Saving Wenceslas

I cannot remember exactly where, but some years ago I was in church around Christmas and we were singing Good King Wenceslas. This well-known "Christmas" carol is really only associated with Christmas because it mentions the feast of Stephen, which is the 26th of December. The themes and ideas in the carol are not about the Christmas story per se - there is no star, nor sheep, nor babe in a manger. But it is deeply Incarnational, which is what Christmas is - the feast of God made Incarnate in Jesus.

The story of the carol is that King Wenceslas sees a poor man and is moved to an act of charity to provide for him. He and his page brave the winter weather to bring the man food and drink. The page is nearly overcome by the snow and cold and receives shelter and warmth from Wenceslas.

It is deeply Incarnational, that is, if the words are not altered to make them more "up to date" or philosophically palatable. As I was singing this I was irritated to discover that the last verse had been altered. Now I am not one who is annoyed by the replacement of thees and thous to modernize hymns and language (provided it is done with reasonable poetic skill.) But this alteration was not a linguistic modernization but rather theological.

Here is a portion of the original text (by John Mason Neale, c. 1850) to refresh your memory. The page has just complained that he can go no longer due to the wind and the cold. Wenceslas invites him to step in the footprints that he has made. And the story continues:

In his master's steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted
Heat was in the very sod, which the saint had printed.
Therfore Christian men be sure, wealth or rank possessing
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourself find blessing

Now our modern poet seems to have been distressed by the notion of a saint and the heat being in the sod, where the saint had stepped. This line was replaced by some unmemorable bit about being encouraged by example and bucking up. In that replacement the well-meaning, I am sure, modernizer robbed the carol of the supernatural and Incarnational presence of God. In the substitution of the lines in this verse, the carol became merely a moral story to encourage one to care for the poor - which is a central point of the work, to be sure.

Robbing the carol of the miraculous power of Jesus Christ, present in the Christian king Wenceslas through the Holy Spirit, ruins the the more subtle but truly central point. The heat transmitted to the sod is NOT Wenceslas, but God in him. God is incarnate in his people because of the saving Incarnation of Jesus (which includes his death, resurrection, ascension and sending of the Holy Spirit). The presence of Jesus in Wenceslas is the source of the miraculous heat, but also of his love and compassion for the poor.

Without the heat and the saint the song is but an anthem for social compassion. With them it remains a deeply Incarnational Christmas carol. May His presence and holiness fill us as it did Wenceslas.

Sloth

Dorothy Sayers is one of my favorite authors.  She was mystery author (creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, aristocratic amateur English sleuth), translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, playwright, and Christian apologist.  In this latter role she wrote an essay called “The Other Six Deadly Sins.”  In this essay she makes a case that the Church has been guilty of an overemphasis on sexual sin (Lust) and near silence on the “other six” – Pride, Gluttony, Avarice (or Greed), Wrath, Envy and Sloth.  In this she is not recommending lightening up on Lust, but rather getting serious about the rest.

At the risk of committing the same error with a different vice, I wonder if we have been serious enough about Sloth.  I take up this strain because the cry of Advent is that we not be found sleeping.

Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.  (Mark 13:35-36 ESV)

In Matthew 25 we read about the wise and foolish virgins, all of whom fall asleep, but only half of whom came prepared to the slumber party.

Sleeping and slothfulness go together for us.  We think of slothfulness as laziness or lack of initiative.  Or perhaps as an aversion to hard work.  Slothfulness is certainly these things, but it is also more.  Slothfulness and its indolence are not limited to the physical realm.   Boredom, for instance, is a sign of intellectual or spiritual sloth.  The careless attitude, and by this I do not mean cheery and virtuous care-free, but real lack of interest in anything – this is Sloth.  The constant need to be entertained, perhaps because we are bored, is a presenting symptom of Sloth.   And to be entirely counter-intuitive, our frenetic activity and busy-ness, as much as it is our way of coping with or escaping boredom, is also a sign of Sloth.

And it is deadly.  Because it lulls us to sleep.  And sleep is death.  The New Testament speaks of those “who have fallen asleep” meaning those who have died.  Asleep we are not attentive to the presence of God.  Nor are we appreciative of the presence of God.   Our slothful boredom conditions us to pay no attention to anything unless it is “exciting.”  Elijah discovered that God was not in the exciting things, like the earthquake, wind and fire (1 Kings 19) but in the still small voice.

