View as Webpage

Morning Devotion for the Season of Christmas

January 3, 2024

Invitatory

Alleluia. Unto us a child is born: O come, let us adore him. Alleluia. 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading:

“But what do I love when I love my God? Not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God.

And yet, when I love Him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.”

                                     Augustine: Confessions

Meditation

Augustine’s famous question is worth a lifetime of contemplation. I would contend that it’s the principle reason for worship – making space for God to be God. Worship isn’t primarily about us or our concerns; it’s not meant to be a means of self-help with a little boost from the divine. There are many who would like worship to be a kind of quick, positive fix for the week, but the liturgy is a very clumsy vehicle by which to try to supply this. There’s a lot that’s said and done that’s off-point if we’re only interested in our own welfare – which is as it should be, unless we believe that God is supposed to serve us.

But Augustine’s question is especially poignant as the last, fading echoes of Luke’s Christmas story disappear and we all return to exactly the same world that we knew before: the same habits, the same desires, the same problems. Nothing has changed. And what we’ve given ourselves, by means of Christmas, is really just a brief interlude. An intermission. And then we resume as before.

Luke’s birth narrative, and our nearly exclusive focus on the watchful moment he provides us, fits nicely into this kind of holiday because one can sense that, at heart, it’s about the manger and the straw and the scent of animals and the miracle of birth. And without noticing it, we’ve quietly turned Augustine’s question around, as if Luke’s story addresses “what does God love when God loves the world?” To which it’s easy for us, then, to respond that God simply loves what we already love. (It’s an assumption, by the way, that makes the church irrelevant).

Mark’s Gospel has no birth story. God’s breaking in to our world is cast in very different terms. Matthew provides a birth story, but it’s extended over much more time and travel and travail, and there’s a certain kind of exhaustion inherent in it. John frames up Jesus’ coming as the eternal taking on finite form – much more in line with Augustine’s longing. These accounts need more consideration because together they make the incarnation more than an intermission. And they give us reason not merely to pick up again where we had left off, but, as Matthew noted of the wise men, we, too, can go back “by a different way.” For something has changed. Something that doesn’t fade away has come. And the gift, and the task, is seeing that, in truth, nothing is the same at all. Augustine touches on this.

Prayer

You come to us, O Christ: you are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. All times and seasons are yours, and in you all things hold together and are brought to completion. Draw us by your Spirit into communion with you and one another and make us and all things whole and free in the full force of your deathless love.