A little lower than the angels

"Jesus comes out of the water, drawing the world with him, as it were, and raising it up when it had hitherto been sunk in the abyss...." -Gregory of Nazianzus, Fourth Century. _________________ "A Christian parish becomes its best self when it accepts the challenge of community. The parish community, as the real expression of a local church, cannot limit its attention to the search for justice and intimacy among its own members; it must be prepared to take up the cross, standing against evil and injustice wherever they exist in the world...." -Nathan Mitchell, Liturgy , vol. 1, no. 2, 1980. Quoted in A Christmas Sourcebook (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1984), p. 146. _____________________ "The heart of Christianity is the self-emptying, kenotic humility of God expressed in Jesus the Christ... At the heart of God's humility is this: God willingly is wounded." -Maggie Ross, Seasons of Death and Life: A Wilderness Memoir . San Fra...

"A star burned in the sky more brightly than all the others; its light was indescribable, its newness marvelous, and all the other stars, along with the sun and the moon, formed a chorus around this star, the light of which reached farther than that of any other.... Then all magic was destroyed, and every bond wrought by wickedness was broken, and the ancient kingdom was razed. When God appeared in human form to bring the newness of eternal life, his counsel began to be fulfilled." -Ignatius of Antioch, Second century. _____________________________ "...In this strange land, amid these unfamiliar faces, there is a way to see the Epiphany: the way of the magi, of the strangers who came in from the night. It is to see ourselves and to recognize our condition in these otherwise alien people. It is to know ourselves compacted with them in a common destiny, the destiny of children marked for death, heirs of the promise through the Child marked for death. Before such mutual re...

As we approach the remembrance of the Baptism of Our Lord, I think back to a sermon I preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent on the Magnificat , the Song of Mary. Let's not forget the Song of Mary as we continue the cycle of the Liturgical Year and hear again the proclamation of the Gospel According to Luke. Her Song sounded the themes Luke explores, and which appear in Jesus' post-baptismal announcement of his own ministry in Luke 4:14-21. As we seek to be faithful to Jesus' ministry in our own place and time, the Song of Mary sounds the themes that inform and empower our ministry in the world. Advent 4, Year C December 20, 2009 If you've gone to an opera or a performance of an oratorio such as Handel's Messiah, you've heard an overture. In musical terms, an overture is the first music you hear at such a performance. It is the prelude or introduction to what is to follow. It helps get you in the mood for the story, and may beg...

In a post on Thinking Anglicans , Simon Kershaw has some thoughts on how we tell the story of Christmas, and what difference our telling makes. He begins with this borrowed verse: "They sold me a dream of Christmas They sold me a Silent Night And they told me a fairy story Till I believed in the Israelite." (words by Peter Sinfield from Greg Lake’s 1975 Christmas record) He continues: "If your Christmas has been anything like mine you’ve heard quite a number of tellings of the birth of Christ over the last few weeks. Sentimental, imagined, romantic, harmonized, fictionalized, sanitized and idealized — that sums up so many of them." "...Do we, in telling the story this way, conspire with our hearers to perpetuate a fairy story? Do we perpetuate the idea that the birth of Jesus is a fairy story, just a fairy story, something that — like the idea of Father Christmas or the tooth fairy — parents use to encourage children to be sweet and good? But something which we...