Category Archives: Uncategorized

We brought our Christmas tree home this last week and set it in the large bay window in the family room.  I poured hot water into the trunk’s basin, and stood back to look.  The tree tilted, but I thought it would be fine once it was decorated.  I opened boxes of last year’s decorations, and pulled out the mini-light string, trying to recall how it was that I had twirled them through the branches.  Slowly, with the help of a ladder, I began at the top and laced the tree with the lights, moving the ladder in a circle.  I plugged the two prongs of the cord into the wall socket.

I stood back and gazed at the colored lights, now lit, seeming so delicate against the heavy fir.  The lights would shine brighter in the dark, I thought.  They would light up the dark.

I pulled from another box a green and silver garland which was today’s version of the tinsel I painstakingly hung as a child.  My mother would dole single strands of silver tinsel to my sister and me, and we would choose a spot to let it dangle like an icicle.  One strand at a time.  It seemed to take forever, I recall, but by the end of the tinsel hanging ceremony we and the tree were one.

Today’s garland that replaced the tinsel was much easier to handle, and again I circled the tree, moving the ladder and laying the long band of green and sparkles gently the bed of fragrant needles.  I found the Styrofoam star from an old Christmas pageant – one we had covered with glittery paper and ribbon – and placed it gently at the top.

I stood back and gazed at the lights and the garland.  So far so good.  The rest of the decorations would be hung on Christmas Eve by the grandchildren.

The decoration of the Christmas tree, or trimming the tree as it was once called, marks the passage of time in our family.  I think of other trees and other lights and other garlands.  This year I had just finished writing our Christmas cards, and the names and faces lingered as I layered the lights through the greens.  Babies had been born, elderly friends had died.  Some of the names were new, some changed due to marriage or divorce.  Children had graduated, gone to college, left home.  Each name was a light on the tree, on its own journey.  My list of names was ever-changing, forming new garlands weaving through my life.  But the names that were removed from the list – those who had passed on to the next life, remained in my heart, enriching my memory as they had enriched my own passage through time.  And with joy I added new names, babies born to these blessed friends and family.

The Christmas tree is the tree of life, an ancient evergreen symbol of Christ and his body. Christ is the star shining on top.  He is the vine and we are the branches.  It is a holy wood from the Tree of Life in Eden and a holy wood from the cross on Golgotha.  The roots run deep.  Life pulses through the greens.

And so Christmas is just such a celebration of life, new life today, new life to come in Heaven, for, of course, the greatest gift of life is the birth the holy child in Bethlehem, who will come to us in the Eucharist, and who will come to us in the future to judge the living and the dead.  And as he gives himself to us, so we give to each other at Christmas.  We light candles to light the dark, as God lights the darkness of our world, now in the dead of winter.

Advent.  The advent of Our Lord among us.  In church today the children told the great story  of his coming.  They processed slowly down the red-carpeted aisle and took their places to sing carols and read lessons.  They told the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and the need for a Savior.  They told of the prophesies of the coming Messiah.  They told of Angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would bear this child whom she would call Jesus, and of Joseph, and of the shepherds and the angels. As the last shepherd stepped slowly up the aisle to join the living crèche, the youngest babies, Izzy (six months) and Luisa (seventeen days), followed, cradled by grateful women.  It was a joyous moment, a time when all the children and parents and congregation joined together to praise God for his great gifts, his gift of himself, and his gift of these children to us.

And soon we received him in the bread and wine, kneeling before the high altar, uniting, aged seventeen days to ninety-five years.

Incarnation.  Birth.  Eucharist.  Miracles among us.  Christmas!

The temperatures have dropped and rain is forecast.  Will there be snow on Mount Diablo tonight?

It is the Christmas season, a time of bustle and buying, of gathering with friends and associates to share a meal, exchange gifts and greetings.  Happy Holidays we say more often than Merry Christmas, not wanting to offend other traditions.  Yet the holidays still center on Christmas Day.  The school vacations lead up to and fall away from this festival.  We as a nation still honor and live out in our culture this time of hope.

