Posts Tagged ‘Advent 3A’
Longing for Christ – Br. James Koester
Br. James Koester
Preached at the Church of St. Augustine and St. Martin, Boston.
Advent 3A
Isaiah 35:1-10
Matthew 11:2-11
Several years ago, one of my favourite newspaper columnists[1] wrote about how she loved going to Church on Christmas Eve, especially if there was a light snowfall. She wrote about how she loved to hear the nativity story and sing the familiar Christmas carols. She wrote about how she would line up with the other members of the congregation and kneel before the altar, decorated with poinsettias, and receive Holy Communion. She wrote about all this and then ended her column wondering why she bothered, because even though she had grown up an Anglican, she had long ago stopped going to Church. She admitted that she didn’t believe a word of what was said in Church on Christmas Eve, or any other day for that matter.
What she loved was the ritual; the familiarity of the story; and the picture-perfect Christmas card scene of a moonlight night with lots of bright stars and snow. For her, there was no sense that the ritual and the story could mean any more than a reminder of a simpler time in her life. What she loved, and I hasten to add, these are my words and not hers, what she loved was the nostalgia of Christmases long ago. Read More
Between Offense and Misunderstanding – Br. Keith Nelson
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Br. Keith Nelson
Advent 3A
Isaiah 35:1-10
Matthew 11:2-11
In my senior year in college, I took a linguistic anthropology course. One lecture seemed to summarize much of my life’s experience. The topic was direct and indirect communication, and the cultural dimensions that shape our often unconscious use of one or the other in public situations.
I had spent the first nine years of my life in southern New Jersey, then age nine to eighteen in central Alabama. In very general terms, U.S. culture as a whole favors direct communication, along with countries like Germany and Australia and all of Scandinavia. But the northeastern and Atlantic states, as well as the Western U.S., especially typify direct speech. People say what they mean; clarity and efficiency are priorities; the manner of speaking is more informal. Indirect communication characterizes places like Japan, China, the Middle East, Latin America, and the south of England: places where people often infer or imply what they really mean using understatement; where avoidance of social conflict is a high priority; and where speech tends to be more formal.
Lots of exceptions apply: the individual, the context, the class, race, and gender of those speaking. But generally: New Jersey and Alabama fit those contrasting patterns. Read More