CONVIVIUM

A Pathway to Spiritual Formation Through the

Development of One’s Own Lectionary

(New addition to this "writing in progress" is in bold-face italics at bottom.

The latest entry was added February 13, 2008.

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The Rhythm of Renewal

Long ago, it seems, I began a love affair with the Lectionary. To be more accurate, it was at first with the “concept” of the Lectionary: that there are germinal selections from scripture that both stimulate and respond to the rhythm of the Christian Year and correlate with the rhythm of human life.

Every life has a beat, a rhythm, a style. A well-conceived, disciplined study of scripture contributes to that style and even calls it to life. Since the Fourth Century, Lectionaries have been developed for the purpose of enhancing personal study and spiritual formation, as well as corporate worship. A Lectionary is a selection of biblical readings arranged in an orderly and meaningful fashion to expose the reader to significant passages of scripture for all or a portion of the Christian Year. An Advent Lectionary, for example, will deal with passages which have a bearing on Advent. Read daily, the selections for each week come more and more alive and call the reader to Life---for such is the rhythm of renewal.

In broad strokes this rhythm has to do with Beginnings, Meaning, Meaning Threatened, and Meaning Renewed. Put another way, in more traditional theological terms, it has to do with a rhythm that Creates, Sustains, and Redeems.

Even a casual student of scripture can get the beat of this rhythm. Almost any degree of sensitivity allows one to sense the beat at the level of emotional process, “down deep within,” where we search for and claim meaning. Certain words of scripture coming as they do, when they do , at significant times in the Christian Year, even at significant times in our personal lives enable us to hear a word we cannot unhear. We try to re-hear those words in a corporate way in worship, i. e., we have a “re-hear-sal”---rehearsal---of The Truth About Life when worship is at its best.

The Resonance of Rhythm and Drama

These are the elements I will tie together as we proceed. I will even mix the metaphor, rhythm, a bit by also seeing the Lectionary as a fleshing-out of the drama of the Christian Year as well as the drama of Christian Worship. So, rhythm and drama may not be so mixed as first meets the eye. It could be that they are the integral aspects that enable lectionary and life to resonate.

I found myself drawing on this even before I was introduced to a formal Lectionary. In my many days as a local church pastor with preaching responsibilities every week, I would plan preaching and worship on a seasonal basis. With no intention on my own part, it seemed, I was lured into the resonance of rhythm and drama.

To say the least, this was greatly enhanced as I became more and more romanced by the Common Lectionary. Soon I was using segments of all the passages for a given Sunday in various parts of the service. Not only did this bring cohesion to the Order of Worship, indeed, helping it become WORSHIP and not a “religious-sounding program,” but it also brought added cohesion to my personal life.

My practice at that time was to read each day a different Lectionary passage for the coming Sunday. In fact, I would read it several times. I would “let it do its work on me.” It would go something like this: Monday, the Psalm; Tuesday, the Old Testament reading and the Psalm; Wednesday, the Gospel, the Old Testament reading, and the Psalm; Thursday, the Epistle, Gospel, Old Testament, and Psalm.

All the while different passages would shimmer off the page and begin germinating as part of the Order of Worship, perhaps in the Morning Prayer, or as the text for the sermon. It was quite seductive. There was an unfolding nature to it, as in a drama. By the end of Thursday’s reading, much of the Sunday Message and the spiritual formation of the Order of Worship had taken form. I will give examples of what I mean in the season by season chapters that follow.

Before “spiritual formation” became a buzz term, it was happening to me through the Lectionary. I have no doubt that I am not the only person for whom this is true. It is the nature of scripture. It is the nature of inspiration. It is the nature of revelation. Wasn’t it Dwight Moody, of all people, who said, “It is not important how many times you have been through the Bible, but how many times the Bible has been through you?” All you have to do is supply the intentionality. If you do, you will be captured by the rhythm, drawn to the drama, and become more connected to the deepest roots of the Christian Faith.

To be sure, there were times when I departed from the Lectionary as a text for the sermon, but I would let it discipline my preparations nonetheless and its continued presence was evident in the Order of Worship as a whole. To date myself somewhat, my early ministry was largely defined by the civil rights movement. There were many Sundays that a topical message was what seemed paramount. Even so, because I had been living with the Lectionary so much, the substance of its rhythm and drama made it apparent that the text for that Sunday did, in fact, speak to the topic that was shoving its way into my heart and mind.