I give thanks that this remains so, although as Christians we must not be ashamed of our faith, not, as Christ said in today’s Gospel lesson, “be offended” by him.  We must live out our faith, respecting others, loving others.  We must not hide our light.  We must share the great hope of Christmas to all who have the ears to hear.

It all depends, I suppose, on who we claim Jesus Christ was, is.  In today’s lesson, St. Matthew (11:2+) describes  how John the Baptist, now in prison, sends two of his followers to see if Christ is indeed the long-awaited messiah. Jesus answers with a catalog of miracles: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up.  This is, of course, exactly what the prophets prophesied.  What did you expect to see? he asks.  Look at what I do.

In the Advent daily prayer offices we are immersed in those prophecies, and now see Christ reminding us that he truly is this long-awaited messiah.  We are also immersed in the terror of the apocalypse, the wrath of God upon the corrupt, the lawbreakers, those who hurt, lie, steal, kill.  We see a God who divides the wheat from the tares, the weeds.  We wait for our redemption, a way to be saved.  We wait for the way, the truth, and the life, the messiah who bridges this huge gulf between prophecy and judgment, this gulf of Advent.

And of course the Incarnation, Christmas, bridges this great gulf.  God provides a way out of ourselves and into his kingdom.  He provides this long-awaited messiah, Jesus Christ, who saves us from sin and thus from death.

Another time Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say I am?”  Peter answers, “You are Christ, Son of the living God.”

Today is Laetare Sunday, which means “Rejoice,” called this for the Latin introit, Rejoice in the Lord always… (Philippians 4).  Today is also Rose Sunday.  We light our pink candle and the two purple ones on the Advent wreathe, a lighter-themed day in our penitential season of purple. Today the theme is Heaven.  Advent one and two were themed Death and Judgment, Advent four, Hell.  Not many pastors preach on these traditional topics today, for some folks might be… well, offended.  But without facing death and judgment we have no need for Christ to give us the way to Heaven and not Hell.  And whether or not we face these things, they will face us.

Who is Jesus Christ?  Did he do the miracles recorded?  Did he fulfill the prophesies?  Was he born to a virgin in a cave outside Bethlehem on a cold starry night?  Did he live a life of miracles and die a shameful death, fulfilling even more prophecies?  And most important, did he rise from the dead as he foretold?

I believe he is indeed the messiah, long-awaited by the People of Israel.  I believe he did all these things described by the prophets and in the Gospels, all these astounding deeds which would, one would think, convince us that he was who he claimed to be.  Yet even after two thousand years, some believe, some don’t.  They never find the way.

Who is Jesus Christ?  The evidence, I believe, is clear and compelling.  I hold this faith close as I return to Isaiah and St. John’s revelations, as I too await the coming of God to a manger in great humility.  I hold this faith close as I sing with fellow believers, Come, O come, Emanuel, to ransom captive Israel… on this cold Laetare Sunday in the dead of winter.  I hold it close as I share meals with friends and family and wrap special gifts and decorate with pungent greenery and colored balls of glitter.  I hold this faith close as the day turns dark early and I light the fire in the fireplace and listen to calling-carols  and watch the heavy gray skies hover over the mountain.

Come, O come, Emmanuel, to ransom us.  Come, O come, Emmanuel… come and ransom little me.

The high winds sweeping northern California lessened today, and we woke to crystal clear skies, the bright sun shining this Second Sunday in Advent, a sun warming the cold air of December.

And so we bundled off to church to worship in our warm sanctuary.  The Advent wreath stood Gospel-left, near the chancel steps, and two purple candles flamed.  We listened to the poetic Collect (the opening prayer), written five hundred years ago by Thomas Cranmer and part of our Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick (living) and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal….

It is a prayer said in every Advent service, and each year, as part of my Advent rule, I try to re-memorize this wonderful summary of Christ’s coming to us.

