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 GodWho 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 sunFor 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 Of Course It's Boring, Idiot What in God's Name? Previous Next Feedback |
|
Quick Links
Profile (Sort Of)
Month's Priorities
The Season of Lent
Work on the rec room renovation
Miracle Worker at the Rep, Feb. 26
Ragtime Rendezvous, March 1
Driving Miss Daisy at Play Reading March 8
Heidi and I put up our Facebook page
St. Louis Symphony, McGegan, Sparks, March 13
Categories
Blogs/Sites I've Been Reading
My Websites
Other Media We Watch
Calendar
March 2009 | Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | | | | | | | | | | | |
XML/RSS Feed
Archives
Statistics
Total entries in this blog: 134
Total entries in this category: 26
Published On: Mar 18, 2009 10:50 AM
|