A Maundy Thursday hymn

Thee we adore, O hidden Savior, Thee,
Who in Thy sacrament dost deign to be;
Both flesh and spirit at Thy presence fail,
Yet here Thy presence we devoutly hail.

O blest memorial of our dying Lord,
Who living Bread to men doth here afford!
O may our souls forever feed on Thee,
And Thou, O Christ, forever precious be.

Fountain of gladness, Jesu, Lord and God,
Cleanse us, unclean, with Thy most cleansing blood;
Increase our faith and love, that we may know
The hope and peace which from Thy presence flow.

O Christ, whom now beneath a veil we see,
May what we thirst for soon our portion be,
To gaze on Thee unveiled, and see Thy face,
The vision of Thy glory and Thy grace.

Putting on the Armour of Light

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 and the dead, we may rise to the life immoral, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

O Almighty God, Who sent Thy Son into our darkness that we might come into Thy light, give us the eyes of faith, that we might see clearly in the twilight of this present age, until the Sun of Righteousness returns in glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and with the Holy Ghost ever, one God, world without end. Amen.

A Christmas Lament

You can already see this in the upper right of this blog, but in case you hadn't, I want to draw your attention to the excellent little piece on First Things, "The End of Advent."

Joseph Bottum eloquently summarizes the disgust that many of us feel at the absurd bloatation and consumerization of the Christmas season, which has now devoured all of Advent and a couple weeks of pre-Advent, and in the process, has devoured much of the joy and magic which once belonged to Christmas.

I confess that my angst over this phenomenon has not been so strong this year, as I found myself yearning for Christmas as soon as November began...no doubt a combination of homesickness and of the earlier shortening of the days. Plus, Edinburgh has the most amazing Christmas festival, which started on Thursday, and which my wife and I visited just today...a truly magical (if overcrowded) German Christmas Market. So this year, it was perhaps not the expansion of the length of Christmas that has bothered me so much, as the consumerization of it--turning it into the greatest engine the world has yet seen for tricking people into spending way more money than they have any business spending on all manner of stuff that no one ever needs.

In any case, Bottum has the right idea for how to combat this capitalist cultural malaise--liturgy. If we can get back to a true observance of Advent-not-Christmas in our churches up until Christmas Eve, then we in the Christian community can make gradual headway toward restoring Christmas to its rightful place

The Revenge of the Idols

In the sixteenth-century, the Reformers (and especially the Puritans), determined to purge the churches of idolatry and Popish superstition, lashed out against the abominable screens that confined the laity in the back half of the Church, away from the altar, against the use of images in the church, and against the "vain repetition" of set prayers, among other things. Ironically, it seems that their hyper-Protestant successors are merely reintroducing the same things, in bastardized form. We attended an "Anglican" church recently that meets in a gorgeous neo-Gothic church building, one of the finest such structures in Edinburgh. But they had done their best to obliterate its beauty on the inside, going so far as to build new modern loft seating halfway up the walls, blocking out most of the beautiful stained glass that the builders had put there.

Worst of all, they had re-introduced a permanent screen, halfway up the nave, blocking from view most of the chancel and altar with its stunning architecture, carving, and windows. This screen, though, was no magnificently carved medieval rood-screen, but a massive projection screen for video and imagery. God's people are being kept from the altar, not for the sake of maintaining graded holiness, but for the sake of degraded ugliness, for the idol of the moving picture.
Which leads to my second point. The beautiful and holy images of the stained glass windows in the chancel are barely visible behind this screen, and what takes their place is the odd, meaningless, and artless imagery that was the constant backdrop projected onto the screen throughout the whole service. This imagery consisted of about a dozen green silhouettes of people in various random postures of everyday life--pushing a stroller, listening to music, etc. Instead of staring at the saints and the story of the Bible throughout the service, we stared up at vague shadows of ourselves in our ordinary, worldly pursuits. The most determined apologist might here find some good message about the breakdown of secular and sacred, but I'm skeptical.
Finally, projected onto this screen for nearly half the service were the words of various worship songs, all sung to basically the same vague and watery tune. And in these songs, we would quite often repeat the same vague and watery words over and over and over, sometimes singing the same line well over a dozen times in the course of a song. Though I tried my best to engage with my heart in the singing, I found myself constantly just repeating the words vainly, meaninglessly, an experience I have very rarely had in the most liturgical services. How ironic that we revolted against liturgy to avoid vain repetition, worship with the mouth but not the heart, and then reintroduced vain repetition in an infinitely less artful and much vainer and much more repetitive form.
How the glory hath departed!

Really Limited Atonement

Have you ever stopped to reflect on the deplorably tiny portions of Communion bread and wine that most Reformed churches serve? I did yesterday.
"Here's Christ's body, given for you."
"Where?"
"That little crumb I just put in your hand."
"I can hardly see it."
"Too bad--may it nourish you unto eternal life."

"Here's Christ's blood, shed for you. Drink it in remembrance that Christ died for you."
"I don't think there was any in my little glass--I didn't taste anything."
"Don't worry, there was some there."
"How do I know?"
"That's why we tell you to receive it in faith!"

Thomas Aquinas, in "Tantum Ergo Sacramentum" wrote "Faith, our outward sense befriending, makes the inward vision clear" asserting that it was by faith that we discerned the true body and blood of Christ beneath the outward forms of bread and wine. In some churches now, faith must come to your aid to even discern the presence of the outward forms.

I can't help but wonder about the theological message this sort of parsimony sends. "Here's Christ's blood shed for you...just a little bit--he doesn't have much to spare." Here we are supposed to be celebrating the bounteous grace of God, the great outpouring of Christ's sacrifice, and the message we're getting in our bread and wine (if we're lucky enough to be given actual wine!) is that Jesus has to be rather stingy with how much of himself he's actually willing to give us.

Perhaps there's some connection with the doctrine of limited atonement--if Christ's blood really is shed for a limited few, we should depict this by only dispensing a few drops of his symbolic blood. There does seem to be something of a correlation here--the more rigid, hard-core Calvinist a church is, the less wine they give you. And, come to think of it, the correlation works also if you prefer to call it "Particular Atonement"--everyone gets their own little particular cup. Whereas, if you go to the not-very-Calvinist Anglicans, the universal atonement is symbolized by the common cup, in which there always seems to be enough wine for everyone to take a generous gulp if they desire.

Another fine example of lex orandi, lex credendi!