December 11: The Internal Peace Christ Provides
♫ Music:
Wednesday, December 11
Title: THE INTERNAL PEACE CHRIST PROVIDES
Scripture: Colossians 3: 15-17
Let the peace of Christ [the inner calm of one who walks daily with Him] be the controlling factor in your hearts [deciding and settling questions that arise]. To this peace indeed you were called as members in one body [of believers]. And be thankful [to God always]. Let the [spoken] word of Christ have its home within you [dwelling in your heart and mind—permeating every aspect of your being] as you teach [spiritual things] and admonish and train one another with all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Whatever you do [no matter what it is] in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus [and in dependence on Him], giving thanks to God the Father through Him.
Poetry:
Haiku
by Matsuo Basho
(trans. by Robert Bly)
The temple bell stops.
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.
PEACE IN CHRIST
As an introvert, solitude makes me feel peaceful, and so I’m occasionally tempted to believe that peace is an individual matter. Inner peace sounds, to my introverted ears, like individual peace.
But peace is always communal, and that fact really hits home in Advent, when I contemplate the upcoming feast of the Incarnation.
In Advent, we remember that in the Lord Jesus “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” and in that miraculous union of God and man he “reconciled to himself all things” (as Paul says earlier in his letter to the Colossians). Because of the Incarnation, we are able to be at peace with both God and with one another. If Christ is in you, and he is also in your fellow believer, then you are united with your fellow believer in a new way. You are both in Christ.
We can’t generate this peace, and it is not always a feeling (much as I wish it were!). This peace comes from our Lord, and it is something we receive.
We receive it and yet, in his mercy, the Lord also lets us have a part in making it. Imagine a parent who earned the money, bought the food, and did all the hard work of making a home, preparing the meal, and setting the table—and yet let the child have the dignity of stirring the pot a few times and saying that he “helped make dinner.” In the same way, our Lord lets us have a part in “making” this marvelous peace with one another.
He even tells us how to do it. This passage from Paul contains such practical instructions. Sing hymns, remind each other of God’s goodness, be thankful. All of these are things we can do because we know God has forgiven us, God loves us, God is good to us.
In other words, we can do these things because the Son took on human flesh, died, and rose again. In doing that, he made a way for us into his own peace—the peace he has shared, from all eternity, with the Father and the Spirit.
The image “Life in Community” that accompanies this devotion gives us a visual of this family in which Christ has included us: Christ is at the head, and the rest of us are all together at one table. Our life is shared, our sustenance is shared, our hope is shared. It is together that we must sing, admonish, and thank.
The music, too, points us in the direction of peace. Faure’s Pavane is frequently used as a setting for the ancient Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison, or “Lord, have mercy.”
It is a prayer we pray expecting the answer, “Yes.”
We expect the Lord will have mercy, Christ will have mercy. Why? Because he has already given us so much: forgiveness, salvation, himself.
And in those gifts, he has also given us each other.
May we receive these gifts—all of them—with joy this Christmas.
Prayer:
Almighty Father, whose blessed Son before his passion prayed for his disciples that they might be one, as you and he are one: Grant that your Church, being bound together in love and obedience to you, may be united in one body by the one Spirit, that the world may believe in him whom you have sent, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.
----from the Book of Common Prayer.
Jessica Snell
Biola Class of 2003
Freelance Writer and Editor
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
Life in Community (with detail)
Aidan Hart
Copyright 2002
Illuminated manuscript on vellum with gold leaf, ink, and tempera paint
The Saint John's Bible,
Saint John's University,
Collegeville, Minnesota, USA.
Used with Permission
All Rights Reserved
This complex multi-layered work from The Saint John's Bible represents an image of the ideal community in Christ. At the center of the composition, other Apostles and figures representing saints throughout church history surround the Virgin Mary, Paul, and Peter. In addition, women, men, and clerics are seated alongside lay people of various cultures and ethnicities. Everyone is gathered around a never-ending central table set for a feast. An altar sits in the foreground with the Scriptures and the elements of the Eucharist. Above the gathering, Christ is seated in the heavens. One of the four passages of calligraphy on the image reads, “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul.” In this image we are reminded that we are called into community within the body of Christ - we are not meant to live out the Christian life alone.