Along the way, while serving a local church in Shreveport, LA, I was also invited to teach Introductory Old and New Testament at Centenary College. I had been doing this for years in my local churches and the head of the Department of Religion there, Dr. Webb Pomeroy, knew this. My respect for the rhythm and drama of scripture and the substance of its message was further deepened through this experience. I knew then there was something more I was being lured into doing with what had become the nature of my own spiritual formation.

Why Not a New Testament Lectionary?

I had been working with the Common Lectionary for a number of years by then. I decided to put together my own Lectionary. Because I had a particular fascination for the New Testament, I further decided that it would be a New Testament Lectionary. Like many of you, there were certain passages of the New Testament that were germane to my understanding of the Gospel and I needed to deal with them over and over. A New Testament Lectionary could highlight those pericopes. Further, Luther was right, “Every Christian should memorize the first eight chapters of the Book of Romans.” How could that become a part of a Lectionary?

Why not read most of Romans during Lent and pairing it with the Gospel of John? Rather than skipping around from Gospel to Gospel and Epistle to Epistle, I prefer living with them in consecutive weeks. So my Lectionary scheme engages a specific Gospel for each major season: Matthew for Advent/Epiphany, John for Lent/Easter, Luke for the first half of Pentecost, and Mark for the remainder, which I prefer to call "Missiontide." The Epistles and the Apocalypse are similarly paired with the Gospels.

Since I had always found Pentecost so long a season that it became monotonous, I divided it into two seasons, Pentecost to the last Sunday in August and, then, Missiontide, to the end of the cycle and the beginning again of Advent. I realize that I am not the first to think of this, having lived with Kingdomtide, which was outdated from the outset, for a number of years. Inserting Missiontide has more to do with rhythm than with reason. The Gospel for this season is Mark. It is paired with several Epistles.

A Pathway to Spiritual Formation

The Common Lectionary, or any other, was never for me “a way to get through the whole Bible in a single year.” There are many Biblical treasures that every Lectionary misses. Nor was the Lectionary that was beginning to take shape in my heart about having a spring-board for a preaching plan for the whole year. Rather, putting together my own Lectionary became for me one of the most significant seasons of spiritual formation I have ever experienced. It became a pathway for me, far more significant in my life than a mere aid in sermon preparation.

To be sure, in wrestling with various passages and where they might, not only speak to my personal life, but also be a natural part of the rhythm and drama of the Christian Year, I became a better student of the New Testament. Without a doubt it made me a better preacher, too, because it made me a better person.

In the succeeding pages we will take a slow walk through the process, season by season. Not only will it include the Biblical selections, but also various acts of worship it inspires, prayers, readings, and ways to get at what the selected text is saying to us today. Once the lectionary wa complete I did, in fact, decide to preach it. Indeed, more than once! One of the challenges I put before myself was a commitment to use segments from Lectionary readings throughout the Order of Worship in as many different creative ways as possible. I feel that helps maintain a balance between the text itself and my interpretation of it, as in the sermon, for instance.

Getting Started

To get started I spent some time recalling those passages from the New Testament that through the years had come to have special meaning for me. I began making a list of them, adding to it as passages that long ago had spoken to me leaked out of the pages of the New Testament again and grabbed hold of me. These passages or selections (i.e.lections) were those which in an ongoing way not only had pressed me intellectually, but had also reached me at the level of emotional process. In a meaningful way they coincided with the rhythm and drama of my own life. Increasingly, they had informed my own understanding of myself, my relationship to others, and the way I did worship in the local churches I served. Further, I sensed that there was a universal quality to these particular words. They were being experienced by other people in much the same way as they were by me.

There is one more element to this process that, for me, is indispensable. I needed some time apart on this for at least three reasons: first, to look at my “spiritual genogram,” as a whole, so to speak. Second, I needed to plumb my own depths of emotional process. Third, I needed to research the validity of my ideas.

