The Seventh Day of Christmas
The Seventh Day of Christmas: Eve of the Circumcision and Holy Name of Jesus; New Year’s Eve; Feast of Pope Sylvester; Commemoration of John Wycliffe
by Chris Pipkin
Most traditional cultures, even those deeply informed by Christianity, have believed in the idea of luck and have attempted to improve that luck through rituals of various kinds. This seems unenlightened to us, but it’s really the same impulse (desire to control our fate in a world that is often beyond our control) that has given us most forms of modern science and technology. Our methods have improved, but our aims are similar.
Now that they are disproven or supplanted, New Year rituals like eating a pig to ensure prosperity in the coming year, or beans to secure good harvest, are charming to us, and I do not see much harm in practicing them for nostalgia’s sake. But I expect for some of the original practitioners (and some still today), these rituals carried with them the earnestness that many of us reserve for New Year’s resolutions–one of the means by which we now attempt to make certain that the following year will be a good one. Having a good harvest has been replaced by resolving to change your habits to get a good job; hopes of marriage or childbirth in the coming year have been replaced by visits to the gym to ultimately win approval of someone else or health for yourself. These modern good luck rituals are less superstitious in that actually changing our habits is more likely to change our short-term destiny–but the desire to control is still there in all its humorless angst and deep drive to create a perfect world for ourselves.
So is the significance we attribute to a New Year. Why should the practical tools we have for marking time–themselves necessary but arbitrary–be imbued with some sort of mystical significance? Going to the gym or on a new diet the first week of the New Year (as opposed to any other time) is not so different, in this sense, from older, more inscrutable rituals. Both give us a kind of hope by consolidating past and present behaviors and events, separating them from an imagined future that is about to begin, and placing them mentally in the “past.” We get to use the helpful labels “last year” and “this year,” sending last year out of the camp as a kind of numerical scapegoat after pinning our personal and corporate evils to it. How many times have we groused about “the year” that has just “passed,” contrasting it with what we hope the magical “New Year” will bring? This might be a helpful way to think, of course, but it is magical thinking all the same.
I was recently surprised to learn that hope itself was once considered akin to superstition. Most educated people in the Hellenic world, before the Advent of Christ, believed that hope was a delusion–one of the evils remaining in Pandora’s box that made mortals feel the other evils all the more sharply. Harvest might be good this year, but the following year, starvation could be imminent. We won the war this time, but next time, our enemies will destroy us. Even if they didn’t, of course, life would deteriorate into old age, disease, and death, as it still does. Hope was prelude to tragedy. The only sane response to such a mutable world was to take delight in those things that were already present and would not be so easily lost–ideas, virtues, traditions, the stars, the gods. But to hope for better fortune was bad philosophy.
The God of the Hebrews was different. He promised not only spiritual rewards to his followers but physical blessings to the nation of Israel. And when he became incarnate (so Christians believe) as Jesus, his message was not simply that people should stop hoping for good lives and focus on the eternal because they would die one day. He healed people’s bodies, even if they would get sick again. He raised Lazarus, even though he knew he would die again. And he himself came back from death, claiming to have conquered it once and for all. This sounded crazy, like a superstition, to the educated people of Athens, who laughed at Paul when he tried to pass on the news of death’s defeat. Paul had to insist that this hope “does not put us to shame.” So important was hope that it became one of the three theological virtues besides faith and love, especially accessible to Christians.
“Attempts to control our lives…are sinful not because our lives do not matter, but because we refuse to believe that a God who died for us does not care about our day-to-day existence.”
So, how does hope in the Resurrection tie into our minor, personal hopes and superstitions? Can it redeem them? Can we twist the arm of God with our rituals? Does Almighty, transcendent immutable Omnipotence give a fig for our civic New Year, our categories, our resolutions about fertility or harvest, fitness or work? I think the Incarnation, and Jesus’ ministry, leaves us little room to doubt that he does. Every aspect of life, in fact, can be embraced with hearts full of hope, with love of God and neighbor, and with prayers of faith. Rather than living, defensively, as if these mutable and seemingly limited aspects of our lives have nothing to do with God’s Important Business, we can live in the sure knowledge that these things actually matter more to God than they do to us. Attempts to control our lives utterly are sinful not because our lives do not matter, but because we refuse to believe that a God who died for us does not care about our day-to-day existence. Instead, he makes our lives manifestations of the eternal within time. Each desire, each prayer, points us not merely to the impassive, eternal unchanging reality, but to ultimate, embodied joy, in which all our earthly longings are fulfilled in the Resurrection.
