Advent Devotional Dec. 6, 2021

CCIO Advent Devotional

Dec. 6, 2021

…When you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

 ~ Matthew 6:3-4 (NRSV)

Myra was a Greek city on the southern coast of what's now Turkey, in which it's a small town called Demre. But as part of Lycian Greece, it was an outpost of Grecian culture, a seaport with cosmopolitan connections, and in the early Fourth Century the Christian community of Myra had its own bishop, a fellow named Nicholas.

There's a long journey from Nicholas of Myra to Santa Claus, and some might even argue there's no real connection anymore between the two. This is where the wider Christian tradition of acknowledging saints has been less accepted in more austere branches of our faith community, because the historic person and the legends that can entwine their image can in truth end up at some distance from each other.

Saint Nicholas is honored in the ancient Christian calendar on December 6, traditionally the date of his passing in the year 343. The week between St. Nicholas's Day and St. Lucy's on the 13th is where many northern European traditions of trees and candles and wreaths and gifts have their actual roots, grafted onto the celebration of the birth of Jesus a little later in the month.

December 6 as a time for gift giving has the longest heritage, although it might be worth recalling that for many centuries while there were gifts in the Advent season, they were no more than could be stuffed into a stocking or stuck in a shoe left at a child's bedroom door. This would seem to leave out ponies and bicycles and game consoles, let alone automobiles with giant red bows.

But the idea of a secretly given gift, without the giver seeking credit for having left it, has a very long and honorable heritage going back at least to Nicholas himself. The legends go back nearly to his era, that the bishop of Myra was, as a good Christian pastor would be, attentive to the hurts and needs of the congregation. Nicholas knew of certain challenges faced by various families in his parish, and found a way to make the practical side of a solution (gold coins, or a ransom in a pouch, or some other tangible way to pay off a debt) show up in their house. He never climbed down a chimney in those first stories out of Myra, but sometimes stockings or shoes by a fireplace were the receptacle of the needed gold bags.

The semi-ironic point of them all was that the receivers didn't know who their benefactor was, though if that really was the case, why do we know it was Bishop Nick here some seventeen centuries later? Ah, saints stories. Like a modern superhero movie, you may not want to pick at the details too closely, let alone the physics. The through-line of the story is that there was a family in need, a church ready to respond, and a gift given not to receive thanks in return, but to honor Jesus's call to love one another.

And isn't the clear origin of the impulse of Saint Nicholas that caution from Christ in the Sermon on the Mount: that in giving gifts to aid and uplift others, don't tell people. Don't put your name on a plaque. Don't make a big deal about it to others. In fact, don't even let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. A warning I read this way: when you give a gift? Give, and let it go. If you give something to someone, and you find yourself worrying about their reaction, their response, how thankful they are or whether it's getting used the way you think it should? You need to forget about it. That's the left side of your brain knowing too much about what the right half got going on. Drop it.

Leaving aside the puzzle of how we know, but letting it be one of those artistic license moments, Bishop Nicholas in helping his community members was truly a Secret Santa. That was clearly his intention, and that seems to be a scriptural intention, too. May all our giving and sharing and helping this Advent be done in that same spirit.

Prayer: God of grace, giver of every good and perfect gift, help us to give freely, to receive thankfully, and to share in the joys of this season as people of grace, a family of faith, with a witness to the world. Amen!

[Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher living in Granville, Ohio; his email is knapsack77@gmail.com but he's fairly slow about replying, so please be patient.]

CCIO Advent 2021 devotional text

CCIO Advent devotional

Dec. 13, 2021

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

 ~ James 1:17 (NRSV)

Before the reforms of the Western calendar, December 13 was effectively the winter solstice date, the shortest day and longest night of the year.

It was also the feast of Sancta Lucia, St. Lucy's Day, and the connections of "lux" or light with Lucia meant that from Sicily to Sweden, in early Europe the celebration of this date meant folk traditions to ask for vision, light, and the rebirth of the daytime hours which would become visibly longer about December 25th, at Christmas.

