St. Peter’s Anglican Church is a Christmas church. The center aisle and chancel are carpeted in red. The altar is white marble. The apsidal wall is red brick that rises to a peak above the altar. The side walls are dark wood with stained glass panels. It is a warm church.
Gone today were the Advent purples; gone the wreath and candles; gone the quiet waiting. Today we celebrated Christmas! Red poinsettias banked in a row on the altar, framing the white tented tabernacle. White roses were arranged at each end of the white draped altar, and candelabra flamed with seven candles on either side. The altar candles stood tall above, burning brightly. The crèche on the Epistle side remained, nestled in the greenery, and the Child Jesus lay in the manger.
We were not able to attend Christmas Midnight Eve Mass or the Christmas Day Mass, so as we stepped into the sanctuary today, the blaze of color filled me with a warm thankfulness. I dropped to my knees, thanking God for this church and the freedom to worship. I thanked Him for Himself, His coming to us, His revealing, His love.
Our own Christmas Day had been filled with family, aged seven to nearly eighty – gathering around two long tables, sharing turkey and trimmings, pies and chocolate, as we caught up with one another’s lives. We each brought to the table a year of joys and sorrows, of successes and failures. I knew many of the private heartaches and many of the public joys – I experienced both in this year of 2009 – and it was good to have a few hours to link hands, tell stories, exchange presents, to encourage, listen, and love. Somehow in this gathering Christ mingled with us as well, encouraging us, loving us, for it was His birthday we truly celebrated, and we were thankful.
St. Stephen’s Day followed Christmas. We drove the last guests to the airport and returned to the quiet house, the tree still laden with memories. Leftovers waited to be heated. Laundry needed to be done. Full of voices of loved ones in my head, I moved through the hours, carrying Christmas Day into St. Stephen’s Day, the day we remember the life of the first Christian martyr, the first to pay the price for his belief in the Galilean carpenter.
Today, the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, we recalled at St. Peter’s this eloquent writer of the Gospel that opens with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Our charming Father Hauge climbed slowly to the pulpit and explained that John’s Gospel was meant to be more of a commentary on the other three Gospels, and for this reason John does not include the Nativity story. John was interested in who this Jesus Christ really was, and his Gospel does indeed portray Christ as God, part of the Trinity, part of the Creation of the world itself, having always lived, outside of time. It is in John’s words that we find the answers to our more profound questions. It is in John’s testimony that we clearly see the meaning of the Eucharistic celebration, as it was in the first century of secret house-church ceremonies. These first Christians believed that the bread did indeed become the Body; the wine did indeed become the Blood. We receive Christ into ourselves, John explained.
So just as Christ mingled through the rooms of our house on Christmas Day, pulling us together with love, he mingled today in the creatures of bread and wine. He found his way into our hearts, our minds, our bodies.
I gazed at the bank of red poinsettias, the flaming candles surrounding the white tabernacle. My eyes rose to the twelfth-century crucifix hanging against the red brick wall. I received Christ in the Bread and Wine.
And once again, I gave thanks for Christmas!
St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/; http://www.anglicanpck.org/.
Four candles burned warmly above the evergreens wreathed on a stand to the left of the altar, the Gospel side. On the Epistle side, below the lectern, nestled the nativity scene in a bed of pine cones and fir branches. There, the shepherds waited with their sheep, Mary and Joseph waited in the manger, and the cows and oxen waited.
We draw close now, closer each day to the miraculous, stupendous, festival of Christmas, when Christ came among us in his great humility, almighty God becoming a baby. Words cannot say what this means for us, for He is the Word itself. Let Him speak to our hearts of this incredible mystery, this fathomless love.
During Advent St. Peter’s has slowly layered the story of Christmas with candles, color, crèche. Even the nave seems to have grown rich with warmth and presence as the weeks have passed. We do not want to rush this – we want to get it right – for we do not want to miss one second of joy, one minute of memory, one hour of holiness. We want what God is offering, Himself.
We draw close now. We watch and wait and listen.
Good Father Pomroy preached about the momentous themes of Advent: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. We like to hear about Heaven, not so much death, judgment, and Hell. Yet, he said, death is inescapable, and, I thought, gives great meaning to life. Judgment, he explained, is the formalizing of the choices we have made. When Christ judges us, as He will one day, He sees where we have chosen to go. And, of course, those choices are clear: Heaven with God or Hell without God. We face our judgment with a final choice, to be sorry for those times we chose wrong, to accept Christ’s saving acts on the Cross for those moments of darkness.
And our choices define who we are. As children of God we are grafted onto the Body of Christ, and it is in this Body we discover our true selves. In fact, as we give ourselves to God, he gives us back a thousand-fold, and we learn who we are meant to be. He molds and forms us; He sanctifies us. But we must choose Him, and choose the way of his Body, the Church.
