Monday of First Sunday in Advent
Mark 1:1-13
Happy New Year!
No, it’s not January 1, the civil calendar’s New Year’s Day. It’s not the middle of August and the New Year’s Day of the school calendar, and it’s not October 1, the New Year’s Day of the U.S. government fiscal calendar.
Yesterday was the First Sunday in Advent and marked the beginning of the Christian calendar or year.
So Happy New Year!
In Advent, we prepare for the Advent or Coming of Jesus Christ in Christmas.
Advent is your own personal John the Baptist, for with John it proclaims “Prepare the way of the Lord! Jesus Christ is coming soon (at Christmas), and so you’d better be ready!”
Like John the Baptist, Advent catches us sleeping and shouts to us “Sleeper Awake!” Before the days of John, it had been 400 years since a prophet had been in the land. Dreams of the Messiah and deliverance had grown dim, and life seemed to go on pretty much as normal. And then John burst onto the scene, clothed in camel’s hair, wearing a leather belt (the clothes Elijah wore, by the way), and eating locusts and wild honey. Out of the blue, he reminded Israel of what they were to hope for and remember all along: that Jesus Christ was coming.
Like John’s day, we have experienced the long season of Trinity, in which one week seems like the next. We get comfortable and complacent, and then Advent comes, and everything changes as we are called to attention again.
Advent is therefore a liturgical alarm clock that goes off in our lives, saying, “Wake up, stupid! Jesus Christ is coming!” John himself was a walking, talking alarm clock. The way he ate, the way he dressed, and the way he spoke certainly were designed to awaken people again to the Advent of Jesus Christ in people’s lives.
Mark’s Gospel, like Advent and John the Baptist, is also a very loud and clanging alarm clock. In the first 13 verses of his Gospel, we hear prophecy from the Old Testament, meet John the Baptist, see the people coming confessing and being baptized, hear John’s pointer to Jesus Christ, witness Jesus get baptized, and experience Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Whew! What a way to start the Church year!!
The church year, which begins with Advent, is one of God’s ways of sanctifying out time. We humans are creatures bound by time, and we will have calendars, we will observe hours and days and times and seasons. We will set alarm clocks and timers so that we don’t miss something important. Many of us will even observe the holy time that is set aside for our favorite TV show or sporting event and even perform the supererogatory work of learning how to program our VCR or Tivo.
But the fact is that we often don’t sanctify the time that is one of God’s choicest gifts. Like the characters in Kerouac’s On the Road, we claim to know time, when in reality we are more likely to waste time or kill time than we are to redeem time or know time.
Once we’ve been awoken again, how shall we use the time of Advent that God has given us? The answer is that Advent is a season of preparation. We’ve all heard the saying, “Prepare to meet your maker!” It’s usually heard in the context of someone about to be killed, but it has a special meaning with regard to Advent, because preparing to meet our Maker and Savior is the whole point of Advent and why we must be awoken. We prepare to meet our God, our Maker, because He has come to meet us in His first Advent or Coming. “Immanuel,” “God with us,” is the reason we celebrate Christmas. God has broken into the time and history of our lives and become one of us. Because of the love and glory and cosmic implications of God’s dramatic action, we’d better prepare our hearts to receive Him once again.
But Advent also celebrates the Second Advent or Second Coming of Jesus Christ. While Christmas is historically past (though in reality it persists every day of our lives), the Second Coming, at which Jesus Christ will judge both the quick and the dead, is yet to come. One day, at the Second Coming, we will meet our Maker with finality and be summoned to give an account of our lives. At that time, or at the time we die, whichever comes first, our time will have run out. So we’d better have woken up and prepared beforehand.
It always amazes me how much time, money, and effort even Christians in America spend preparing for the Advent of Christmas – not for the Advent of Christ that’s celebrated at Christmas – but for the Advent of Christmas as a holiday (and not necessarily a holy day.) We carefully save our money and budget it so that we can give each other gifts. We prepare months or even a year in advance to make sure we will be able to go where we want to go to celebrate Christmas the next year. We make a big deal about it with our children and know how to fill their little lives with joyful anticipation.