We have other ways to mark the month and the days, and light switches to banish the gloom of evening coming shortly after lunchtime, but for all our modern innovations, we still seek vision. To see, and see clearly.

James speaks in his letter about light from above; Alexander Campbell cited this verse to explain his windowless study with a six-sided cupola allowing only "light from above." The message of James is that every self-giving act, every perfect gift, brings us something of God, of the divine intention, into our everyday life.

St. Lucy in her martyr's tale from the third century tells us about a young woman who chooses to see God's love as the most important love in her life; there are many myths about her, all of them eloquent (and some creepy), but I most like the stories that talk about how she could not be moved, even by a team of oxen. She was barely more than a little girl in the midst of the Roman Empire at its height, but they could not move her. God and the love of charity and chastity and compassion came first, and not wild horses or well trained draft animals could move her. She could not be moved.

In Advent, we look for the light of God to grow on us and around us, and we pray that when God's anointed comes to lead us, that we will follow, that we will not be moved from that faithfulness. Advent is about the promise God has given, again and again, to offer guidance when we need it, to lead us for a season, to transform us for eternity. Lucy heard and saw and believed that promise, which gave her enough light to follow step by step. On St. Lucy's Day, we can remember that witness, her martyrdom, as a light for us which "comes from above." 

As saint's tales do, from St. Nicholas to Sancta Lucia, her image and story becomes in the north of Europe a procession of young women walking slowly, deliberately, with a crowning wreath studded with lit candles, avatars of a coming dawn made real on the "longest night" as Dec. 13 once was in Sweden. Those illuminated acolytes cast flickering shadows on the snow, a tribute to a young woman who likely never saw snow in her life.

The Christian journey, the story within the story of Advent, is one where we find ourselves made one family, siblings of the Christ, children of the Most High, alongside of Sicilian princesses and Scandinavian children. We are ancient modern people, brought together from the east to the west, the arctic to the antarctic, from Romans to Americans, empires lost and rising and falling again, but all made one in a redeemed and resurrected hope.

May we all find light from above that illumines our inmost thoughts, our late night reflections, well before the reassurance of the dawn a light that comes from above but shines out within. Sancta Lucia, shine your light upon us!

And may we remember that all light comes from above, from God.

Prayer: Illumine Thou our hearts, O God, and shine not only on us, but through us, that we might show a light which helps others find a path that leads towards your love. Amen!

[Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher living in Granville, Ohio; his email is knapsack77@gmail.com but he's fairly slow about replying, so please be patient.]

Notes from my Knapsack 11-25-21

Notes from my Knapsack 11-25-21
Jeff Gill

Thankful for losses, large and small
____

Being thankful is one of the usual duties of the season, and certainly an expectation for columnists. Most of us find at one point or another as November winds its way towards December thinking about what we are thankful for.

You can make quite a list, some years, of gifts and events and occasions, of people and relationships, of all that has made us thankful in the last year, or at least as much of it as we can recall from the vantage point of the eleventh month.

My thoughts are going in a somewhat different direction, not that I don't have a number of wonderful reasons to be freshly thankful. But after the last few years I've had work to do heading into Thanksgiving Day on being thankful for . . . well, let's put it this way: for things I generally didn't start out being thankful for.

I'm still slowly adjusting to not being a parish minister, a settled preacher in a church where I go to the same pulpit each Sunday and preach to a largely similar congregation week after week. That is the life I had been used to for decades before, and like most people, I liked what I was used to.

Yet there are blessings to having the freedom, which I had to push myself to claim, of being able to care for family members in the middle of the complications of COVID. There are pleasures of meeting new faces, masked or otherwise, and preaching to a completely different group than you did the last time you got up to share good news as a preacher. It stretches different preaching muscles to craft a message that way, and I've learned some things about myself, about churches, about faith.