In The Yale Divinity School Library

My first and most important step in this part of the journey came a number of years ago when I spent a part of a Summer in a self-directed study at Yale Divinity School. Stimulating lectures and animated discussions daily pressed me to look at myself with new eyes and to hear things with new ears. My mentor there was the venerable Parker Rossman, who had the good sense to push me out the door each morning in the direction of the divinity school library.

There, to my complete surprise, I discovered that the first known Christian Lectionaries were New Testament Lectionaries! In a formal sense, at least, the Christian Year came into being as a result of the fourth century evolution of various feast days, which had been collecting from generation to generation. [1]

By the end of the fourth century evidence of Lectionary development is found. In Sermon No. 11 on the Gospel of John, preached in Antioch, about 389 CE, John Chrysostom wrote, “What then is it that I require of you? That each of you take in hand that selection of the Gospels which is to be read among you on the first day of the week, or even on the Sabbath, and before the day arrive, that he sit down at home and read it through, and carefully consider its contents, and examine all its parts well, what is clear, what is obscure….” [2]

In another sermon (Number 1 on Acts) preached about 400 or 401 in Constantinople, Chrysostom refers to Acts as “a demonstration of the Resurrection.” [3] Augustine in Africa in Tractate Number 6 on the Gospel of John speaks of the custom of reading Acts in the season following the Passion. [4] I was delighted to discover this, for in my own Lectionary, instinctively, that is where I had placed my readings from Acts, paired with the Gospel of John. Instinct cannot claim all the credit, however, for that is precisely where most of the readings from Acts are in the Common Lectionary and most other Lectionaries I have seen. My point is we are dealing with a long and natural Lectionary history, which has imbedded itself in the rhythm and drama of life.

It seems that for a time in Christian Worship, in Byzantium in the 5^th Century, the Old Testament fell out of use. Late in that century or early 6^th , that was also true in Rome. The Byzantine Lectionary, dated as early as the 7^th Century, consists of Gospels and Epistles. Interestingly, it begins with Easter and seems to concentrate on the period from Easter to Pentecost and is built around the Gospel of John. From Pentecost to the first of September, Matthew is foremost. Generally, in this period there tends to be three structural types: one which begins with Easter; another which begins with Christmas or Epiphany; and a third which begins with Advent. [5] It became clear to me that Advent was the obvious place for a Lectionary to begin, particularly one that was pointing down the path of spiritual formation, rather than being more like a "calendar" for sermon preparation. Advent speaks of a New Birth, a beginning, even a beginning again. I could sense this whole adventure becoming that for me.

A Shift in Perspective

This was surely not the beginning of my "spiritual genogram," but there are times when one cannot tell when something is beginning or something is ending. Those days in the Yale Divinity School Library were charged with meaning for me. I had only recently been appointed to a church in the Northern part of Louisiana, where I had never served before. It was very different from New Orleans where I grew up and was first appointed out of seminary some twelve years earlier.

When we moved, my wife, who was to live only a few years longer, had left her therapy group that had been so helpful to her. She "graduated," so to speak, as the years in therapy had seem to greatly strengthen her as a person, indeed all of us. For awhile, she did well with her "new wings," but she was showing signs of loosing the momentum she had fought so hard to gain. We had four children. All of them had made a remarkable adaptation to the new location, school, church, friends, community. Our five years there would prove to be a prelude to an incredible turning point for all of us. My time at Yale was the first time I had been away from home and this dear family for any length of time.

Being away from home, however, was not a new experience for me. Indeed, a sense of apartness (note: not separateness) has played a significant role in my personal spiritual genogram. I have no doubt that it enhanced the charged nature of my short time at Yale. It also re-connected me to months in my childhood that I spent away from home, apart from my family. This was actually the first time I had been away from home, alone, since several extended periods in a hospital a long way from home between 1936 and 1944.

It was during one of those “apart” periods in the hospital in the 1940s that I first began to read the New Testament with any degree of seriousness. It is ironic that apartness would take on a significant role for me in that on the Myers-Briggs I am a rather strong “E.” I will come back to that later as I explore the Advent Lectionary.

The Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Cycle

Advent

I have been fortunate to have had many excellent teachers, most of them in everyday life, rather than in a classroom. However, there have been several seminary professors who have made indelible imprints on me. Foremost of these was Joe Matthews, who turned on all the lights for me.