I gazed upon the purple draped altar now being sweetly censed by the celebrant swinging the thurible in circles about the holy table, above and below, around the sides, preparing the space with billowing clouds for the great offering of the Mass.
And with the offering of the Mass, I knew I would once again offer myself. I would choose this offering, with His help and grace.
We draw close. We choose to travel to Bethlehem. And we see our true selves in the Holy Child in the manger.
Merry Christmas!
Deo gratias.
St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/; http://www.anglicanpck.org/.
It was raining steadily when we entered the church, crossing the threshold, moving from the secular to the sacred, from the cold outside to the warm inside.
Today, Rose Sunday, is a Sunday of color and light. We light the third candle on our Advent wreathe, a rose one, and we move from a penitential mood towards one of rejoicing. We are closer now to Christmas, to the brighter colors of Christmas. The altar is still draped in purple, but there have been roses added on either side of the violet tented tabernacle. We announce to the world the joy of the coming of our Redeemer.
Indeed, the Gospel for today is the passage about John the Baptist when he asks his followers to go to Jesus, ask him who He really is. Jesus answers the question with the deeds he will do publicly, actions that will proclaim him as the Messiah, will fulfill the prophecies of old. He will heal the blind, the deaf, the lame, the lepers. He will preach good news to the poor. He will proclaim publicly who He is.
And just so we proclaim publicly each Sunday who He is, as we portray the season in song and litany, in prayer and liturgy, in the great actions of the Mass. Now, in Advent, we act out the coming of God among us, Emmanuel. We sing together,
Visit then this soul of mine! Pierce the gloom of sin and grief!
Fill me, radiancy divine; Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more thyself display, Shining to the perfect day.
Just so, more and more of God is displayed.
And we proclaim in the secular world too, outside the threshold of the holy, in the many practices of Christmas: the tree of lights and sparkle, holding memory in each ornament; the carols of Christmases past, a liturgy in their own right; the cards we send to friends and family, pulling folks together with love; the presents we give from the heart and perhaps from habit as well. We might attend a concert, as I was fortunate enough to do this Rose Sunday afternoon, where an assortment of songs and singers gathered around trumpets, piano, guitar, and flute, the space full of warmth and melody, of sharing the joy of music, of anticipation. We might tell tales of Santa Claus, stories of Saint Nicholas, the giver of gifts to children, who flies through the night on a magical sleigh, with graceful reindeer. Mystery. Miracles. Not far from the truth of Bethlehem.
We wait for His coming in the dark of winter, in the rain and snow, in these shortened days. We wait for the light, and on this Rose Sunday, as we see glimmers and flashes of the brightness, we begin to rejoice in His nearness.
Our good Father Pomroy preached quietly today, thoughtfully. As we wait, he said, we draw toward Christ, learning more about Him, knowing Him better, understanding the answer to the John’s question. We ponder these truths of Christmas, of Advent, of the great mystery of the Incarnation. As our understanding increases, He loves in us, we love in Him, and we know joy. A joy that transcends time, uniting past, present, and future on the altar.
We wait for and in “the perfect day,” as time collapses into joy in the Bread and the Wine.
St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/; http://www.anglicanpck.org/.
Sun streamed through the stained glass, lighting on the Madonna and Child, splashing the pews, warming the cold winter morning at Saint Peter’s Anglican Church.
The Litany in Procession moved up the red carpeted center aisle – the thurifer swinging the sweet incense into the air, the torchbearers carrying the flaming candles, the crucifer raising the crucifix high over us, the celebrant in his purple cope, the clergy following solemnly. We sang together, Good Lord, deliver us, and We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord, as the prayers were chanted. The procession moved around the nave and up the center again to the high altar. As we prayed for ourselves and the world I sensed the darkness of winter, the waiting for spring, as the dancing patches of sun gave us hope.
In Advent we wait and we pray for our redemption in the manger in Bethlehem, and our redemption when each one of us dies. We pray for our redemption today, this minute, this hour. Death to life, dawn to day.
And our Deacon preached on time. God outside time, giving us the gift of time. Fascinated by the mystery of time, I thought how when we love, we lose ourselves in another and time disappears. When we give of ourselves, literally give ourselves away, we lose sense of time as well. Yet time continues to pass, marked by digital numbers changing silently, by clocks ticking, by bells tolling, by the setting and rising of the sun, night into day.
In Advent we wait in the deepest dark before dawn, the dawn of Bethlehem. We approach the end of man’s calendar year, yet begin God’s calendar year. The overlap of time intrigued me, as though our ends overlap our beginnings. We move through this life and into the next seamlessly, in Christ.
The Child in Bethlehem bridges death and life, night and day. The Christ Child is our dawn.
St. Peter’s Church, 6113 Lawton, Oakland, CA; Sunday Mass and Church School, 10 a.m.; http://www.saintpetersoakland.com/