We are a historical church, going back to Christ’s advent two thousand years ago. Through the centuries we have kept what is true and thrown out what is false, looking to the authority of Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Church year in and year out.  Part of that keeping is the keeping of words, for words are how most of us pray, how most of us touch God and hear his voice.  Words are how we make sense of our lives.  We call that keeping of words, our memory.

Much has been written recently, mourning the scarcity of memory work required in grade schools.  I recall memorizing poems, and working to root the words and phrases in my mind.  I would repeat and repeat and repeat, until finally the words became part of me, automatic.  Perhaps it was this automatic, “rote,” aspect that educators found to be without meaning, but, since I have returned to memorizing prayers and psalms, I find that the words become more meaningful, not less.  They become part of me.  And they are always there for me to hold onto, to remember, to light up the dark places in my life.

If poets and writers, prophets and preachers, from the past have captured truth with meaningful words, shouldn’t we memorize those expressions of truth?  We need to keep them close, engraft them onto our hearts and into our minds.

The children practiced the Christmas pageant today.  They are memorizing lines so that they can speak and sing the words, so that they can tell the miraculous story of Christmas to all the congregation.  God will work through our children, speaking through them to us.  Such a marvelous experience – to bring God’s words to his people.

I love re-memorizing the Collect for Advent each year.  We throw out the dark and arm ourselves with the light.  We are mortal and call upon the immortal, Jesus Christ who visits us in great humility.  We welcome this humble child born in a cave outside Bethlehem, so that when he returns in his glorious majesty, we will rise with him to life immortal.  This child wipes away our tears.  He saves us from ourselves, banishes the darkness.  Learning these words help me to hold these truths close.  They light my darkness.

I shall also keep Advent by reading Evening Prayer each night.  The Scripture lessons pair Isaiah’s prophecies with Revelation’s apocalypse.  The readings steep me in Christmas, the meaning of the Incarnation, the light transforming the darkness, no less than the redemption of man.

My new memory work this year, however, is found in our Morning Prayer office.  It is called the Benedictus, recorded by St. Luke.  It is Zacharia’s prophesy, spoken after his time of not being able to speak, after the birth of his son, John the Baptist: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who has visited and redeemed his people, and has raised up a mighty salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spake by the mouths of his holy prophets which have been since the world began…

As I commit these words to memory, I shall pray them, engrafting them, calming the raging winds, warming the chilly air, lighting the dark.  As Christmas draws near, I will carry these words in my heart, just as Israel carried their hopes for the promised messiah.  The words shall be calling words, first spoken by Zacharias so many hears ago, words now spoken by little me, bringing Christ among us in this Year of Our Lord, Christmas 2011.

We call him and he comes.  We hold onto our memory, carried into the present with words.

In this time of war and rumors of war, of government intrusion into our lives on so many levels, it was good this week to pause and give thanks for our country, for our freedom of worship and speech.

I gave thanks.  I considered those who fled religious persecution to forge a new nation under God, guaranteeing each of us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The United States of America remains that nation as we struggle to protect life and ensure liberty so that we may indeed pursue happiness.  I gave thanks that I was lucky enough to be born in America.  I gave thanks that I am blessed to still be living, at the gentle age of sixty-four, and living in this exceptional nation.

I thought about liberty and its corollary, responsibility.  And with responsibility, I thought, comes a standard by which we measure our lives, define our duties to God, family, community, country.  With responsibility, comes self-examination.  With self-examination, hopefully, comes penitence and repentance, a turning.

The “I’m okay you’re okay” culture will not support liberty.  “That’s just me, just my thing, just the way I am” will not protect freedoms.  We must, as individuals forming culture, return to an acknowledgement of guilt, make our confessions – if I may be so bold to use the unpopular word – of sin.  Without this examination, we have little hope of ensuring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And so we enter Advent, that marvelous, mysterious, miraculous season of hope.  A four-week preparation for the great intersection of the eternal into the finite, the immortal into the world of the mortal.  The Incarnation.  In the flesh.  Christ-mas.  We recall that two thousand years ago God took on flesh and walked among us.

