Ted took me to church this morning. He is good about that even when it’s difficult, as this morning because it was raining. And Miss Virginia will carry the Gospel down into the congregation as she always does, even when the eight o’clock congregation is only seven because of the rain; and she will carry it back up into the chancel and replace it on the lectern. She’ll come back down, producing the envelope she has written her sermon on the back of from a pocket in her regalia one cannot see. It is not as magic as the Eucharist when she changes the accidents into essences though the accidents remain the same; but it is a mystery nevertheless.
Since sometime near the end of COVID, the church has had wafers “marked” with wine, so you can take the body and the blood together, or you can take both, the body and the blood together then a sip from the cup (more of the blood). But you cannot dip your wafer into the cup (intinct it) as you used to, as I did two weeks ago, though the guest priest said the cup was already in it, the wafer. He whispered it, but he didn’t stop me because I said, “I know”; then I had already done it before he could pull the cup away. But last week there was an announcement in the bulletin in red: “Don’t do that!” Or, exactly: RECEIVING COMMUNION: all are welcome at the Lord’s Table. Communion is available in both kinds (bread and wine), but please do not dip (intinct) the consecrated bread in the wine (each wafer has already been marked with consecrated wine).
The sermon on the back of the envelope was about the wilderness, which appeared in both the Old Testament reading from Isaiah 40 and the Gospel reading from Mark 1. It (the envelope) wanted us to know how it is this word in Hebrew and that word in Greek, as if any of the seven of us truly cared — not even Ted truly cared — also how it can be a place where the waste howls, or it can be utterly abandoned, a place of desolation.
(I say I didn’t care if the Greek was one thing and the Hebrew was another, but I was remembering that the French was désert from the Latin desertum from desero, deserere, deserui, desertus, meaning ‘abandon’.)
Where are we as we move through Advent, the envelope went on, as we move through Advent in a rush? Aren’t we buffeted back and forth between howling chaos — ostriches, satyrs, owls, and night hags — and feelings of abandonment, emptiness? So, John the Baptist calls to us as well: Make way, clear a path in our too-full or too-empty lives. Make way, the Savior is coming.
Or something like that.
12/10/23
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