It was from Joe that I first heard the one-liner, “We are the people who know the end of the story a well as we do the beginning.” There was no doubt as to which story he was referring. The context in which he always set it and the dramatic way in which he said it confirmed within me the sense of hope that seemingly has pervaded my life as long as I can remember. It enabled me to see that every Advent had a little Lent in it; and, more important, every Christmas had a little Easter in it. It served to keep me not only hopeful, but realistic as well.

So it is, whenever I enter the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Cycle, I am aware, also, of the Lent-Easter-Pentecost Cycle. Moreover, none of the cycles of the Christian Year are limited to their allotted place in the chronological calendar. We are dealing with time, both as chronos, time as we see it on a calendar or a clock, and kairos, time as meaning.

Each of the cycles resonates with the truth about life. Every day holds the possibility of Advent. Likewise, when it is Advent on the calendar, it may not be Advent in my heart. Still, it comes. It tugs away at us as though it is as much a living, breathing, thing as are we. The same can be said of all the seasons of the Christian Year.

Like the word “adventure,” advent is from the Latin “ad” and “venire,” meaning “to come.” When written with a capital “A,” the first letter in all alphabets, Advent is the first season of the Christian year. It begins on the Sunday nearest the day of St. Andrew the Apostle, November 30, and lasts for the four weeks leading to Christmas Day. [6]

Color Advent purple. In the old days that was the color for Kings and, after all, this is about the King of Kings. So, purple. I have a different slant on why it should be purple. Alice Walker helps me with this in her novel THE COLOR PURPLE, when Celie and Shug are having a discussion about faith. Shug says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” [7] Likewise, I think it pisses God off if you walk by an incarnation and don’t notice it. So. color it purple!

It comes like a proclamation and is a foretelling of an experience in which the One who gives Life will be revealed in a vivid way. It has its own gestation period, implying that it will take us awhile to get ready for the comprehension of a momentous event. To put it another way, Advent is about an existential moment when Truth becomes so evident in our lives that we cannot deny it. An Advent Moment is an A-ha Moment.

First Sunday in Advent

Matthew 11:2-6

2 When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples ³ and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ ⁴ Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: ⁵ the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. ⁶ And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’

Philippians 2:1-11

1 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ² make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³ Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴ Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵ Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, ⁷ but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, ⁸ he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. ⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, ¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹ and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

A Shift in Perception

It is not too much of a stretch to understand Advent as the onset of a shift in perception. The idea of an incarnate God was surely a shift in perception. Isn’t that a serious part of what Advent is all about? Isn’t it about the coming into life, as we know it, of the experience we have named “God,” in such a way that it is no longer just a name?

So it is, at the beginning of Advent I want to ask the same question John, the Baptist asked, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we wait for another?” [8] I like the way Matthew remembers the answer, something like this , “Well, what are you seeing and hearing: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are beginning to hear good news.” [9] That is the answer I want. That is the answer I need.

As one who knows the end of the story as well as the beginning, my selections from Matthew reflect this. They deal with the definitive nature of the Christ Event, with its ultimate meaning, which has to do with Life (Beginnings, Meaning) Death (Meaning Threatened), and Resurrection (Meaning Renewed). That Life-Death-Resurrection Cycle is the possibility of every moment. In every moment we are somewhere in that cycle: Beginnings, Meaning; Meaning Threatened; Meaning Renewed. It is about the One who Creates, Sustains, and Redeems us.

When Joe Matthews “turned on the lights” for me, words like that, which I had been hearing again and again over the first eighteen months of my seminary education took on flesh for the first time. Indeed, the word became flesh and dwelt within me. Not only that, the experience defined many of the Advents that had already taken place in my life and would inform many yet to come.

While the first Gospel reading in Advent raises the question of authentic identity, the first Epistle reading covers the whole Jesus cycle as though it is the more compleat (sic) answer to “Are you the one for whom we have been waiting?” Philippians 2:1-11 begins, “If then there is any encouragement in Christ… ” as if to say “If we are going to get anything out of this, look at like this….”

What follows is Paul’s way of spelling-out the whole drama: though he was in the form of God, did not claim equality, nor did he exploit his position, rather, he “emptied” (what a word in this context!) himself, being born in human likeness, so much so, that he died---but wait, we know the end of the story as well as the beginning---so exalted has this whole experience we call Jesus Christ become that every knee bows, every tongue confesses that this is the way life is built: Life, Death, New Life, the eternal cycle.

