And next year's words await another voice.
Little Gidding T. S. Eliot
A Christmas prayer:
Hallelujah, help us sing your story with the voices, emotions, language and music you would have us hear to create new hearts and understandings within us.
Pastor Ray preached about reading in Mary's understandable anger through her question to Jesus and the Gospel's words regarding Mary's pondering. "His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.".It is too easy to invest only positive emotions to the "good" and "holy" characters in the Bible, just as easy to ascribe the negative emotions to their antagonists. And that is if we even engage in imagining their emotions.
We feel uncomfortable imagining happy outbursts of laughter from those we hold in reverence or from their antagonists. It makes them too human. John the Baptizer's 'brood of vipers' scorn that we read a couple of weeks ago is an example of another aspect of this process of sanitizing Biblical figures. We find it hard to incorporate scorn into these figures.
Pastor Ray pointed out the anger that was no doubt present when Mary questioned Jesus, "Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety." it was probably said in anxious anger. We immediately want to jump to her pondering however. This is the Mary, mother of God, that we are comfortable seeing in our mind's eye. It also creates the distance between humans and saints that we can easily create.
What should be envisioned as holy activity - when we are actively engaged in life or when we are pondering what we remember in our hearts? Pondering can quickly become an exercise in shedding the today's world and the problems life presents us with. Perhaps, as we are embracing Mary's pondering, we should also be enfolding her anger within us as well. Would this close some distance between us and the saints we admire. At times regarding Mary as human as we see ourselves is not an uncrossable boundary. At these moments there are possibilities and other paths to follow for conversion and transformation into being different human souls.
Tiffany substituted for Matt on piano for the service today. I played guitar and sang with Craig and Shirley leading the congregational singing. This was the last opportunity to sing traditional Christmas hymns with the congregation. The congregation engaged and loved the Now The Feast liturgical setting as usual and everything was sung with enthusiasm.
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