This is why prayer and thanksgiving are such gifts to us. They acknowledge that the God of the Universe is not limited by his large size to care only about his own Important Business of running the cosmos (or even saving eternal souls). He is infinite, and he cares infinitely about the details of our lives. He commands us to pray for our daily bread and the coming of his kingdom, and to thank him for the spiritual and material blessings of the day (or of the past year). We thus acknowledge that the universe is governed by someone who, while more than a person, is certainly not less than one. Each answered prayer becomes an icon of our own future Resurrection–some small manifestation of the restoration of all things. Each unanswered prayer, likewise, drives us to pray all the more for this same restoration, so that we are groaning along with creation for the true New Year that will come at the end of time. Thanksgiving allows us to acknowledge that God, not luck or fate, has given us what good we have out of his goodness, not because we have deserved it by being holy enough, or praying enough, or dieting, or eating enough pork and beans on New Year’s.
December 31
Activities
- Buy and set off fireworks to mark the beginning of the New Year.
- If you have a pig, walk it on a leash (a tradition from Vienna). If you don’t have a pig, don’t steal one. Walk the dog instead.
- Compile a list of books you would like to read and projects you’d like to do in the next year.
- Spend time looking back over a calendar or pictures from 2022 and talking about your favorite moments from each month.
- Invite friends or family over and make a black-eyed peas dish called “Hoppin’ John’s,” as is traditional in parts of the American South.
- Write a wish for the upcoming year, burn it, then (if you’re especially hardcore), drink the ashes in your New Year’s beverage of choice, as is traditional in parts of Russia.
- Have a discussion: Look up other New Year’s Eve/St. Sylvester traditions and have a conversation about the nature of luck. To what extent is the idea of luck compatible with Christianity (or with whatever beliefs, formal or informal, that you hold)? Can you make any sort of a case for it? What is the difference between luck, fortune, and chance?
- I like this idea from catholicculture.org: “On the eve of the civil New Year the children may join their parents in a holy hour, in prayer and thanksgiving for the gifts and benefits which God has given them in the past year, and to pray for necessary graces in the forthcoming civil year.”
presents!
Gift Giving
- Give one of the gifts you did not give on the first day of Christmas.
- Give someone twelve envelopes labeled with the twelve months of the year, featuring a wish, a scripture, a picture, a quote, a poem that they can read the first day of each month this year (obviously, this is also appropriate for New Year’s Day).
- NO CASH OPTION: Create a song, poem, or picture featuring what you think was the most important memory shared between you and the gift’s recipient over the past year.
Literature
The Darkling Thrush
A poem by Thomas Hardy. This is also the poem selected for this day by Malcolm Guite, in his brilliant Waiting on the Word—which everyone reading this site should check out (he sort of does what we’re doing here, but only with poems).
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
The idea of “hope” is interesting here, and I very much doubt that Hardy believed in any kind of “blessed Hope,” perhaps taking instead the pre-Christian classical view that hope is for fools. This poem provides an interesting contrast to the Gawain-poet’s birds, who “piped piteously for pain of the cold.”
Prayer
A General Thanksgiving (from the Book of Common Prayer)
Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love.
We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side.
We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us.
We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.
Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the truth of his Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying, through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom.
Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know Christ and make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen.
Daily Scripture
Use a lectionary from your own tradition:
Alternatively, use one or more of the following readings:
Old Testament
Deuteronomy 8 (ESV)
“The whole commandment that I command you today you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers. 2 And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. 3 And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word[a] that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4 Your clothing did not wear out on you and your foot did not swell these forty years. 5 Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. 6 So you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. 7 For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, 8 a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9 a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. 10 And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
11 “Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, 12 lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, 13 and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied,14 then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, 15 who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, 16 who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. 17 Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ 18 You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. 19 And if you forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. 20 Like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.
Isaiah 65 (DRA)
They have sought me that before asked not for me, they have found me that sought me not. I said: Behold me, behold me, to a nation that did not call upon my name.2 I have spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people, who walk in a way that is not good after their own thoughts.
3 A people that continually provoke me to anger before my face: that immolate in gardens, and sacrifice upon bricks.
4 That dwell in sepulchres, and sleep in the temple of idols: that eat swine’s flesh, and profane broth is in their vessels.
5 That say: Depart from me, come not near me, because thou art unclean: these shall be smoke in my anger, a fire burning all the day.
6 Behold it is written before me: I will not be silent, but I will render and repay into their bosom.
7 Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers together, saith the Lord, who have sacrificed upon the mountains, and have reproached me upon the hills; and I will measure back their first work in their bosom.
8 Thus saith the Lord: As if a grain be found in a cluster, and it be said: Destroy it not, because it is a blessing: so will I do for the sake of my servants, that I may not destroy the whole.
9 And I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, and out of Juda a possessor of my mountains: and my elect shall inherit it, and my servants shall dwell there.
10 And the plains shall be turned to folds of flocks, and the valley of Achor into a place for the herds to lie down in, for my people that have sought me.
11 And you, that have forsaken the Lord, that have forgotten my holy mount, that set a table for fortune, and offer libations upon it,
12 I will number you in the sword, and you shall all fall by slaughter: because I called and you did not answer: I spoke, and you did not hear: and you did evil in my eyes, and you have chosen the things that displease me.
13 Therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold my servants shall eat, and you shall be hungry: behold my servants shall drink, and you shall be thirsty.