We celebrate with rich symbols: an evergreen tree laden twinkling with lights and fantastical ornaments, candles aflame, gifts expressing our love for one another, holy-day foods and drinks that sweeten the tongue and warm the heart.  We sing the stories of Christ’s coming so long ago so that we will not forget.  To prepare for his coming we sing calling-hymns, in minor keys, “O come, o come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel….”  The Messiah is coming… the one promised to the prophets!  As we draw nearer to Christmas Day we tell the story in our pageants and Gospel lessons.

Keeping Advent prepares us for Christ’s coming to us again and again in the Eucharist and coming to us in our daily prayers.  We prepare for his bodily Second Coming to earth, when a new world will be formed under his rule.  How do we prepare our hearts?  We clean them out to make room.  We examine our lives and throw out the clutter.

We simplify.  Not easy to do in our commercial culture of noise and bluster and busyness.  But we try.  We increase our daily prayer life; we go to church.  We pause in the stillness to hear him speak to us.

Even in our secular culture the great story of the Incarnation rises from our common consciousness in symbols, rituals, and stories.  Good Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Smyrna, appears to us as Santa Claus.  He drives a sled through the starry heavens full of gifts.  He brings hope and cheer, and a sort of justice, a rustic memory of God the Father.  His steadfast reappearance each year is, I think, for the most part a good thing.  In Santa we honor laughter, love, and sharing, not to mention responsible behavior.  Santa is making a list and checking it twice.  He is keeping a moral scorecard.  Examine and repent, Saint Nicholas reminds us through our children.  Will we listen?  Perhaps we are too grown-up to believe… too grown-up to bear freedom as it must be borne.  Perhaps we are not grown-up enough.

Because I am so very thankful for our freedom, I take this holy season of Advent to examine my heart, to turn to the light and away from the dark, to prepare for the child born in Bethlehem, the child that will save my soul.

O come, o come, Emmanuele.

I just finished Abby Johnson’s astonishing account of her move from being Director of a Planned Parenthood Clinic to a Coalition for Life spokesperson. I treasure so many moments in this book. I heartily recommend Unplanned.

I did not plan on encountering such a sympathetic, understanding portrait of the pro-choice, pro-abortion movement coming from one who had chosen to leave it. Abby clearly knows what it is to love your enemy. Or perhaps that is going too far – for she wouldn’t use the word enemy.

Since she was once on their staff, she can truly empathize, and she does. In this way Unplanned is a different kind of pro-life apologia. And, I think, she is on the right track, just as the prayer vigils outside abortion clinics are a better approach than showing graphic photos of aborted babies and name-calling.

One of the remarkable insights I received from Abby’s book, and there were many such flashes of sudden understanding, is how language is used to promote a viewpoint. As an avid reader and novelist, I have been long attuned to the use of language. But the power of word substitution such asfetus for baby, or termination for abortion, struck me forcibly. When we call that person growing in the womb a fetus and not a baby, a mindset change takes place. When we call the taking of life a medical proceduresolving a disease-like problem, a mindset change takes place.

I considered how we all lie to ourselves, how we all avoid some of the hard truths of life. We avoid thinking about our own deaths, for we might need to examine our own lives. We avoid examining our own lives, for we might need to admit fault, an admission that suggests, even demands, change. We avoid God, sliding away from proofs for his existence, for we might need to obey his commandments, beginning with regular Sunday worship. We slip and we slide, many times without being aware of it. And often our culture encourages the sliding.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said. While I would argue that every life is worth living, I see his point. Man needs meaning and direction, and such meaningful direction comes from an examined life. We become whole when we understand where we are going and why. We experience joy when we come to know the author of that path. Without God, we wander and we wonder. Eventually, we despair.

The Church’s season of Advent approaches, the four weeks that prepare us for the coming of Christ, Christmas. Some call it a “mini-Lent,” although our culture discourages such observance, particularly in the December frenzy of shopping and parties. Even so, it is a time to examine one’s life. It is a time to return to God, to seek order and meaning in our choices each and every day. It is a time to go back to church to find him.