The warning of Advent is to watch, to awake, to attend to the still, small voice now. For if we do not we will find, at the last day, that his coming is more exciting than we would prefer.

Wakened by the solemn warning

Let the earth-bound soul arise

Christ, her Sun, all sloth dispelling,

Shines upon the morning skies

E. Caswell - translated from Latin of 6^th century

Undistractedly

Reinhold Niebuhr, it is thought, coined a prayer made more famous by Alcoholics Anonymous.  It runs something like this:

Grant to us the serenity to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other.

I have been reflecting on the anxious energy I expend on fretting over that which cannot be changed, or at least that over which I have no power to change.  I remember distinctly the roller coaster of anxiety and worry, relief and then more distress we experienced while both my mother and sister-in-law fought with cancer.  It is a fight they both ultimately lost, but in the battle there were moves forward and times where each of them rallied and then took a turn for the worse.

And there was a lot of worry and fretting on my part.  And that worry and fretting is a distraction.  I have no personal power over cancer and the circumstances of their illness.  Healing and miracles are indeed something I prayed for, but that is quite different from fretting over what I could not change.  The stuff I can’t change I need to leave in God’s hands.  Really.

Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, sang a hymn of praise when his son was born and he received his voice back.  You can read the whole thing in Luke 1:68-79.  It is a hymn of praise that God has “visited and redeemed his people.”  Zechariah sees the coming of Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promise, his “mighty salvation for us.”  And that promise, spoke through the prophets is that we should be “saved from our enemies and from the hand of all that hate us.”

This is yet another example of something over which we have no control, the assault of enemies, especially enemies more powerful than we.  Zechariah praises God that his has fulfilled his promise to save us from our enemies, something which we cannot do.  Fret not, God has this one.

And why does he do this?  It is further on in this hymn of praise:
That we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies,

Might serve him without fear

In holiness and righteousness before him

All the days of our life.

All those things which we cannot control - but we desperately try to, in our actions and sometimes just in the endless, circular conversations we have in our head - those things distract and impede us from serving him without fear, in holiness and righteousness.  I deeply desire to serve him undistractedly.

In order to do this I need to leave that which is outside my control with God.  In doing that I need to give up my deeply held heresies, and I use the word advisedly, that God does not act and that, if he does, his actions will not be good.  And if you truly do not wonder in your heart about these things, you are a better man than I.

Praise and honor to the Good God who acts, who has raised up a mighty salvation for us.  I yield to your hands all that I cannot control, that I might serve you without fear (in serenity), in holiness and righteousness all my days. Undistractedly.

Advent

One of the music leaders in our church came up to me the other day and asked something like this, “What of the Christmas music are we allowed to sing before Christmas?”  He asked because he knows I am an Advent zealot.  I eschew the singing of carols until Christmas Eve. I might appear very Grinch-like:

“The more the Grinch thought of the Who-Christmas-Sing,
The more the Grinch thought, ‘I must stop this whole thing’”[1]

I am not wanting to stop Christmas or singing, quite the contrary.  I just want to know Advent before the Christmas feast starts.  In Advent we remember the coming of Jesus in humility as an infant AND we look to his coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead.  Or that is the intent at least.   The four weeks leading up to Christmas are a time for preparation.  Preparation includes cooking and baking as well as shopping, but it also includes self-examination and reflection. It is hard to stuff in any reflection when we are rushing ahead to Christmas. 

I want to sing Advent hymns like “Lo he comes with clouds descending” and “Come thou long-expected Jesus.”  I am entirely excited about belting out “Joy to the World” but I first want to squeeze in “Hark! A herald voice is sounding.”  (Any confusion of this Advent hymn with the obviously Christmas carol, “Hark the herald angels sing” is understandable, what with “hark” and “herald,” two largely unused “h” words, appearing in both titles.)  Before I rush to the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus, I think it wise to spend a few moments considering the Consummation, his glorious coming as judge.  My judge. 

Others have thought it wise before me.  That’s why there is an Advent. 

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[1] Theodore Geisel, How the Grinch Stole Christmas