And as I've written about before, the aftermath of my father's passing and the closing down of the family house in Indiana has brought me home taking a different eye to my own possessions, some of them with strong sentimental attachments. Aside from the truism of "you can't take it with you," you can't even get much of it into a retirement community, and most of it my son is not going to want to inherit. I'm thankful I've been coming to a new relationship to my stuff, to memorabilia, to what I (think I) can't do without.

With this year's new version of some of the same struggles we had last year, not to get into too many personal details, it's also been a time to confront some limits. In myself, in others, and as we (in our family, anyhow) start to assess what we can and can't do it's a healthy time to figure out what is possible, even if it's not exactly what we wanted to do. Clarity is a gift, one with sharp edges but a useful reflection.

So I find myself thankful, in a way, for losses, for paring down, cutting back, getting focus even if on a smaller field of view. Clarity is indeed a gift, and I want to be thankful for it.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thankful for a whole lot of people but that's a different column. Tell him about how you've been thankful for unexpected things at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 11-27-21

Faith Works 11-27-21
Jeff Gill

The Wheel of the Year, Cycle of the Seasons
___

Full disclosure: I love the Christian calendar.

My own religious tradition is one that is not as rooted in the observance of the church liturgical sequence as others; we hold that such things are non-essential, and in truth I would never judge harshly someone who said they found the so-called church calendar unhelpful. It's something we've created over the centuries to help make spiritual sense of our annual cycle of events.

The more rigorous of my fellow believers take as their guide not so much that if something is not explicitly forbidden in the Scriptures, you can do it, but if something is not specifically called for in the New Testament, you should not mark it. Severe Calvinists like Oliver Cromwell famously banned Christmas celebrations on this basis, and our early American Puritans felt much the same way; it took a Civil War and the experience of soldiers encamped with German Americans and Irish recent immigrant enlistees to re-disperse across the country traditions of trees and decorations and feasting and carols.

By the time we got Christmas back into most of American Christianity, even the most austere faith communities started to relax about a few manger scenes and maybe a tree in the vestibule. Once we'd had our troops overseas, especially into 1940s Europe, they came back with a love of candlelight services and "Silent Night" that's still a part of what many of us think of as a "traditional American" Christmas.

I grew up in the more progressive end of my tradition, but even in the church of my childhood, I don't recall words like lectionary or Advent being very common until well after I'd left for college. Hanging out with and ultimately ministering around Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians in a campus ministry, I saw the role in faith formation and Christian education that the church calendar could play; the Episcopalians down the block let alone the Catholic parish around the corner certainly had more candles (or even incense) than I was used to, so our less exuberant Advent or Lent still seemed to be in keeping with our heritage.

Going out into vocational ministry, I learned in the 1980s that terms like "Year C" or paraments were still a foreign language in plenty of parishes (my word processor still underlines paraments in red), but then I'd hear the question "where do you get those red or green or purple cloth covers for the pulpit and lectern?" Yep, paraments.

Again, I'd argue strongly against anyone wanting to say you must have paraments and a liturgical year to faithfully worship God and praise Christ, but I don't think they are an obstacle, either. They're a teaching tool, and one I have come to appreciate. It's not the end of the world if you miss a Sunday when the green should be changed to purple (hint: if you do that, it's time). And if you have come to prefer the color blue, or as I've heard "Advent blue" for the Sundays leading up to Christmas and the glory of white and gold, that's fine too, just don't make a crisis out of having the wrong color out. That makes the point the anti-liturgical people make about putting human traditions over divine intention, when we worry more about parament colors than the preaching.

It's the idea of the Christian calendar, though, that I've come to value most. It starts with each day, prayers at morning, noon, and evening for many of us, the rising and setting day after day, echoing the Son's rise; then the concept we all share of a day set aside to celebrate the Resurrection each week (even if there's a bit of debate over which day, with a few holding onto Saturday). Then each week we live out a cycle of birth, death, and resurrection in a recurring celebration (some marking each Friday as a reminder of Good Friday, along with other weekly observances); Advent and Lent are each their own self-contained cycle of weeks building to Christmas and Easter, the two axles of the whole ongoing process.