I find that Advent and Lent pull me into reality, return sanity to my life, particularly if my time on earth has not been recently examined. They are seasons of preparation for the great acts of God among us – the Incarnation in a cave outside Bethlehem, the Crucifixion and Resurrection on a hill outside Jerusalem. Advent is a time to examine my life, hold it up to God’s standards and repent of the slips and slides that I may not have recognized during the year.

As I read Abby Johnson’s powerful and sympathetic first-person account, I gave thanks to God for his working among us. I was reminded that each of us can be manipulated by words, propaganda, and societal pressure. Do we want to be blown about by others? I think not. Only God can give us the strength and wisdom to live a true life, an examined life, a life-welcoming life, a life planned by God, if perhaps unplanned by us.

Thank you, Abby Johnson.

It has been a stunning week and in many respects I am catching my breath, before breathing normally again.

We have returned to the Big Island of Hawaii for a few days to read and write and rest.  Here, along the Kohala coast, the sea rustles the shore, and moist air kisses our aging skin.  It is a gentle world to all appearances, and one might think it was indeed the first paradise, the Garden of Eden.  Sights and sounds and scents and flavors and soft breezes cosset us in a sweet cocoon and for the time being we can hide from the real world, the world we have left.

Appearances can be deceiving, I fully know.  The sea can pull out and under, the sun can burn and devour, the rain and wind can flood and destroy.

Just so, I thought, appearances are often deceiving in the world we left – the world of wars and rumors of wars, of lawsuits, of greed, of lying, of fraud and breach of trust, of misuse and mismanagement, mis-this and mis-that, the twisting of truths.  The media strikingly knows this full well as it colors stories to their liking.  Right and wrong.  Truth and falsity.  Where is the line dividing them?  Is the gray country in between so difficult to navigate?

Today’s Epistle was Paul’s wonderful passage about putting on the full armor of God:

My brethren, be strong in the Lord in the power of his might.  Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield offaith, where with ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of theSpirit, which is the word of God… (italics mine) Ephesians 6:10+

So the full armor is truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the word of God.  I try to recall these things as I maneuver through the confusing world about us, making my own small choices, thinking how could they possibly matter.

But they do matter.  These choices protect us from the world’s discord and anarchy, from, indeed, death.  How we chose to live our lives counts.

My stunning moment from last week came as a response from from one of my final draft readers in New Zealand.  He is a language scholar and lay theologian for whom I have immense admiration and respect, and God has blessed me with his wisdom and excellent editorial eye, his suggestions after reading the first and sixth drafts of my novel-in-progress, The Magdalene Mystery.   He sent me his most recent comments and included a stunning quotation for the book jacket.  I am overwhelmed, and of course, deeply thankful.

My novel is about truth – how we know it, how we use it in our perception of the world, how it influences our choices in life.  In a word, or rather phrase, how truth governs our lives.

As our world discards the idea of truth and embraces relativity, personal taste, subjectivism, each of us must take on the armor of God.  Each of us must question our own choices, set them against standards of right and wrong, of righteousness.  But whose standard?  Whose authority?  For Christians, the answer is simple: God’s.  But how do we know his will?  St. Paul gives us guidelines to help us discern.  We learn how to love (the gospel of peace), we keep the faith (in Christ), and we absorb Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Church through which the Holy Spirit weaves.  In this way we are protected from falsehood and the “wiles of the devil.”  We are saved.

I feel more “armored” simply having read the Epistle, more ready to re-enter the real world of twists and turns that lie ahead.  I shall be prepared to choose.

Yesterday, Saturday, was cold, the temperatures dropping, surprising me.  Damp seeped over the hills, sliding into our home through windows and doors, an invisible chill.  I grabbed my winter jacket and headed for our parish’s annual Holiday Boutique.

