30 DECEMBER 2024
We quickly caught our breath after Thanksgiving to welcome Advent this year. Such pace may have caught us unprepared for the riches of Advent. I have friends who struggled to fit family obligations into their calendars. To have control over our calendars is alluring. After all, managing time well is a hallmark of responsibility and an increasing social necessity. While humanity strives to stretch the limitations of our finitude in planning our lives, at Christmas we are confronted with something different. We listen to the poignant story of God becoming human, a profound mystery of God becoming present to us in the flesh. This adventus, or coming, of Christ was narrated through Scripture, prayer, song, music, and Eucharist in the multiple liturgical celebrations of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I suggest that what we experienced at St. Mark’s this Christmastide was a counter-cultural response to the expectations and reality of our world today. It is not about us conforming to the calendar, but the opposite. The liturgical calendar conforms us.
This is certainly what I felt deeply. The First Vespers of the Nativity prepared our hearts for Christmas Eve with five Psalms reminding us of the birth of Christ as God’s son, redemption and covenant, light in the darkness, and Jesus as the true Shepherd. A memorable Latin Vigil Mass introduced the vast scope of an ancient language that captures both the mystery and preciseness of the Offertory. The readings of each Mass were layered with theological intention to highlight the prophecies of Isaiah, and the varied renderings embodied in each of the three Gospels that narrate the Christmas story in all of its wonder and intrigue. These became fresh readings for me, although I have been hearing them since childhood. The readings are not abridged within the narrative itself, so we hear the entire genealogy in the first chapter of Matthew, hearing with dramatic anticipation each generation of well-known and lesser-known names as we move toward each of the triple categories clustered within the reading. We do not need to count the generations because we know that they are fourteen generations within each cluster, the first being from Abraham to David. The pause at David is the anticipated moment when, dare we say, the Messiah of the house of David is to appear.
As we listen our way through each generation, we do not reach Bethlehem except by way of Babylon. I have attended too many Christmas recitations that race toward a sterile manger without the pain and dislocation of exile. I am grateful that at St. Mark’s we hear the whole story, an authentic biblical history. As the tempo increases within the final third of the generational narrative, we know to slow down and wait to hear what began with Abraham the words “. . . and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.” When you attend all of the liturgical offerings through the Vespers and Masses, there is a rhythm to how words shape our sensibilities toward what is essentially the deepest mystery of our Christian faith – the full presence of God, incarnate in human form to live among us.
But to end here is not the full story. The Eucharist at our Christmas masses summoned me from beyond Bethlehem to the Last Supper and Golgotha. The reality of Emmanuel is that God is with us not only at the start of Matthew but at the very end when Jesus promises to be with his disciples always, to the end of the age. The Vespers on Christmas Day commemorated St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr, an appropriate liminal move toward the birth of the body of Christ – the early church as it confronted its opposition. The liturgies of Christmas are honest, realistic, and hopeful renditions of how we live as Christians today, never surrendering to cultural expectations, but to the embrace of God living with us.
Dr. Randy Furushima
Senior Warden
