First Sunday of Advent • Calendar Crunch

We live in an era when calendars seem to rule our lives—the office calendar, the school calendar, the holiday calendar, the social calendar. Not surprisingly, many of us rely more and more on technology to help us keep track of all our various obligations and responsibilities. The new Church year begins today and the scriptures invite us to pause, slow down, and consider some of our core priorities as disciples of the Lord.

Statistics show that, more than any previous generation in human history, we have disposable time to use how we choose. We are not tied to the unrelenting agricultural calendar of traditional farm work or to sixteen-hour days in factories, yet we often feel rushed and over-committed. This all comes down to how we use our God-given time.

The readings today declare that God will fulfill the promises that God has made. Until that time of perfect justice, righteousness, and salvation comes upon us we are asked to do four things: to be alert at all times, not to give in to worry and distractions, to pray for strength, and to care lovingly for one another. So, as we prepare to celebrate again the coming of the Savior, think about the stewardship of time.

Think back to third grade when we learned the difference between needs and wants, and realize how much the line has blurred between the two since then. Is your calendar too full? Streamline it by looking at it with an informed eye: What must you do and what would you like to do, and how can you put God first this Advent? 

Copyright © 2009, World Library Publications. All rights reserved.

Liturgical Year and Colors

We occasionally see the term “Liturgical Year” in our bulletin.  This week we are celebrating the Feast of Christ the King which is the last Sunday in our Liturgical Year.  What exactly does Liturgical Year mean?

Beginning with the First Sunday of Advent and ending with the Feast of Christ the King the Church celebrates the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The year itself is broken down into three distinct periods.

The first of these periods is Advent and Christmas.  We anticipate then celebrate God coming into human history.  The second period is Lent and Easter where we enter into the events that lead up to Jesus’ death and then celebrate his resurrection and ascension into heaven.  The final period we call “Ordinary” Time, but there’s nothing ordinary about it.  The word “Ordinary” comes from the word “Ordinal,” which is how the weeks are numbered: first, second, third, etc.

Each of these seasons have a different feel to them and we can recognize the change of season by the different color vestments the clergy wear as well as the colors of our banners and altar decorations. 

The use of colors to differentiate the liturgical seasons became a common practice about the fourth century.  At first, usages varied considerably but by the 12th century Pope Innocent III approved the use of five colors: Violet, White, Black, Red and Green.  Today, four colors are used to express the emotions and ideas that are associated with each of the seasons of the liturgical year.

Violet is the ancient royal color and therefore a symbol of the sovereignty of Christ.  Violet is also associated with repentance from sin.  We see that connection in its use during Advent and Lent as we acknowledge our sinfulness and prepare for the Lord and his resurrection.

White reminds us of the brightness of day and that Jesus is the Light of the World.  We wear it during the Christmas and Easter seasons as well as for the great feasts of the year.

Red evokes the color of blood, and is the color of martyrs and Christ’s death on the cross.  But it is also the color of fire and remembering the tongues of fire that hovered over the Apostles it is also the color of the Holy Spirit and feasts of the apostles.

And the rest of the year, when we’re counting out our Ordinal time?  We wear green which represents living things and the promise of new life. 

Every year we cycle through the life, death and resurrection of Christ and every year we are changed by that journey.

Water and Wine

Before elevating the cup a little and blessing God for the gift of wine, the Deacon, or in his absence the Priest, pours a few drops of water into the chalice or flagon of wine.   As he does this, he says quietly:

          “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

Because of the distance from the altar and the quiet, almost silent recitation of those words, most of us may hardly notice and certainly not understand either what was said or the significance of the action.

An ancient rule during Christ’s time required that some water must be mingled with the wine.   In those times all wine was heavy and thick and no polite person ever served it uncut.   Today’s wines already come watered down, so the reason we do this at Mass has been lost.   But over the centuries the action took on new symbolic meanings. 

The meanings include the wine and water being like Jesus and us, together and indivisible – the close bond between Christ and His Church.  And the one that most of us probably heard in grade school:  it can be seen as representative of the water and blood which flowed from Jesus’ side as he hung from the cross.   One can see that while the mixing of the water and wine is a minor action, the symbolism can be very great.

When there are several cups, as happens here at all of our Masses, the water is normally poured into the flagon that comes up with the gifts and then the wine is poured into the separate cups.   Some suggest that the water be placed only into the principle chalice that the priest uses – because that was the practice prior to the Second Vatican Council – but that was because at that time, only the clergy received the Precious Blood and there would have been only one chalice.

However the water gets into the wine, the action today is one of symbolic gesture – a gesture that reminds us that just like the water and wine, we are all commingled, combined into the mystical Body of Christ.

The Offertory

For the past several weeks, with some detours, we have discussed only the first part of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Word.  Today we begin discussing the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

Our Eucharistic celebration begins with the Offertory.  In the Middle Ages the faithful would bring their gifts of offering forward and place them on the altar.  These gifts would have included bread and wine, along with produce and small animals such as chickens and pigs.  The larger animals would have been placed in a side chamber before Mass began.

The deacon of the Mass would have taken aside an amount of bread and wine that would be suitable for the Mass and the remainder of the gifts would have been put aside for the care of the clergy and the church.  Now you know the reason that Father washes his hands following the prayer of offering our gifts to God – he would have just finished handling the animals that had been offered.

The priest then takes the gifts and offers them to God.  We hear this happening as Father lifts the bread toward God and says in a formulary that is faithful to our Jewish roots, “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.”  After blessing God, which in this context means “praising,” and offering the bread, the wine is offered in a similar formula. 