But do we spend as much time and energy preparing for the coming, not of Santa Claus, but of the Lord Jesus Christ? In Advent, we are given four entire weeks to prepare. This year, why not use Advent as a time of holy preparation?
Advent is here, which means the King is coming.
Are you ready?
Resolution and Point for Meditation: I resolve to find one practical way today to prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ during the season of Advent. I probably already have some good ideas for what might please my Lord, and so I will use one of these. The One Who Has Come and Has Come and Is Coming will come to me through His Word, through prayer, through the spiritual disciplines, and through the act of serving and discipling others. I resolve to prepare for the coming of the Lord this Christmas, so that the secular meaning of Christmas does not distract me from Christ Himself.
Prayer: Heavenly Father, who 2000 years ago sent John the Baptist to stir up the hearts of your people and to point to Your Holy Son, Jesus Christ, I ask that You would stir up the hearts of Your people again this Advent season. Wake me up especially from my spiritual slumber. Baptize me again with the presence of Your Holy Spirit that I might prepare to meet You once again. Assist me in any vows I have taken that I may love you better. May I, through Your grace, be a prophetic herald to others of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
© 2008 Fr. Charles Erlandson
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Introduction to Daily Bread
Introduction to Daily Bread
“Give us this day our daily bread” is the most fundamental prayer we can ask on behalf of ourselves. Knowing this, our Lord not only commanded us to pray for this every day but also offers Himself to us as our daily bread.
As the Bread of Life that offers Himself to us each day as true spiritual food, Jesus comes to us in many ways. The words and images of the feedings of the 4000 and 5000 (especially in the Gospel of St. John) remind us that it is through faithful participation in the covenantal meal of the Holy Communion that Jesus feeds us. Through the creatures of bread and wine, Jesus gives His Body and Blood to us and feeds us at His heavenly banquet.
But He feeds us in other ways. In his Sermons on New Testament Lesson, St. Augustine expresses his belief that the feeding of the 4000 isn’t just about filling the bellies of men with bread and fish, nor is it solely about the Holy Communion. For St. Augustine and others, the Bread of Life is also the Holy Scriptures, upon which we are to feed every day, for they are the words of life. That the Word of God is also the Bread of God is satisfyingly illustrated by the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, in which we ask God to “Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
However, Christians in the twenty-first century (and probably all others) often do not properly eat or digest the Word of God. I’ve noticed some of you snacking in a sort of hit and run fashion, as you rush to lead your “real life.” “I’ll squeeze in a chapter of Bible reading today,” you think. Some of you are to be commended for devoting yourself to studying the Scriptures, but unfortunately it is in such a way that only the mind is fed. Meanwhile, the soul gets spiritual kwashiorkor, which may easily be identified by your distended spiritual belly.
Scripture must therefore be eaten with prayer, which may be likened to the blood into which the bread of life must be digested and ingested. Through a life of prayer, the Word of God is carried into every part of your life and becomes your life, just as a piece of digested food is broken down, enters the blood, and is carried to every part of your body. Only through a life of prayer, which is a third means by which Jesus becomes our daily bread, will the Word of God become spiritual food for us. After all, haven’t many of us had teachers of the Bible in college who have read and studied the Word but who, apart from a life of prayer and obedience, use their studies to starve themselves and others?
The most fruitful way I know of to receive my daily bread of Scripture is through the ancient practice of the lectio divina, or divine reading, with which I hope many of you are familiar. The essence of the lectio divina is not primarily to feed the mind: it is not just another Bible study to inform our minds. Instead, the lectio divina is formative reading, in which we allow the Holy Scriptures, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to form our very being. There are four basic steps in this divine reading:
1. lectio – reading/ listening
a. cultivate the ability to listen deeply
b. slow, formative reading
c. based on previous reading and study
2. meditatio – meditation
a. gently stop reading when you have found a word, phrase, or passage through which God is speaking to you personally
b. ruminate over this passage, as a cow ruminates or chews its cud
c. say it over and over, noticing different aspects – “tasting” it
d. allow God’s word to become His word for you at every level of your being, ton interact with your inner world of concerns, memories, and ideas
3. oratio – prayer
a. pray – dialogue with God – over the passage
b. interact with God as one who loves you and is present with you
c allow God to transform you thoughts, memories, agendas, tendencies, habits
e. Re-affirm, repeat what God has just told you
4. contemplatio – contemplation
a. rest in the presence of the One who has come to transform and bless you
b. rest quietly, experiencing the presence of God
c. leave with a renewed energy and commitment to what God has just told you
Daily reading of the Holy Scriptures through the lectio divina is just the food to nourish our impoverished spiritual lives, our over-emphasis on the intellect since time of Enlightenment, and our random foragings into the Bible that leave us unsatisfied.
