Friday of the Fourth Week of Advent Mass in the Morning

Introibo ad altare dei

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel;

for he has come to his people and set them free.

There are so many songs in the opening chapters of Saint Luke’s Gospel it might be a musical. Mary, Zechariah, Simeon, Jesus and a heavenly choir sing. We often sing all but one of these songs in our liturgy: Zechariah’s canticle at Morning Prayer, Mary’ Magnificat at evening prayer, Simeon’s prayer at night prayer, and the song of the angels with the Gloria at Mass. On this day before Christmas the gospel proclaims Zechariah’s canticle.

His express purpose is to bless God: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel! It is a song of union with God. Zechariah’s heart is fully in tune with the Lord’s purposes, and also with the people of Israel. As he praises God he recounts the history of salvation, remembering David, the prophets and Abraham.

To know God we must belong to God’s people, and to belong to God’s people we must find ourselves in the history of God’s people.

Some years ago I participated in the merger of several parishes in western Iowa. I invited parishioners to come together and share memories of their five churches. Some of them were rural churches standing alone on a vast landscape of open prairies. Others enjoyed the position and prominence of life in the small towns. Theirs would not be a single-stream history. Rather, it would combine many different stories in different settings. Each parish had its own tales of pastors, musicians, catechists and “characters.” Of course, many of these people knew one another already. There were related by blood and by religion. 

The story telling would be a kind of gift-giving as each parishioner gave and received the past to one another. Eventually, I hoped, the stories would be braided together into a continuous history. A new member of the unified parish might be given a chronicle of the various churches. Like a child learning about her mother’s and father’s different families, she would be initiated into the complex, beautiful story of faith in western Iowa. Eventually she could say, “This is the history of our church.”

In today’s gospel Zechariah recaps the story of Israel and gives it to the newborn Christian Church. As we celebrate Christmas once again, we thank God for our Jewish forebears, their courage and fidelity and intense love of God. We pray that we may be worthy to receive their gift and enter the history of God's people.