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Why I Skipped Church This Morning
The Sunday before Christmas, I should be in church, shouldn’t I? I mean, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it Holy,” right? OK, but … I’m not. And the reason for this comes down to two words: Christmas Program.
This is the Sunday they’re going to drag those poor helpless children to the front of the chapel and have them sing religious Christmas songs and read the account of the Nativity in Matthew. These things are mainly for the parents. For the kids, it’s an awkward and uncomfortable experience, you can see it in their defensive body language and hear it in their hesitant little voices. For everyone else, it’s just painful.
So, I will keep the Sabbath Holy by spending time preparing for the big day next Friday, keeping a faithful and grateful attitude, and later on prayer and reading some scripture.
But I can’t face those poor, dead-eyed children this year.
Published in General, Religion & Philosophy
It’s never recommended to invite a friend to church the Sunday before Christmas. If it’s a year where we don’t have any kids enthusiastic about signing up for it we usually skip that week. Not this year, although I must say my six-year-old little girl had me enthralled with her red dress, glasses and reindeer antler hairband.
This makes me sad.
There is no praise high enough for this highly favored daughter, the Mother of God Himself, incarnated in her own flesh.
“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you!”
“Who am I that the Mother of my Lord should come to me? The moment your greeting sounded in my ears the babe in my womb leapt for joy! Blessed is she who believed what the Lord spoke to her would come true.”
One of the things that will not annoy Jesus is loving his mother lots and lots.
Her “Yes!” to the Lord’s will made the Incarnation possible.
Praise her! All generations will call her blessed! The Almighty has worked marvels through her! Holy His Name!
She always points the way to her son. Do not be afraid!
Beautifully expressed, Mama Toad. The recognition of Mary’s honored place in our faith is what propelled chivalry in the Middle Ages and, I believe, eventually led Western culture to acknowledge the value of women.
Our Church (United Methodist), and the one I grew up in (Pres), have Christmas Eve Services where these things happen. Kids and parents are the ones there. In fact, I think most mainstream Church in our city does this. Heck, the Episcopal Church has a “Children’s Living Creche”.
Why do this the last Sunday in Advent? That should be about Advent, if you ask me. Let Christmas Eve be about Christmas.
And my little girl is going to be a Shepard in costume.
Orthodox. EJ really stands out.
Ditto certain Protestant churches, too. In the churches I attended, the Christmas pageant was always a special afternoon service on the last Sunday of Advent. Disrupting Divine Service for a play, no matter how religious, was still unthinkable.
Politically, these churches weren’t terribly conservative, but in form of worship, they were, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
As a husband and father, I think the Mary stuff is way overboard. Joseph may have said nothing (a 14 year old Girl said all those things?), be he was a good man who was a doer. Did the right things.
As a non-Catholic, like many other non-Catholics, I find the Saints, especially Mary, to move close to being demigods. It seems to me that sometimes, they are accorded worship. Nowhere does Jesus say to pray to saints. Jesus says the path to the lord is through him, not his mother. Further, if I have a personal relationship with God, then I don’t need a saint to put in a good word for me with God.
I am sure there are many Catholic answers to these items, but from someone on the other side of the Reformation, that is what they look like.
I like Liturgical Churches. I would miss the sermons though, if I were Catholic. The homilies just don’t give me what I want. And to be fair, I want sermons that make me think.
As a wife and a mother, I think your dismissal of Mary’s uniqueness disappointing. She gave life to the Redeemer through an act of free will which you are quick to dismiss, bore him in her womb til his birth, and fed him with her own milk. She stood at the foot of the Cross, and was mentioned with primacy of place frequently by the accounts of the Passion, Easter, and Pentecost. Your response to this is to yawn?
Do you ever ask your friends to pray for you, or do your scoff at their assistance?
I personally value my friends the saints.
St. Joe is a family patron. We love him and his shining, stalwart example. I am glad to share your love of his witness.
I hope that someday you have occasion to hear Fr. Joseph Peh Akomeah, who preaches homilies at my parish that are inevitably holy and thoughtful, while retaining their Catholic focus on the words from the readings for the day, rather than whatever the preacher wants to talk about.
It is too bad you dismiss all Catholic preachers. Have you had much occasion to listen to them? I ask without malicious intent here, I’m honestly curious.
I’ve had some lousy ones, but many very very good ones. Our previous pastor made me want to leap up and shout out “Hallelujah! Preach it, brother!” Fr. Joe moves me less emotionally, but I find much fodder in his exhortations.