At the end of each of my devotions I will offer a suggested Resolution for you to more profitably use your mediation on the Scriptures and put into effect what God has just been telling you. Use this suggested Resolution and the meditation itself in a way that is most beneficial to you.
Because I am offering these meditations and ruminations on the daily lessons out of my own experience with the lectio divina, they are not intended to comprise a systematic teaching on Scripture. Each meditation will not attempt to reproduce my actual time of devotion but only some of the fruit the Lord has given me for the day to live on. I have re-written these meditations in a way that is more general and applicable to everyone, and not just myself.
I have chosen to follow the lessons from the Daily Office from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for a number of reasons. First, as a Reformed Episcopalian and Anglican, it is my spiritual tradition. More importantly, it is a system of reading that allows the entire Bible to be read in a systematic way so that our diet of spiritual food is a complete one. It is, as well, a program for eating the Scriptures that is descended from those spiritual gourmands of the early Church out of which and into which the Holy Scriptures were written and received.
My intention is to begin with the Morning Prayer lessons for each day of the week, excluding Sundays, and to begin with the Second Lesson in each Morning Prayer service, which is usually a New Testament lesson. When I have gone through all of these, I will go back and go through the Second Lesson for Evening Prayer, and then hope to have a complete set of devotions on the entire New Testament.
Eventually, I’d like to publish these as a book that could be used along with any lectionary or system for reading the Bible.
A few words of advice:
1. Use what is profitable, and don’t worry about the rest.
2. Don’t feel the need to meditate on every part of every Daily Bread. It’s not good to exhaust yourself spiritually. Also, don’t feel it necessary keep up with a different Resolution every day – you’ll drive yourself crazy in the process and unnecessarily feel like a failure. Work on what God is calling you to work on. Use the Daily Breads as they are most profitable for you.
3. If God stops you and tells you to do something different – for example to meditate on one small part of the lesson and apply it to your life today – drop everything else and listen to Him!
4. Most importantly: once you’ve developed the godly habit of meditating on the Bible every day – don’t ever let go of it!
“Give us this day our daily bread” is the most fundamental prayer we can ask on behalf of ourselves. Knowing this, our Lord not only commanded us to pray for this every day but also offers Himself to us as our daily bread.
As the Bread of Life that offers Himself to us each day as true spiritual food, Jesus comes to us in many ways. The words and images of the feedings of the 4000 and 5000 (especially in the Gospel of St. John) remind us that it is through faithful participation in the covenantal meal of the Holy Communion that Jesus feeds us. Through the creatures of bread and wine, Jesus gives His Body and Blood to us and feeds us at His heavenly banquet.
But He feeds us in other ways. In his Sermons on New Testament Lesson, St. Augustine expresses his belief that the feeding of the 4000 isn’t just about filling the bellies of men with bread and fish, nor is it solely about the Holy Communion. For St. Augustine and others, the Bread of Life is also the Holy Scriptures, upon which we are to feed every day, for they are the words of life. That the Word of God is also the Bread of God is satisfyingly illustrated by the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent in the Book of Common Prayer, in which we ask God to “Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.”
However, Christians in the twenty-first century (and probably all others) often do not properly eat or digest the Word of God. I’ve noticed some of you snacking in a sort of hit and run fashion, as you rush to lead your “real life.” “I’ll squeeze in a chapter of Bible reading today,” you think. Some of you are to be commended for devoting yourself to studying the Scriptures, but unfortunately it is in such a way that only the mind is fed. Meanwhile, the soul gets spiritual kwashiorkor, which may easily be identified by your distended spiritual belly.