Facing Difficult Questions

Mind you, “the lights came on” at a time when I was questioning my calling. For some weeks I had been asking myself, “Is this really what I want to do with the rest of my life?” Further, I was pressing myself and my sentimental attempts at theology with which I had arrived at seminary by wondering, “Is this all there is to it?” Talk about Advent having a little Lent in it; how about Christmas Eve having a bit of Gethsemane.

Add to that some even more personal considerations that cubed everything. I could sense that our family life was beginning to revolve around me too much: my vocation, my calling, my education, my seminary, my training, my ordination. Get the drift? Anxiety over what that was doing to my wife, Audrey’s, self-definition was on a steep rise. She was not immune to the anxiety, in fact, she was particularly vulnerable to it.

Audrey was a registered nurse, having won awards in nursing school, and with experience practicing for over a year after graduation in pediatrics. She was also a talented artist. She had already been battling the demons of anxiety throughout her three years of training as a nurse. Not self-centered at all by nature, deep down a gnawing unrest was returning, threatening to take over. Was her Life-Story being consumed by mine? What would that leave her? Would it be enough? Would the lights come on for both of us?

Can you begin to see why “We are the people who know the end of the story as well as the beginning” carried such freight of meaning for me? To say the least, it kept a light shining in the darkness and the darkness could not overcome it. Though only in my twenties, I had long lived without benefit of certitude, as you will see. It opened me to faith, not belief in something because it could be proven to be true, but for some other reason. A new sense of self-definition was beginning to emerge.

The respected contemporary poet Sharon Olds made a vow early-on that she would never talk about her personal life in public. She is one of the few modern poets to sell thousands of copies of her books, probably because she writes about the family lives and loves of ordinary people in her collections. So revelatory are her poems that many have taken them to be about her own life.[10] Her poem "High School Senior," from her collection THE WELLSPRING is a case in point:

...Seventeen years ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me--no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed. [11]

Are those words autobiographical or not? Through the years Olds has refused to answer that question. Indeed, that question is rendered irrelevant if her words speak to the human situation. Isn't that what all writers and, indeed, preachers strive for---to speak to the human situation? We have all read authors who speak so tellingly to the human situation that we are sure they must have lived through those very situations themselves. Words like that have their origins in the soul.

 

All of that gives me pause before I go any further. What I am writing is about my personal life. To be honest, I am not sure I should be writing about things that are so personal. On the other hand, I am not sure that one can write or speak about one’s own spiritual formation without becoming autobiographical and personal about it; the trick is to not be egotistical or otherwise inaccurate. I want to be dealing with the human situation and not just my own. And let us keep in mind how right Paul is when he refers to “sighs, too deep for words.” [12] There is something sacred about those depths, so much so, that the unsaid does not go unfelt. They are the stuff of prayer.

Second Sunday in Advent

Matthew 21:33-42

33 ‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. ³⁴ When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. ³⁵ But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. ³⁶ Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. ³⁷ Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” ³⁸ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” ³⁹ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. ⁴⁰ Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ ⁴¹ They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.’ 42 Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:
“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is amazing in our eyes”?

Galatians 3:23-4:7

23 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. ²⁴ Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. ²⁵ But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, ²⁶ for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. ²⁷ As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

4 My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; ² but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. ³ So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. ⁴ But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, ⁵ in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. ⁶ And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ ⁷ So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.

Purpleness

Back to the “purpleness” of Advent. Ironic, is it not, that the color for Lent is also purple. In the Lenten context it signifies penitence. To be sure we know that Lenten part of the end of the story even as we celebrate the joy of the beginning of the story.

At the same time, when we are honest with ourselves, we know our tendency to deny, avoid, or even to distort Truth. That has not been lost on me in my own journey toward self-definition. It has, in fact, heightened the urgency of my search for a deeper sense of spiritual formation along the way.