Red-draped tables were piled high with goodies and gifts – soup mixes, cookies, cakes; country crafts, colorful cottons to hold shoes, paisleys to cosset jewelry, floral prints to keep bread warm with a tiny pocket of rice to microwave and return to the neat little pocket (so clever!).  The hall was full of imagination and color, and I meandered along the aisles, caught in a garden of dreams turned into handiwork that had been loved with each stitch and with each knit and purl.  There were tiny booties and toasty slippers in blues and pinks and colorful jumbled weaves, little caps and big caps for the snow and rain, for the little people and the big people, scarves looping and softly flowing, shawls to drape over chilling shoulders.  The men of the parish had made signs for the busy street corner and had climbed ladders to loop streamers between green wreathes in the hall.  Holiday music swung from note to note, getting us all in the mood.  There were raffle tickets for bottles of wine and gift baskets and even a set of my little books.

My little books looked rather dull next to all of this.  Nevertheless, I set them out and signed and chatted with folks as they dropped by.

This last week was one of my favorites in the Church Year.  The world was silly on Halloween Monday – pretending to be what it was not, wishing for more sugar (who doesn’t?), being someone else for a few hours, someone good, evil, famous, clever, silly, serious.  Goblins and witches roamed neighborhoods and folks gathered to sip mulled wine and answer  doorbells and fill pillow cases with mini candy bars.  Trick-or-treat!  Halloween.  All Hallows Eve.  The night before All Saints Day.  The night when the spirits of the dead roamed the earth, that is, before the belief was vanquished by the Church.  Perhaps those spirits too were unhappy with who they were.

There was a time, before the West was Christianized, when the end of summer was celebrated on October 31.  It was believed that the spirits of ancestors roamed the earth this night, and folks would light bonfires to frighten them away.  They also left food out to appease their terrible tempers.  Christianity dispelled those fears, or should have, for Christians do not believe that the dead roam the earth, but rather that they are with God in Heaven.  We no longer fear the dead or our own death.  The Church, as it did with many of its festivals explaining this wonderful resurrection faith, transformed a pagan festival of fear into a Christian festival of love, All Saints, honoring these men and women of God.

And so on All Saints Tuesday we gathered to offer our thanksgivings for the saints, past, present, and to come, those living among us, loving us, sacrificing for us.  We met in the great nave and before the white tented tabernacle and offered this Mass of thanksgiving for those who knew fully who they were, who in their life on earth grew more and more full of God.  As they journeyed in time, God molded them into their true selves.

Many of us returned on Wednesday for All Souls day, that day of thanks and remembrance for the rest of those who have died and have passed into eternal glory.  As Christians we know these souls do not roam the earth.  We live with the certainty they are happy and that we shall join them one day.  At the Mass for All Souls our priest read the names of those members and friends of the parish who have traveled to Heaven, and I listened to the list tolled in the cool air of the sanctuary, as light streamed through skylights upon the crucifix.  I knew many of them.  Among them there were Willa and Louise and Jeanine and Kay and Vi and Elizabeth and Dot, women who had mothered me in my single parent days, women who had cuddled my four-year-old son who at the time had no father in his life.  There were the men too – Hugh and George and John and Jim.  And many more.  These are the saints I think of often, the souls in heaven who made such a difference on earth, who knew all about love.

So it was with a heart full of those who had gone before me, those who had once stood in this hall and sold handicrafts crafted with love so many years ago, that I browsed our parish Holiday Boutique.  I gave thanks for the men and women who had gone ahead and as I lifted my eyes to one of the ladies selling a calico memo holder with magnets for the fridge, I was overwhelmed by love.

I left the church laden with goodies, and impatiently awaiting the chance to try the freshly made pecan pralines.  I also carried in my bursting bag a jar of soup mixings, the same savory minestrone we had with our tea-lunch (excellent) and while I am not much of a cook, this has given me a goal.  We shall have soup over the holidays, paired with a nice crusty loaf of whole wheat.

It was raining lightly as I made my way to my car.  I pulled my jacket tighter about me and popped open my umbrella, ready to journey a bit farther in my span of time, full of the life and love of God manifested in his people.

