiah are about the life and prophesy of Isaiah, son of Amoz around 740-700 B.C. During this time, Judah lived under the threat of domination by Assyria, and Isaiah warned of the eventual exile of Judah. Chapters 40-55 are written by a disciple of Isaiah, right around 530 B.C. Babylon fell to Cyrus of Persia, whom the Babylonian people welcomed into the city. Cyrus' rule was characterized by tolerance of his subjects, and kings were often left on thrones, but answering to Cyrus. Second Isaiah saw the hand of God in this, and considered Cyrus, not a Jew, to be the Messiah. The last chapters of Isaiah may have been written as much as a generation later, perhaps by still a third disciple of the original Isaiah.

Our Old Testament reading for this Sunday, then, is Isaiah 40:1-11, (Second Isaiah). This reading contains many familiar passages incorporated into that masterpiece, Handel's Messiah, especially these words about a highway being prepared in the desert and about God gathering his lambs into his arms. According to the New Oxford Bible, Second Isaiah here "exults in joyful anticipation of exiled Judah's restoration to Palestine."

Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures we find testimony to God's faithfulness to the wayward Hebrew people, led by God's chosen patriarchs. They have only to remain steadfast in righteousness and love of God, and prosperity will follow. Our psalm reading (85:1-2, 8-13) supports this view:

The LORD will indeed grant prosperity,
And our land will yield its increase.

Righteousness shall go before him,
and peace shall be a pathway for his feet.

2 Peter is one of a group of letters referred to as the Catholic epistles, since they are addressed generally, rather than to a specific Christian community, and 2 Peter may be the newest of these epistles, written just at the turn of the 2nd Century by a disciple of Peter's. The reading for today (3:8-15a) warns that the apocalyptic return of the Lord, the parousia, is near, and the readers should wait for the new heaven and new earth without spot or blemish. By the time this epistle was written, church leaders were dealing with competition from false teachers who believed the earth would remain in its then present state. Jesus Christ had died in the 30's and here it was 70 years later.

The gospel reading, Mark 1:1-8, quotes directly the earlier passage from Second Isaiah, but it is John the Baptist who is identified with the one who will prepare a highway for the Lord in the wilderness. John baptizes with water, his successor will baptize with the Holy Spirit.

All these works, from the trembling, confident anticipation of the Manz choral piece, through the Old Testament images of highways and footpaths for God in the desert, through the proclamation in Mark of John as the precursor to the Messiah, to the pleadings of Peter's disciple for faithfulness to the return of Jesus Christ point to God's return in Christ Jesus, the Savior.

And today, we are still seeking Christ's return. Our rector, in her sermon, made this point. We will not find Christ in more rules for the Church, but rather when we turn to the fringes of society, to the excluded: to the prisoners, to the poor, to persons of alternative sexuality and gender identity. Christ won't come excluding these or others who failed to gain the certificate of mainstream acceptability.

And so today, I am glad that I am an episcopalian in this intimate urban parish and that my understanding and my faith is continuing to evolve. 

Posted: Sun - December 4, 2005 at 04:03 PM          

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