Early on, then, I signal this by placing in the Second Sunday of Advent the parable about the landowner who leases his vineyard to sly tenants who successively beat, kill, and stone those sent to collect his produce. Frustrated, the landowner sends his son on the mission thinking, “They will respect my son.” They do not, however; in fact, they throw him out of his own vineyard and kill him. As we read the passage, even, without knowing its roots in Isaiah and its quote from Psalm 118, we find ourselves saying to the sly tenants, “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!” Already we can sense a fore-shadowing of the crucifixion. The final words of the passage are a direct quote of Psalm 118:23-23:

“The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord’s doing,

and is amazing in our eyes.”

I do not find it easy to admit I have been wrong about something. To talk about such a time I have to resort to humor to temper the sting of it. When I was a sophomore in college I ran the phonograph record department of a small store. To be honest about it, my department occupied a corner of the store. It was no big deal, but I gloried in my title and authority.

Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that I had responsibility for ordering all the records that would be sold there, how they would be displayed, and most important what music would be played on the public address system both inside the store and on the system outside. I got to pick the future hits. To be perfectly square with you, I had all this “authority” because my Dad was General Manager of the business.

I am talking late 1940s. There were no I-Pods or CDs and DVDs were a long way off, tape players were as yet unheard of. We were figuratively closer to Edison than to miniaturized sound technology. One day a sales representative from RCA Victor came in to acquaint me with 33 and 1/3 rpm (revolutions per minute) 12 inch phonograph records. The norm for the day was 78 rpm, 10 inch records.

He explained how much more music could be recorded and played with the new technology and how much better it would sound. It would require replacing the 78 rpm phonographs with 33 and 1/3 rpm phonographs. Soon no more of the former would even be manufactured, because people would be so attracted to the new technology.

Well, I knew right away that he was wrong, wrong, wrong. People were not going to give up their old 78s. I had a collection of Traditional Jazz 78 rpm record albums that would never be obsolete! And look at my record wracks with hundreds of different song titles and recording artists. No, sir, I was not at all interested in placing an order. It would never work.

Boy, was I wrong! Fortunately, before it would really become embarrassing, I was off to seminary and the corner where my Phonograph Record Department once existed was taken over by the overflow of the new television sets that people were going crazy about. Color me purple for repentance, no matter what the season. Fortunately, my Dad gave me the freedom to make my own mistakes and trusted me to learn from them. Sometimes I did.

Law, Faith, and Freedom

So it is in Advent we temper the vestige of purple repentance for which the Early Church had such an affinity, with a pink Advent candle, emphasizing the joy of the season. For me, the great joy of my own spirituality is the gift of freedom---so I couple a reading from Galatians that implies being “set-free,” with the Matthew reading that seems to belong, not in Advent, but in Lent, indeed, Good Friday! What is that line, again? “We are the people who know the end of the story as well as we do the beginning.” At times we know it even better.

When I do a “Lectio Divina” on Galatians 3:23-4:7 I come up with “Now before faith came we were imprisoned…;” “but now that faith has come…;” “no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female…;” “fullness of time…;” “no longer a slave, but a child, an heir---of God…”

That is so different from being thrown out of the vineyard and killed. It is a new way of “seeing,” perceiving things. It is pointing to the good news (gospel) that there is always something going on that liberates us from those things that would limit our capacity to be fully alive. That is my way of defining “gospel” in my own words. That is what I mean by “turning on all the lights.”

Third Sunday in Advent

Matthew 9:16-17

¹⁶ No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. ¹⁷ Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.’

Galatians 5:1-6; 13-14

5 ¹ For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 2 Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. ³ Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. ⁴ You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. ⁵ For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. ⁶ For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.

13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. ¹⁴ For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

Drinking Freely of the New Wine

Compared to the Matthew reading about the sly tenants this reading is as different as a brand new piece of cloth placed alongside old overused piece; like putting new wine in old wineskins. That wonderfully descriptive verse from Matthew 9 helped me long ago to begin to internalize the change that was already swirling around in my head.

Then in Galatians 5:1-6; 13-14 that great and joyous gift of freedom is even more clearly explained. It further distinguishes the new and different way that was making a dramatic Advent into our lives. The words I see with my eyes of faith are, “…the only thing that counts is faith working through love…; “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters…;” “…the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

There is no doubt about it sometimes we can abuse that great gift of freedom, as did the tenants in the vineyard. Lurking between the lines of this passage from Galatians is our propensity to use our freedom to rationalize the rightness of almost anything we do even when we know it is wrong.