And the wheel within the wheel is the Christian year from the First Sunday of Advent (tomorrow!) through Pentecost, a coherent narrative about Christ set within the wider, ongoing turning of the year itself, both part of and set apart from earthly time.

Or perhaps tomorrow is simply a Sunday: even so, every one is a gift from God. On that we can all agree.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; now he's digging out all his Luke themed sermon notes for Year C. Tell him what Advent means to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 11-20-21

Faith Works 11-20-21

Jeff Gill

Thankfulness is a choice we can make

___

There's a new word that may or may not make it into future dictionaries, but it has plenty of usage right now.

The word is "Beforetime." As in, "the Beforetime, when we crowded into elevators without a second thought…"

Beforetime is a period of taking supply chains for granted, casual attitudes towards hand washing, and seeing crowds as cause for excitement. Beforetime is what some of us want to get back to, and a time which many of us are sure isn't coming around again. Or as Heraclitus said, "no one steps into the same Beforetime twice" (or Greek to that effect).

Ohio's own Warren Harding campaigned into the White House on the platform "a return to normalcy" which was a word we're still not sure is legit. But it's a word with new currency. We want something like normalcy, even if it isn't a 1920s version.

What our steadily easing circumstances can give us, though, is a very real sense of thankfulness for the things we now know we took for granted. Chocolate chip little bear cookies, the brand of toilet paper we knew fit onto our fixtures at home, going to concerts without a second thought: we can bemoan at length what we don't have back yet, entirely, or we can dig a bit deeper and be thankful for the fact we had those things, and have every expectation of getting back.

Or we can kvetch or mutter about how it is right now, and see if that makes us feel better. As Dr. Phil says: "How's that workin' for ya?"

Thankfulness. That's the theme of the season, the point of the holiday, where we want to be. To be thankful for as good as it is, not to focus on what it isn't now, isn't yet, isn't going to be soon. But we're working on our thankfulness for what we've had, and in a very practical sense, what we're entirely likely to get back again soon enough.

Right now, we don't have everything we'd like to have. That's a common sentiment at any given time. Even in the Beforetime, if we're honest. There's always something we'd like to have, to get, to hold onto, that's gone for now. COVID is making more immediate impacts on our lives, but this isn't all that unusual in the wider sense of how life goes. Read your Bible, read the histories, think about how it was for pioneers, settlers, our great-great-grandparents. This is a literal speed bump in the road by comparison.

So we have had, most of us, a long stretch of smooth driving at high speed, and now we have to slow down, and even brake our way over speed bumps. Okay. No crisis, right?

For the Christians out there, we have a narrative to consider about being a pilgrim people in the Old Testament wilderness, and of being missional apostles sent to to declare Good News, but occasionally having to shake the dust off our sandals and keep moving with the peace that is in us. Nothing new there, correct?

In Judaism, there's a running reminder of giving thanks for freedom from Egypt, of escaping the wilderness in the Exile, or for entering into the Land of Promise. Among Muslim believers, there's an awareness of the struggle for acceptance of who God is, how God is active in the midst of the world, and being thankful for that without asking for or expecting more. Many non-traditional faiths talk about a divine operation that is beyond our immediate understanding, who is not accountable to our everyday expectations.

For anyone trying to live by faith, the challenge is to accept life as it is, but to not settle for that as the only lasting reality. That's both a tension and a resolution at the same time. Or to put it another way, it's our common expectation that faith leads us towards new life, and that to life everlasting.

What's next? Paul says to the Corinthians that we see in a dim mirror but darkly…and later we will see face to face. Can we be thankful for a promise as yet unfulfilled? If we have enough reason to trust that promise; if our faith is secure in promises already fulfilled, pointing towards those prophecies resting in hope, I believe we can be thankful for what has not yet happened.

Which illuminates the thankfulness we have for what's already been done, in a brighter light "upon a distant shore."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thankful for quite a few things that haven't happened, too. Tell him what you're thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.