There’s a Lutheran pastoral saying: “If Christ didn’t die in your sermon, you didn’t preach the Gospel.” Using that criterion, I heard the Gospel preached maybe a couple times a year before I became Lutheran.
After all, I’m at church to learn about Christ, not get a self-improvement lecture. :)
It is my understanding that there is not a lot of training on preaching given to Priests, in the way, say, a Methodist gets in his or her training. What I have experienced of homilies is they are too short and do not make me think.
If Bryan had phrased it not as Mary is overvalued, but that Joseph tends to be undervalued, perhaps we’d all be in agreement?
For Joseph, too, did an astonishing thing. How many men, even very pious men, could bring themselves to believe a fiancee who told them the “other man” she was pregnant by was no man at all, but a miracle of the Holy Spirit? Even if a girl of the most pristine reputation had told you that, could you bring yourself to believe it? I don’t think I could.
In fact, purely as a hypothetical, if I had been in Mary’s own shoes, I don’t think I would have believed it, either. If all the evidence I had told me I had never been close to a man, but I had been visited by an angel announcing my pregnancy, and I was, in fact, pregnant, I would wonder, for example, if some impossible-to-remember sexual encounter during deep sleep or some sort of fit had caused the pregnancy, and the vision of the angel were just my way of rationalizing it. Joseph, not being a dummy, would have to be wondering the same thing, no?
The way Joseph overcame natural – and, in any other circumstances, extremely justifiable – male sexual jealousy and pride was its own miracle.
I don’t have a problem with saying she was a good person. I resent ignoring Joseph. Fathers are as important as Mothers. Joseph would have been the primary spiritual leader for Jesus growing up. I don’t think she deserves the level she gets in comparison to him.
Saints are not treated like asking friends to pray for you. There are Shrines to saints. Forgive me, but Shrine mean worship. Altars to Saints mean worship. While for you, it might just be “my friends the saints” to a whole lot of people, it is like a lessor god.
The Church, I might add, encouraged this when the expanded, replacing local gods with saints as they went.
I grew up in a tradition that treats Mary and Joseph as accessories. They are there because that Jesus baby needed a mama and they both need a papa to protect them and make it look legit. That’s a bit more crude than my Sunday school teachers would have put it, but that’s the gist.
I gained an appreciation of Mary and came to understand her more as a true hero of the faith through both the liturgical emphasis on her and some wider reading. Now I think of her as I do Abraham. They both were inflection points in human history because of their faith, their courage and their worship. Their names should always be remembered and honored.
Likewise, Joseph receives little attention in the church and less in Reformation Protestantism and that is a travesty. I heard a teaching about him in a Messianic Jewish service that pointed out his critical importance to Jesus’ lineage from David. It caused me to meditate more on him and what his role teaches us.
But we all NEED fellowship with the “communion of all the saints” to be in a robust and right relationship to Christ.
Well yes, but then the true Father of Jesus deserves (and gets) our worship.
While I’m all for giving the saint I’m named after his due, and I hesitate to side with the feminists on this… we are after all talking about a religion that worships a male trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a Bible that tells the story of the patriarchs while attributing the Fall of mankind primarily to Eve (for which she is cursed with the pains of childbirth), a religion that until very recently had an all-male clergy, that still today in the Catholic Church has an all-male priesthood that we colloquially refer to as “fathers” headed by il Papa. I hardly think we’re in danger of undervaluing fathers around here…
You apparently misunderstand the purpose of any Catholic church whether a shrine, basilica, or simple country parish, which is to offer the Liturgy of the Mass.
Altars to saints does not mean worship. What do you think happens at an altar? The answer is, the holy sacrifice of the Mass. The Mass is the same today as it was in Mary’s day. It has nothing to do with the saint. You should learn more before you dismiss.
You have heard the criticism of Catholic practice from critics. Have you heard the defense from defenders?
As a shrine-visiting, novena-reciting, Rosary-loving proud Catholic, I assure you that we do not worship or adore the saints, any more than Lutherans worship Martin Luther or Calvinists worship John Calvin. We view them as our friends, help and encouragement in following Christ in all our varied walks of life.
But Mary is special.
I reject the false idea that Mary was simply “a good person.” She is the Ark of the Covenant, the Cause of our joy, the Star of the Sea, the Mother of Mercy, and the Mother of God. She is the Immaculate Conception!
Mary was not immaculately concepted. It harms the doctrine of Christ’s full humanity (see Hebrews 4:15 for more).
I may have to unpack this is two posts. We will see how it goes:
To me, it appears Catholics pray to Saints for intersession:
O Holy St Jude!