I don’t know how it is with you, but deep down I know when I am playing games like that. Now that I have tasted of lovingly given freedom, I can’t get away with such self-indulgence. I may deny that I am doing it for a time, but the wild rivers of guilt do their number on me when I do.

Further, God does not give freedom to some and not to others, nor does God give freedom with one hand and take it back with the other. This means there are times when my freedom is on a collision course with yours. It can get complicated; the kind of complicated that can be very “simple,” “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” We are dealing with paradox when we get to this depth in our search for life-saving, life-giving truth. Whoever said, “A paradox is truth standing on its head in order to attract attention,” sure got it right.

Fourth Sunday in Advent

Matthew 22:35-40

³⁵ and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ ³⁷ He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

I Corinthians 13

13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, ^* but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, ^* but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

The Anatomy of Revelation  

It surely needs to be acknowledged that a God of love was not an invention of the New Testament. We find it in the Old Testament as well. It was not until I was in my senior year at Tulane and had already made the decision to go to seminary and seek ordination as an Elder in the Methodist Church that I was introduced to the “tender mercies of God,” the loving nature of Yahweh that rises to the surface throughout the Old Testament.

I had come to realize that I had very little training in the New Testament and almost none in the Old. How would I survive in a seminary environment? Out of desperation, I signed-on for a course entitled, “The Bible as Living Literature.” It was in the Newcomb college curriculum, clear across the Tulane campus. It was a real challenge just getting to the class on time, but it was one of the best educational choices I ever made. It consumed me. I soaked it up like a thirsty sponge. Though I did not realize it at the time, the Bible as Living Literature was a leap forward for me.

Fortunately, I was never afflicted by Fundamentalism. Though my parents were not “church-goers” in my childhood, they were innately very loving, caring people. It is an overstatement, but I make it anyway: I had never known a world that was not centered in love. As such, my world was surely not contaminated by Fundamentalism. I learned later how unusual that was for one born and raised in the Deep South.

Many of the people I grew up with were having the same experiences, but the only language they knew with which to talk about their religion was the language of Fundamentalism. Anything that “sounded” different seemed threatening and needed to be rejected. That was not true of me.

So it is that I was open, really open, to a view of the Bible that was like an unfolding drama moving from creation in the direction, always, of a God who loved me, and not only me, but you, too, and that made it clear how I was supposed to feel about you. Experientially, I was being exposed to that kind of love in everyday life. To put it another way, I was open to learning that there was a Christliness to God even before there was a Jesus of Nazereth. People of Faith have always experienced a God of Love. Jesus becomes the lens through which we see it more clearly.

Jesus, himself, had met this God of Love in the Old Testament. He knew the Shema to be essential to Jewish Liturgy. When asked which of the commandments was the greatest, that is where he turned in his reply. Drawing from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, his reply remains the essence of Christian Ethics, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Paul’s “Ode to Love” in I Corinthians 13 is the perfect correlation to the Great Commandment of Matthew 22. In most instances a sense of heightened self-definition comes when, in moments of reflection, we look back over our shoulders at an event from out past that seems to be vibrating with new meaning. Indeed, to me, that is the nature of revelation.

Rarely do we know “at the moment” that a new sense of self is beginning to emerge. Rarely do we realize “on the spot” the full ramifications of the rumblings of the Spirit we feel deep within. Even when it comes like a “swift kick in the ass,” it takes awhile for the full meaning to be unpacked.

I believe this was no less true for Moses and the burning bush. Whatever that event actually involved, its full meaning was not evident to Moses until further along. Whatever that memory set ablaze, Moses held it in his heart as though it needed time to simmer, take root, and grow into a revelation of the first order.

I think this was true of the prophets, Isaiah in the Temple with his unclean lips and the burning ember that cleansed them; Jeremiah and the Potter’s wheel; Ezekiel and the wheel in a wheel in a wheel. First experienced as perplexity, then as challenge, then, after living with the memory and even wrestling with it, each of them came to a deeper understanding of what they had to do with the rest of their lives---a revelation.

Jesus went through the same process with his baptism by John in the Jordan and on the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John, and even in the Garden of Gethsemane.

First there is an event, something really happens, it takes root within us. It lives in us. We unpack it, repack it, and wrestle with it knowing all the while, not merely that we have something here, but rather that something has us!