14 Behold my servants shall rejoice, and you shall be confounded: behold my servants shall praise for joyfulness of heart, and you shall cry for sorrow of heart, and shall howl for grief of spirit.
15 And you shall leave your name for an execration to my elect: and the Lord God shall slay thee, and call his servants by another name.
16 In which he that is blessed upon the earth, shall be blessed in God, amen: and he that sweareth in the earth, shall swear by God, amen: because the former distresses are forgotten, and because they are hid from my eyes.
17 For behold I create new heavens, and a new earth: and the former things shall not be in remembrance, and they shall not come upon the heart.
18 But you shall be glad and rejoice for ever in these things, which I create: for behold I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and the people thereof joy.
19 And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people, and the voice of weeping shall no more be heard in her, nor the voice of crying.
20 There shall no more be an infant of days there, nor an old man that shall not fill up his days: for the child shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner being a hundred years old shall be accursed.
21 And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruits of them.
22 They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree, so shall be the days of my people, and the works of their hands shall be of long continuance.
23 My elect shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth in trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their posterity with them.
24 And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will hear; as they are yet speaking, I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together; the lion and the ox shall eat straw; and dust shall be the serpent’s food: they shall not hurt nor kill in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.
Psalm 148 (KJV)
Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise him in the heights.
2 Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts.
3 Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light.
4 Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens.
5 Let them praise the name of the Lord: for he commanded, and they were created.
6 He hath also stablished them for ever and ever: he hath made a decree which shall not pass.
7 Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:
8 Fire, and hail; snow, and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his word:
9 Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars:
10 Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl:
11 Kings of the earth, and all people; princes, and all judges of the earth:
12 Both young men, and maidens; old men, and children:
13 Let them praise the name of the Lord: for his name alone is excellent; his glory is above the earth and heaven.
14 He also exalteth the horn of his people, the praise of all his saints; even of the children of Israel, a people near unto him. Praise ye the Lord.
New Testament
Romans 7-8 (NIV)
Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? 2 For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. 3 So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.
4 So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. 5 For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. 6 But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
7 What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8 But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. 9 Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. 10 I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. 11 For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment,deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. 12 So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.
13 Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.
14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. 3 For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
5 Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. 6 The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. 7 The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. 8 Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.
9 You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. 10 But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. 11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.
12 Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. 13 For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
14 For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.15 The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” 16 The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. 17 Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us,who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who then is the one who condemns?No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
John 8 (ESV)
But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. [[2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground.9 But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”]]
12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” 13 So the Pharisees said to him, “You are bearing witness about yourself; your testimony is not true.” 14 Jesus answered, “Even if I do bear witness about myself, my testimony is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. 15 You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. 16 Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. 17 In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. 18 I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me.” 19 They said to him therefore, “Where is your Father?” Jesus answered, “You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.” 20 These words he spoke in the treasury, as he taught in the temple; but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.
21 So he said to them again, “I am going away, and you will seek me, and you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.” 22 So the Jews said, “Will he kill himself, since he says, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?” 23 He said to them, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. 24 I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.” 25 So they said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Just what I have been telling you from the beginning. 26 I have much to say about you and much to judge, but he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.” 27 They did not understand that he had been speaking to them about the Father. 28 So Jesus said to them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me. 29 And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” 30 As he was saying these things, many believed in him.
31 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. 38 I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father.”
39 They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did, 40 but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. 41 You are doing the works your father did.” They said to him, “We were not born of sexual immorality. We have one Father—even God.” 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. 43 Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. 44 You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.45 But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. 46 Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?47 Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.”
48 The Jews answered him, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” 49 Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon, but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me. 50 Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is One who seeks it, and he is the judge. 51 Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.”52 The Jews said to him, “Now we know that you have a demon! Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.’ 53 Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died! Who do you make yourself out to be?” 54 Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’ 55 But you have not known him. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word. 56 Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” 57 So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” 58 Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” 59 So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.
Sing With joy
Christmas Carols
Adam Lay Ybounden
Adam lay i-bowndyn,
bowndyn in a bond,
Fowre thowsand wynter
thowt he not to long
And al was for an appil,
an appil that he tok.
As clerkes fyndyn wretyn
in here book.
Ne hadde the appil take ben,
the appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
a ben hevene quen.
Blyssid be the tyme
that appil take was!
Therefore we mown syngyn
Deo gratias!
Everything up to “Deo gratias” [Thanks to God] is Middle English. You can probably figure out what it says if you read the words out loud. This extremely Marian take on the idea of the “Fortunate Fall” is a bit scandalous, and if you have quibbles (or if you don’t) with its theology, it’s probably worth articulating why.
O Holy Night
1. O Holy Night!
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till he appear’d and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary soul rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Chorus:
Fall on your knees
Oh hear the angel voices
Oh night divine
Oh night when Christ was born
Oh night divine
Oh night divine
2. Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming
Here come the wise men from Orient land
The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger
In all our trials born to be our friend
(Chorus)
3. Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and His gospel is peace
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.
(Chorus)
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