Scripture must therefore be eaten with prayer, which may be likened to the blood into which the bread of life must be digested and ingested. Through a life of prayer, the Word of God is carried into every part of your life and becomes your life, just as a piece of digested food is broken down, enters the blood, and is carried to every part of your body. Only through a life of prayer, which is a third means by which Jesus becomes our daily bread, will the Word of God become spiritual food for us. After all, haven’t many of us had teachers of the Bible in college who have read and studied the Word but who, apart from a life of prayer and obedience, use their studies to starve themselves and others?
The most fruitful way I know of to receive my daily bread of Scripture is through the ancient practice of the lectio divina, or divine reading, with which I hope many of you are familiar. The essence of the lectio divina is not primarily to feed the mind: it is not just another Bible study to inform our minds. Instead, the lectio divina is formative reading, in which we allow the Holy Scriptures, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to form our very being. There are four basic steps in this divine reading:
1. lectio – reading/ listening
a. cultivate the ability to listen deeply
b. slow, formative reading
c. based on previous reading and study
2. meditatio – meditation
a. gently stop reading when you have found a word, phrase, or passage through which God is speaking to you personally
b. ruminate over this passage, as a cow ruminates or chews its cud
c. say it over and over, noticing different aspects – “tasting” it
d. allow God’s word to become His word for you at every level of your being, ton interact with your inner world of concerns, memories, and ideas
3. oratio – prayer
a. pray – dialogue with God – over the passage
b. interact with God as one who loves you and is present with you
c allow God to transform you thoughts, memories, agendas, tendencies, habits
e. Re-affirm, repeat what God has just told you
4. contemplatio – contemplation
a. rest in the presence of the One who has come to transform and bless you
b. rest quietly, experiencing the presence of God
c. leave with a renewed energy and commitment to what God has just told you
Daily reading of the Holy Scriptures through the lectio divina is just the food to nourish our impoverished spiritual lives, our over-emphasis on the intellect since time of Enlightenment, and our random foragings into the Bible that leave us unsatisfied.
At the end of each of my devotions I will offer a suggested Resolution for you to more profitably use your mediation on the Scriptures and put into effect what God has just been telling you. Use this suggested Resolution and the meditation itself in a way that is most beneficial to you.
Because I am offering these meditations and ruminations on the daily lessons out of my own experience with the lectio divina, they are not intended to comprise a systematic teaching on Scripture. Each meditation will not attempt to reproduce my actual time of devotion but only some of the fruit the Lord has given me for the day to live on. I have re-written these meditations in a way that is more general and applicable to everyone, and not just myself.
I have chosen to follow the lessons from the Daily Office from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for a number of reasons. First, as a Reformed Episcopalian and Anglican, it is my spiritual tradition. More importantly, it is a system of reading that allows the entire Bible to be read in a systematic way so that our diet of spiritual food is a complete one. It is, as well, a program for eating the Scriptures that is descended from those spiritual gourmands of the early Church out of which and into which the Holy Scriptures were written and received.
My intention is to begin with the Morning Prayer lessons for each day of the week, excluding Sundays, and to begin with the Second Lesson in each Morning Prayer service, which is usually a New Testament lesson. When I have gone through all of these, I will go back and go through the Second Lesson for Evening Prayer, and then hope to have a complete set of devotions on the entire New Testament.
Eventually, I’d like to publish these as a book that could be used along with any lectionary or system for reading the Bible.
A few words of advice:
1. Use what is profitable, and don’t worry about the rest.
2. Don’t feel the need to meditate on every part of every Daily Bread. It’s not good to exhaust yourself spiritually. Also, don’t feel it necessary keep up with a different Resolution every day – you’ll drive yourself crazy in the process and unnecessarily feel like a failure. Work on what God is calling you to work on. Use the Daily Breads as they are most profitable for you.
3. If God stops you and tells you to do something different – for example to meditate on one small part of the lesson and apply it to your life today – drop everything else and listen to Him!
4. Most importantly: once you’ve developed the godly habit of meditating on the Bible every day – don’t ever let go of it!
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