Mary and Joseph were heading for the stage, along with a beatific baby Jesus. Crowding in were shepherds, their flocks, wise men, a gaggle of giggling angels — and a traffic report.
And thanks to the Rev. Peter Pearson for our Christmas icon. Peter is priest in charge at Saint Philip’s Church in New Hope, Pa. He is a former Benedictine monk, an icon painter (and our editor in chief’s former roommate when they worked at Camp Saint Andrew in Tunkhannock, Pa.)
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Middlebury, Vermont was and is a vibrant church in a small college town where the Christmas pageant was a big deal. The pageant had the whole cast, from Mary to the wise men, to scads of shepherds to angels, to scores of sheep, to a donkey and a cow. The pageant was fun for kids, and was (as I now appreciate) a ton of work for the adults in the church, and was a set- up for all kinds of chaos.
It took me until this Advent to realize that anxiety – far from being a perennial nuisance – is an essential part of this season. It coincides with all the world collapsing, the failure of sound reason, the growing darkness, and all our best-made plans falling to pieces. Advent anxiety connects with our most profound fears that we don’t really have it figured out, whatever “it” is.
I suspect even the jolliest vicar at Christmas feels like an accountant at the end of the tax year. This is not simply fatigue, but frustration with the gap between what we think we are doing and what those unwonted full houses think they are doing.
Because we wanted much that year
and had little. Because the winter phone
for days stayed silent that would call
our father back to work, and he…
Here was a man who took his work for the Lord one-hundred percent seriously. A prophet whose whole being was like a trumpet that the News of the Kingdom came blowing right through. A man who cared neither for his appearance nor his diet. A man who said what he was called to say, no matter what the consequence. A man who was loud and raw, and without interest in personal wealth or honor.
In the middle of the wonderful, bright, flashy displays that I see while walking the streets of New York, I struggle. I want to find a place within myself to enjoy that which I see without forgetting the other part of my life, the one grounded in serving Christ in a faraway place where we don’t have enough of anything, much less the extra needed to decorate lavishly.
I’d like us to imagine this song in the way medieval mystics interpreted the Song of Songs, as if God were one of the lovers and humanity the other. If anyone is offended, let me just say that I’ve toned the sermon down. The first version I wrote appealed to Marvin Gaye. The song I have in mind doesn’t have too much in common with Isaiah except perhaps the sense that Someone is coming, ready or not.
I love Advent. It’s our great season of eschatology, the season when we contemplate and await the in-breaking of divine power into our little worlds in a way that prefigures the great consummation in which we are fully joined into God’s reality.