Apostle and Martyr,
great in virtue and rich in miracles,
near kinsman of Jesus Christ,
faithful intercessor for all who invoke you,
special patron in time of need;
to you I have recourse from the depth of my heart,
and humbly beg you,
to whom God has given such great power,
to come to my assistance;
help me now in my urgent need and grant my earnest petition.
I will never forget thy graces and favors you obtain for me
and I will do my utmost to spread devotion to you. Amen.
To me, that is too much like a prayer to God. I don’t need to ask a Saint to put in a good word for me, because he is closer to the Big Guy, and that is what this feels like. I believe I have a direct line, and I am no further from God than the Saint.
So, all I am saying here is that it is not my cup of tea. It is not for me. I do no condemn it in someone else. *I* would feel uncomfortable.
Catholics do pray to saints for intercession.
See this part of the Baltimore Catechism.
On the Subject of Mary:
Personally, I think the whole notion of Original Sin and Personal Sin to be Angels Dancing on the Head of a Pin territory anyway.
Now, that might be an idea you reject. We can disagree. You can have your faith traditions and I can have mine. God is big enough to accept that.
My posts have been with that I like in Church services. And Catholic is not it.
I’m not sure how original sin and personal sin can be dancing angels territory. It is what the whole shooting match is about.
No Adam, no Christ (Romans 5).
No personal sin, no need for Christ post-cross (1 John 2:1-2).
Tend to agree with you there I’m afraid, the majority of Catholic homilies I’ve heard have not been very interesting or inspiring. Not sure what the root cause is. Language barrier can be an issue as well, since around here we tend to import a lot of foreign priests for whom English is a second language — though they tend to give more interesting and challenging homilies than the American priests, providing you can decipher the accent.
I’d prefer they fix the quality issue first though before addressing the length, if the sermon is uninspiring it’s at least a blessing that it’s short…
I wish I could remember the exact quote which may have been by Andrew Greeley but it’s something like ‘advice to young priests : after 10 minutes the only one still listening to you is your mother, after 15 minutes she’s glancing at her watch’
I want to send it anonymously to one of our deacons.
I don’t understand your reasoning there. Were Adam and Eve fully human when God first created them? Or did they not become fully human until after the Fall?
My parents and grandparents – to the extent that they attended church at all – wanted sermons that made them think, too. Even while not attending Sunday services, they wanted the comfort of being affiliated with a church whose pastor gave interesting sermons.
For me, liturgical music turned out to be more important. So much so that, as soon as I had the choice, I choose a church with a wonderful music program – but a pastor who gave horrible sermons. To deal with the ramifications of my choice, I became very good at tuning out sermons. Which turns out to be a hard habit to break once you’ve developed it :-)
It comes as no surprise to me that different people connect with God differently. I can live with terrible sermons if everything else seems about right. My husband can’t. And once you’ve got kids, their moral formation may take precedence over parental worship preferences – I’ve heard of cases where that’s happened: for example, parents switching to a church whose worship music viscerally repulses them, but which has better youth programs – and more moral peers for their children – than other options.
This is done and I have yet to hear of it done well.
We left the Episcopal Church for obvious reasons I think, but propelled by the desire to avoid having to constantly correct what our children heard at church. We spent a lot of time and prayer searching out a church home for all of us. We all wanted some formal liturgy, but it must be accompanied by good doctrine and quality teaching. The social fellowship aspect is important, but many youth programs are forced and weird. The 2 best I found were in doctrinally problematic situations and my daughters were more sensitive to that than I realized. We do not have a satisfactory answer, but my daughters have been in Christian schools and seem to choose friends who are serious about faith matters.
Friends who were struggling along in the Episcopal church before the ACNA option, took their children to a very evangelical Protestant church for the Bible teaching. They endured the informal worship style for their sake. In the end, both kids are finding their own way in the faith and not as their parents would have hoped. Mixed result?
When Adam and Eve were created they were without sin, both in flesh and spirit. It was necessary that Christ take on a fallen human body for the sacrifice to be real and effectual unto salvation. (2 Cor. 5:21).
You do the best you can. My faith is not exactly like my parents, nor theirs like each others. I have what I call a “Doubter’s Faith”
Yep. Sounds like a mixed result.
I, too, would consider forfeiting children’s instruction in liturgy and tradition a loss, even if it also meant them finding a more socially-conservative, (hopefully!) less-sexually-active, and generally more wholesome church peer group. Ideally, you want it all.
But if you can’t have it all, engaged, non-depraved kids is in itself quite an accomplishment. For more than one college friend, spending time in Evangelical circles gave them a (relatively wholesome) “rumspringa” before returning to liturgical worship.