http://www.saintjohnsbible.org/
About The Saint John's Bible:
The Saint John's Bible is the first completely handwritten and illuminated Bible commissioned since the invention of the printing press. After a Saint John’s University-sponsored calligraphy presentation in 1995, master calligrapher Donald Jackson proposed a handwritten Bible to Fr. Eric Hollas, OSB, the former executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John's University in Minnesota. The Saint John’s Bible, officially commissioned in 1998, was completed in 2011. During production, Artistic Director Donald Jackson oversaw a group of artists working in a scriptorium located in Monmouth, Wales. Using a mixture of the ancient techniques of calligraphy and illumination, the artists created illuminated manuscripts that were handwritten with quills on calfskin vellum decorated with gold and platinum leaf and hand-ground pigments. Gold leaf was used liberally to represent the divine, silver/platinum to reflect the principle of wisdom, and rainbows to show God’s faithful promises. A wide range of artistic styles, including iconography, abstraction, chrysography, and illustration, were incorporated to create a contemporary visual vocabulary for the sacred. Meanwhile at Saint John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota, a team of biblical scholars, art historians, and theologians gathered weekly to develop the theological content behind the illuminations. The Saint John’s Bible is divided into seven volumes and is two feet tall by three feet wide when open. It is made of vellum, with 160 illuminations on 1,165 pages. The Saint John’s Bible contains the text and notes of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation.
About the Artist:
Aidan Hart (b. 1957) is a British artist who grew up in New Zealand and worked there as a full-time sculptor after completing a degree in English literature and a diploma in Secondary Education teaching. In 1983 Hart became a member of the Orthodox Church, returned to England, and began work as a professional iconographer. While continuing to work as an iconographer from 1988 to 2000, he also spent two years as a monk on Mount Athos, Greece, and six years as a hermit in Shropshire, UK. This intense life of prayer profoundly affected his life and work. Hart is now married with two children and has developed expertise in a wide range of media and techniques including egg tempera, panel painting, fresco painting, stone and wood carving, illuminated manuscript painting, church furniture design, and mosaics. Hart has published two books, Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting, widely regarded as the foremost work on the subject, and Beauty Spirit Matter, a collection of essays. In 2009 he founded The Certificate in Icon Painting, a three-year part-time program that he continues to teach and which is run by The Prince's School of Traditional Arts, London.
https://aidanharticons.com/
About the Music:
“Pavane, Op. 50” from the album Masterpieces in Miniature
About the Composer:
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was a French composer whose refined and gentle music influenced the course of modern French music. Fauré studied piano with composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who introduced him to the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Fauré excelled not only as a songwriter of great refinement and sensitivity, but also as a composer in every branch of chamber music. He wrote more than 100 songs and enriched the literature of the piano with a number of highly original and exquisitely wrought works. His 13 nocturnes, 12 barcaroles, and 5 impromptus are perhaps the most representative and well-known of his repertoire. Although he had a deep respect for traditional forms of music, Fauré delighted in infusing those forms with a mélange of harmonic daring and a freshness of invention.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriel-Faure
About the Performers:
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas (b. 1944) is an American conductor, pianist, and composer. Since 1995 he has been the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, the Founder and Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra. In addition to conducting the world’s leading orchestras, Tilson Thomas is also noted for his work as a composer and producer of multimedia projects that are dedicated to music education and the re-imagination of the classical concert experience. He has won eleven Grammys for his recordings and is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and a Chevalier Dans L’ordre des Arts et Des Lettres of France.
https://michaeltilsonthomas.com/
The San Francisco Symphony (SFS), founded in 1911, is an American orchestra based in San Francisco, California. The orchestra has resided at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall since 1980. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (founded in 1981) and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus (1972) are also part of the organization. Michael Tilson Thomas has been the orchestra's Music Director since 1995 and is scheduled to conclude his tenure as the orchestra's music director in 2020, when conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is scheduled to become the orchestra's next music director. In the past 26 years, the orchestra's awards and honors include an Emmy Award and 15 Grammy Awards.
https://www.sfsymphony.org/
About the Poet:
Matsuo Basho (1644–1694) was the most famous poet of the Edo Period (1603–1868) in Japan. Soon after the poet’s birth, Japan closed its borders to the outside world, beginning a period of isolation in which Japanese culture flourished. Basho moved to Kyoto, where he studied Chinese poetry and Taoism, and soon began to compose small stand-alone poems incorporating natural imagery, a poetic form that eventually became known as haiku. Basho was a master of the form. His work, rooted in observation of the natural world, as well as in historical and literary concerns, engages themes of stillness and movement in a voice that is self-questioning and wry. Around 1682, Basho began months-long journeys on foot that became the material for a new poetic form he created, called haibun, a literary form alternating fragments of prose and haiku by examining a journey of the exterior world with the mind of the traveler.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/basho
About the Devotion Writer:
Jessica Snell
Biola Class of 2003
Freelance Writer and Editor
Jessica Snell, alumna ’03. Jessica is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Focus on the Family, Christ and Pop Culture, For the Church and more. She lives in sunny Southern California with her husband and four children.