Fourth Sunday of Advent

Lectionary #12

When Christ came into the world, he said:
"Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
but a body you prepared for me;
in holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight.
Then I said, 'As is written of me in the scroll,
behold, I come to do your will, O God.'"



When I was ordained, there were guidelines for leading public prayers that often used the phrase, "these or similar words." They might have been called rubrics but they weren't printed in red, like the rubrics of the missals. (The Latin word for red, rubra/rubrum.)

During the first week after my ordination, I freely extemporized my own words in place of the Opening and Closing Prayers of the Mass. After a week, I realized I was repeating myself. I wasn't all that creative. So I fell in line and read the approved texts -- with some modifications. And so it went for more than thirty years. 

I experimented in other ways with the liturgy, often accommodating the gestures and the prayers to the congregation and my own style. Only once did a fellow priest chew me out for doing so. He thundered at me, "It's not your Mass!" I respected the man greatly and eventually accepted the rebuff, though I grumbled at the time. I knew he was absolutely right. 

But my conversion to a strict reading of the rubrics and prayers was slow. When rumors appeared in the Catholic press that certain Roman officials were preparing a new English translation of the liturgy, I accepted the general suspicion that somebody was trying to cramp the free-wheeling, free expression of priests like me. 

By the time the new translation finally appeared, I had decided to follow the rules precisely, and let the chips fall where they will. If the words were sexist, I would read them as printed. If the syntax was tortured, it's not my fault.  To paraphrase the Letter to the Hebrews, I would read it as written... in the scroll. 

This has been my own very personal decision. In what I suppose is the latter half of my priestly career, I have decided to obey and pray by the book. I don't want to come between the congregation and the Lord; or, for that matter, between the congregation and the bishops of the Church. 

I hope that, in reading the Mass this way, I am imitating the obedience of Jesus, and one of his truest disciples, Francis of Assisi. I don't suppose the sacrifice of my style is one of the great offerings in the history of the Church; but I do hope that the mystery of the Mass appears more clearly through my administration of the Sacrament. 

Thus should one regard us: as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. (I Corinthians 4:1) 

I tell this personal story because Christmas is all about the mystery of the Incarnation. God could not become one of us -- the Incarnate Son of God -- if we were not subject to laws human and divine, secular and religious. 

...when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law...

In my youth, I bought the romantic ideology of change, progress and determinism. Things are getting better and better and my generation will improve on the ethos, customs and religion of the past. Why should I conform to the ways of the past when the future is the Kingdom of God, and I can see it so clearly? 


Somewhere along the way, I realized my future is past, and good riddance. 

As a young priest, I also searched for that originality that made me an individual. Or, as Frank Sinatra sang, "I did it my way." Again, good riddance to bad rubbish! 

I don't believe Jesus was speaking of change, progress or individuality when he announced the Kingdom of God. Nor do I suppose he would overthrow the past. Rather, his obedience permitted him to be overwhelmed by human life as it is, with all its confusion, complexity, irrationality and viciousness. His journey to Jerusalem, his suffering, passion and death made no sense to anyone. It was nonsense to the Greeks (the rational mind) and a scandal to the Jews (the religious mind.) (I Corinthians 1: 23)

Even when raised from the dead he would not call upon his followers to overturn The System and its ways. His kingdom might appear in this world but it is not of this world. 


As we celebrate Christmas 2012, we ask the Lord to show us what we must do in a turbulent world that was always dangerous, and always will be.