The week was a triumphant one.  I finished the nearly final draft of my novel,The Magdalene Mystery, which is concerned with the search for truth in a world of lies.  I bundled several copies off to readers in Rome, Maryland, New Zealand, Provence, and Sunnyvale, California.  Each person will bring his or her unique talents and background to my little creation and I shall listen to what they tell me.

My little creation.  Sighing with relief and joy, I considered what I had done.  For words on their own are wild things, meaningless collections of consonants and vowels that need to become part of a greater organized whole.  Until then they lie fallow, waiting.  But we humans harness those words into phrases, give those phrases shape in sentences, those sentences real substance in paragraphs.  We fatten the paragraphs into pages, the pages into chapters, the chapters into books.  (the books into libraries?… or flash drives?)  We create language, and with language we tell stories, give meaning to our lives.

We impose order on chaos.  Just like God when he made the world.  Just like God when he created us.

Today in church we celebrated the Feast of Christ the King.  We sang glorious hymns.  For the processional we sang the lyrical Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation; O my soul, praise him, for he is thy health and salvation….  For the Offertory we thundered Luther’s A mighty fortress is our God, A bulwark never failing; Our helper he amid the flood Of mortal ills prevailing…  And for the recessional joined in All hail the power of Jesus’ Name! Let angels prostrate fall; Bring forth the royal diadem, And crown him Lord of all!  We soared into the music, lifting our voices in praise to our King, who has imposed order on the chaos of our lives.  The music shall linger with me through the week, making sense of my minutes and hours.

Our preacher explained how we were created by God and thus impressed with his image, just as a coin is impressed with the figure of a monarch.  God’s creative order pulses through us; we need only turn to him, realize his author-ship.  Since World War II, he continued, the West has largely rebelled against authority and we find our world today retrogressing to the chaos of the jungle.  Yet good – godly – authority is our only guarantee of freedom, our only means to meaning in our lives, our only path to love.

As I gazed on the realistic wooden crucifix over the altar, with its dying body on the cross, I recalled a Christ the King crucifix I have at home.  A king on a cross!  A king dying a criminal’s death, a shameful death, a vagrant’s death.  A king with his crown and red robes, the robes of resurrection, the robes of victory, the robes of loving and sacrificial authority.  A death that overcomes death.

As Christians we have a king with authority.  As Christians we are given the power to create as God once pulled light from the dark.  We have the means to order the chaos around us.  We need only turn to him, obey his commands, allow his life to run through our veins.

Just as I harnessed my 88,000 words into sentences in The Magdalene Mystery so Christ harnesses our lives into sanctity, into love, into becoming creators.

And so it seems appropriate that tomorrow is All Hallows’ Eve, popularly called Halloween, the night before the Feast of All Saints.  On All Saints we thank God for all those men and women who have allowed God to write his story on their hearts and in their minds, to recreate their lives, to impress them again and again with his image.  We pray that we may be impressed, recreated, sanctified, that our chaos may be ordered by his authority.

We give thanks for Christ the King of creation.

It is fall and the leaves are falling, forming golden ponds of orange and yellow upon the paths and roads, the walkways and yards.  The leaves rain down from their lofty branches, dead now, having provided our green shade in the warmer months, having protected us from the sun.  Now the sun enshrines the riot of color splashed against the hillsides in these last bright bursts before winter.

Changing seasons.  Passing time.  The living die, the dead mulches new life, waiting in the womb of the earth, for spring.  We harvest and prepare the land for its slumber.  We prune so that the living may produce new life, trimming branches to stalks, cutting back and throwing out.  All the earth moves and changes, rumbling through autumn like a giant beast.

We too rumble to our deaths, having come from cells uniting, having grown miraculously day by day to this present moment, decaying imperceptibly.  Our days are numbered and we count the years since our birth, celebrating with song and gifts and love.  But we too shall discard our bodies, shall see them decompose into the earth.  We shall fall.  We shall die.

Yet we have a promise, a hope.  We know our spirits shall live on, infused with God’s sacramental grace.  We, in baptism, have already been reborn, have already become united with the eternal.  We are not leaves of autumn, or the plowed-under field, or even our own bodies that shall one day become ashes and dust.  We are immortal, beloved by God.