This is not happening on some chronological schedule as with an appointment with a psychiatrist, but as an event that gets woven into our every day lives and is polished into its full luster by other personal events. Then, one day we look back on it all and, voila, we have meaning, we have a revelation. We know what we must do with the next moment and beyond. We live it, we write it, we preach it, we sing it

The Greatest Thing in the World

In speaking of such moments Edwin Friedman like to say, “It is like a crack in the door; some people see it, some do not.” [i] When we do “see” it an ever-expanding time of deepening self-understanding begins to take shape and our sense of perception is deepened.

Can it be that is the process that Paul, himself, went through before he could write I Corinthians 13? He, who “once was blind” to the truth about life, had come to see things through new eyes. He, who was “untimely born,” had come at last to the “fullness of time” for his own life. Looking back on all that he is inspired to begin something like this, “Though I speak with the combined eloquence of all humanity and the angels of heaven, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” It is almost as though it is a reflection not only on his own journey, but on The Great Commandment as Jesus stated it.

Those words and the remaining ones in I Corinthians 13 ripple through me still. They became very personal when my first love, Audrey, before we had any idea how our futures might be linked, still in High School, gave me a little volume entitled, The Greatest Thing in the World. It was by Henry Drummond, a 19^th Century gifted English evangelist, who had assisted Dwight Moody. Written in 1874 it was a meditation on I Corinthians 13.

I am sure I read more into it than Audrey intended. After all, I thought, it was about love. No matter that she and one of our school’s athletes were quite an item. It furnished countless opportunities for “conversation” with her. We began to see each other with new eyes. More than that, though, both the book and the budding relationship helped me to see that love is truly a gift, one first given to us by the One who gives us life, and a gift we can only truly learn to value as we give it to another.

Not long after that a pastor came into my life, Luther Booth, who made a lifelong impact on me. Indeed, he performed the wedding ceremony when Audrey and I were later married. Luther introduced me to the social ramifications of the commandment to love. In particular, he made me aware of the nature of my relationship to people of other races. In the South in those days that was a hot issue. He ushered in for me a major change in the way I perceived things. Luther ended one of his many moving sermons with

No one could tell me where my soul might be.

I sought for God, but God eluded me.

I sought my neighbor out

And found all three.

Well over a half-century later those words of an anonymous author continue to play a role in my own spiritual formation. I remember how they first cut into the way I had been perceiving things and helped to draw me into something deeper. Luther Booth helped me see through a crack in the door. The Civil Rights movement kicked the door in. And because of who she was and the simple book she gave me, Audrey helped me to see what, indeed, was the greatest thing in the world.

I have learned much about love since then and I think I have learned to love better and deeper. When I first put together the New Testament scriptures that had been most spiritually forming for me, I knew The Great Commandment and I Corinthians 13 had to be near the top of the list. Further, I knew they had to be in Advent. Whatever else is happening in the Christ Event, one thing is certain: God in Christ is messing around with the way we perceive things. The Gospel readings for Advent challenge our perceptions. The Epistle readings have to do with the way we spell out those new revelations in our personal lives.

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[1] The Christian Year and Lectionary Reform, A. Allen McArthur, SCM Press LTD, London, 1958.

[2] A Select Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series XIV, 1890, page 38.

[3] ibid, page 3.

[4] The Works of Aurelius Augustine, X, Section 18, M. Dods, 1873, page 85.

[5] Studies on the Lectionary Text of the Greek New Testament, Volume 1, “Prolegomena to the Study of the Lectionary Text of the Gospels,” edited by Ernest C. Colwell and Donald W. Riddle, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1933.

[6] A IS FOR ADVENT, Charles W. Ferguson, p. 3, Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 1968.

[7] The Color Purple, Alice Walker, 1982

[8] Matthew 11:3

[9] Matthew 11:4-5

[10] The Writer’s Almanac, November 19, 2007, Garrison Keillor, The Poetry Foundation.

[11] ibid. Click on "Sharon Olds" in Keillor's Writer's Almanac for November 19, 2007, for this and another example. www.writersalmanac.com.

[12] Romans 8:26

[13] Generation to Generation, Edwin H. Friedman, The Guilford Press, New York, 1985