Today, we don’t individually bring our gifts to the altar.  A couple of people or a family is chosen from those attending Mass to represent all of us.  And instead of us bringing bread and wine, or grain or livestock, we offer a monetary gift to support those in need and the Church’s needs:  be that bread and wine for the Liturgy or electricity so that our worship space may be kept a comfortable temperature.

 Of course, it is not just the bread and wine and the gift of our monetary resources that is offered to God.  We are also bringing ourselves to the altar, offering ourselves, consecrating ourselves to God. 

At Risen Savior, we invite all of our families to be “gift bearers.”  If you would like to bring up the gifts at any of our Masses, please contact our Liturgist, Kevin Newman at 821-1571 ext. 122 or knewman@risensaviorcc.org.  

The Intentions of the Mass

When a priest presides at the Mass he has three objectives: First, to offer the Mass in union with and for the good of the whole Church; Second, to offer the Mass reverently; Third, to offer the Mass for a particular intention, such as the repose of the soul of someone who has died.  

Right before Mass begins, our announcement reader tells us for whom this Mass is offered.  These most frequently are the deceased members of our parish family, but on occasion the Mass is offered for someone’s birthday or anniversary, or for someone who is facing a particular trial in life.

Praying for the dead began long before the early stages of Christianity.  The earliest Scriptural reference to prayers for the dead comes in the second book of Maccabees, written some 150 years before the birth of Christ. The book tells how Judas Maccabee, the Jewish leader, led his troops into battle.  When the battle ended he directed that the bodies of those Jews who had died be buried.  As soldiers prepared their slain comrades for burial, they discovered that each was wearing an amulet taken as booty from a pagan Temple. This violated Jewish law and so Judas and his soldiers prayed that God would forgive the sin these men had committed (II Maccabees 12:39-45).

This is the first indication in the Bible of a belief that prayers offered by the living can help free the dead from any sin that would separate them from God in the life to come. It is echoed in the New Testament when St. Paul reminds us that Jesus is the “Lord of the living and the dead” (II Timothy 4:1).

The cavelike tombs under the city of Rome, which we call catacombs, bear evidence that members of the Roman Christian community gathered there to pray for their fellow followers of Christ who lay buried there.  By the fourth century, prayers for the dead are mentioned in Christian literature as though they were already a longstanding custom.

Praying for the dead also has roots in our belief in the communion of saints.  We who are living often assist each other through prayers and other forms of spiritual support. Christians who have died continue to be members of the communion of saints. We believe that we can assist them by our prayers, and they can assist us by theirs.

The Prayers of the Faithful

The deacon says, “For our Holy Father and all the leaders of the Church, we pray to the Lord.”  And all of us immediately know to respond by saying: “Lord, hear our prayer.”  This form of prayer was new to Catholics after the Second Vatican Council, but now the response is almost automatic.  The danger with automatic responses, of course, is that we tend to forget the deeper meaning of what we do and say.

The petitions that follow the Creed are called the Prayers of the Faithful or the General Intercessions.  Each name tells us something important about this prayer.

It’s called the Prayer of the Faithful because this prayer is said by those who are baptized.  As Christ prayed for the good of the people, so we are called to offer prayers and intercessions for the needs of all people today.

The General Instruction of the Roman Missal says that this prayer generally includes four main categories of intentions: “for the Church, for public authorities and the salvation of the whole world, for those burdened by any kind of difficulty and for the local community” (#70).  There may be more than one petition in any of those categories, but these general areas remind us that the prayer is to be universal in scope.  It seeks to address the needs of all people, near and far.  Thus the prayer is also called the General Intercessions – because they are general in nature.

While they are general in scope, the petitions are also current and local.  They address the needs of our world in our own time, and they reflect local needs as well as global ones.  The rest of the prayers at Mass are prescribed in the official books – we are not free to rewrite or create them.  In the Prayers of the Faithful, in contrast, we are expected to write our own – otherwise they could not reflect what is happening at this particular time in this particular place.

But what do we mean when we say, “We pray to the Lord?”  This statement requires us to remember that the Church teaches that we are the Body of Christ.  When we ask Christ to care for the ill, or end war and poverty, we are also taking on the commission of doing so ourselves.  We are not passive.  We understand that faith is a verb and we are all called to action when we say, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic

Every time we’ve prayed the Creed we’ve professed our belief in the “Marks of the Church.” The essential characteristics or “Marks” that distinguish the true Church from other groups are expressed in our statement of belief in “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.”

In the first article of the Creed we express our belief in One God who is undivided and indivisible.  Our expression of belief in One Church does not deny diversity.  Nothing in the New Testament suggests that uniformity is an ideal.  The Second Vatican Council in their document The Light of the Nations teaches us that the Church shines forth as “a people made one with the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

We say of the Church that it is “holy” because there is holiness both of and in it.  We do not claim that the church is holy because we, collectively, are a holy, sinless people.   The Church’s holiness is the expression of divine love that will not allow itself to be defeated by human willfulness and weakness.   The Church is not holy because of us, but in spite of us.

The word “catholic” derives from a Greek phrase that means “on the whole.”   The first recorded use of the word seems to have been from St. Ignatius of Antioch in the early 2nd Century when he wrote, “Where the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”  He was saying that the church had reality, life and power only to the extent that it formed part of the universal church in union with its spiritual head.  When we speak of being catholic we are saying “the Church is one, not a union of parts but a unity of many.” 

The last Mark of the Church is that we are “apostolic.”   As St. Paul said in his letter to the Ephesians, “You form a building which rises on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.”   The apostles were first and foremost what Jesus refers to them as being, “witnesses.”  Our faith is built upon the Apostles, who witnessed to what they had seen, heard and experienced.

When you put these four Marks together we can see that the Church is from God and for us.