One day we will be given new bodies, resurrected with God the Son, Christ, pulled with him into glory.  Unlike the decomposing earth, we shall live through him.  This is the great Christian hope.  This is the great Christian victory.

Winter approaches.  The days are short, the nights long.  The dark encroaches upon the light like an eclipse of the sun, and so too our world, with its wars and rumors of wars is caught in the shadowlands of battle.  Our world waits for the light, for the sun to emerge from the shadow of the earth, for dawn to break.  We wait for Christ’s coming.

But in the meantime we have the passage of time, the seasons, the glorious drama of the natural world given for our delight.  We have the Creeds and the law and love of God to keep us straight and true, to place our feet on the right path through the days and weeks and months of the year, through the seasons of sowing and reaping and slumber.  We have Sunday worship and communing with him in the Eucharist so that Monday will be a day of life and love.

As a child I liked to jump in the leaves, hearing the crunch, feeling the crisp collapse.  Now I sweep them aside to prepare a path, and marvel at their colors.  Tomorrow I shall walk between them, through them, as they rain upon me, to new and glorious life.

This last week we celebrated St. Michael and All Angels, the defender of heaven and our defender too.

There was great war in heaven, so Scripture tells us, and Archangel Michael and his heavenly host of angels cast out the angel Lucifer, who had rebelled against God.

Myth?  Dream?  Real event?

While many passages of Holy Scripture are indeed myths, telling greater truths, or dreams, predicting real events, this account of the war in heaven rings true.  I see the war in heaven all around me in our fallen world, and in my own fallen heart.  Good and evil battle continually, and sometimes we see it, sometimes we don’t.

So I love the feast day of St. Michael.  I love that Satan is defeated and thrown out.  For I know God wins in the end.  It is good to remember too that God is not fighting Lucifer.  God and Satan are not equal combatants.  Michael and Satan fight this war in heaven. The angel Lucifer grew too proud, too full of himself, setting himself up as God.

Today’s Gospel was the parable of the lilies of the field, where Jesus tells us to not be anxious about tomorrow, consider the lilies, how they are not anxious. Christ is not telling us not to carry out our responsibilities to society, to one another.  But once these obligations are met, we have no need to worry.  Let God do the rest.  Enjoy him and his creation.

God’s acting in time and eternity, his final victory, his valiant angels, also give me peace of mind.  I know that by believing in Christ and his great redemptive acts, I shall become one with him in the Eucharist, and one with him in eternity in heaven.  This knowledge gives me peace.

The hymns today were all about Michael, and we sang with intense anticipation and praise as the thurifer prepared the way along the red-carpeted aisle, throwing incense into the air, processing to the candle-lit altar and the green tented tabernacle.  The crucifer followed, holding the crucifix high, an extension of himself.  The clergy came last.  They stepped joyously and solemnly, filled with God’s certain love.  The stunning liturgy of the Holy Eucharist began, the immense offering prayer of God’s people, the liturgy of sacrifice repeated again and again since that last supper on Maundy Thursday so long ago, an offering repeated until the return of Christ to earth.

Today we welcomed our new vicar who is also named Michael, and I prayed that he would renew our people, fill them with the golden goodness of God in Scripture and Sacrament, in prayer and song.  I prayed that he would cast out the evil and nurture the good.

As we left, I recalled that this Tuesday is the Feast of Saint Francis, a poor beggar filled with the same confidence as Archangel Michael.  Francis had no worries, padding the trails of thirteenth-century Italy, walking through the fields, talking to the birds, at one with God and his creation.

I gave thanks for the poetic symmetry of the lessons and feasts, Michael yesterday, the lilies today, Francis tomorrow.  It is harvest time, and we offer thanks for our crops, for sun and rain and wind.  We are at once a part of it and not a part of it, somehow the same but different, with our creator binding us together.  In time we will understand this mystery.

For now, the Archangel Michael defends heaven and Saint Francis celebrates earth.  Creator, we the created, and creation, are one.