December 19: The Angel's Song: Gloria in Excelsis Deo
♫ Music:
WEEK FOUR INTRODUCTION
TITLE: THE ANGEL’S SONG: GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO
Luke 2:14
December 19 - 25
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”
The initial response of the shepherds at encountering the angels was one of sheer terror. Although luminaries like Moses and Isaiah saw God and lived, there was a strong tradition in the Old Testament that supported the impossibility of looking on the glory of God and living! “Don’t be afraid,” an angel of the Lord told the shepherds, “I bring you tidings of great joy. Today Christ the Lord is born.” French priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote that “joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” Instead of being fearful, we must rejoice. Instead of living in terror, we must actively seek his peace.
Seven hundred years before Christ, Old Testament prophets proclaimed one who would come to assuage the immobilizing fears of a troubled planet. Their message is as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was almost three millennia ago. Jesus, “the Prince of Peace,” came to this earth in humble circumstances and lived a life of humility in order to restore mankind’s severed relationship with God. He did this so that we might experience wholeness and peace, a peace that surpasses “all human understanding.” The inner peace that Christ provides is not of this world. It is a rest and tranquility in the midst of turmoil that can be attained only by abiding in the “God of peace.”
Christmas should be all about encountering the great God of glory, joy, and peace. The God who intervened in history because of his abounding, unending love for mankind. Because of this great gift the world has been given, we are compelled to respond to the wonders of his love by echoing the words of the Angel’s Canticle, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” Let all creation in heaven and on earth sing his praises now and forever.
Title: GOD’S GREATNESS
Scripture: Deuteronomy 5:24
“Surely the Lord our God has shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice from the midst of the fire. We have seen this day that God speaks with man; yet he still lives.”
Poetry:
Speak to Us
by Katie Ford
For all of my years, I’ve read only living signs—
bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle,
bodies growing disease like mushroom coral.
It is tiresome, tiresome, describing
fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human
ribs
into some slow, future forest.
My beloved, he tires of me, and he should—
my complaints the same, his recourse
the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet
suffering drapes
over the living freeze of heart after heart,
and never by that heart’s fault—the heart did
not make itself,
the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone
to wail across the plains or beg the bare city.
I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans,
the figs that outlived summer
or the tedious mineral angles and
their suction of light.
Have you died? Then speak.
You must see the living
are too small as they are,
lonesome for more
and in varieties of pain
only you can bring into right view.
KEEP SILENT
Beauty might pacify, but eternal beauty terrifies. Throughout the Scriptures, beholding the glory of God, even glimpses of divine light, elicited terror in human hearts. No one could look upon God and live–that is, unless divine grace permitted. Such fears account for the surprised delight in Moses’ words: “We have seen this day that God speaks with man; yet he still lives.” For this reason, the icon of Moses and the Burning Bush depicts a billowing flame of rich, rosy red that radiates upward from a small, green bush and includes the miniscule supplicant prostrate before the blazing tree. The sublime scene is made even more remarkable by the aureole of golden light encircling the holy mountain. Deuteronomy evokes this poignant moment so that the people of God never forget this miraculous theophany (“divine appearance”).
Such moments, however, multiply during the days of Jesus’ ministry. Whether from the bottom of a boat caught on wind-tossed sea (Mark 6:50) or after the clouds dissipated on the mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:6ff), Jesus’ disciples feared that which their eyes could not reconcile. “Who is this man?” While the Gospels record incidents of Christ’s terrifying glory, the reassuring rationale for such revelations is given later. Terror gives way to relief when 1 John explains that Christ’s glory portends our deliverance: “Beloved… what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)
No longer is the glory of Christ a terrifying radiance from which we must shield our eyes. Rather than overwhelming our senses–burning our eyes and deafening our ears, his sanctifying love makes our hearts “burn within us” (Lk. 24:32). The consuming flame of his love purges and cleanses; yet it does not destroy, but heals.
In the Orthodox Church’s iconographic tradition, the imagery of the unburnt bush relays the glory of the Incarnation as prefigured in Mary’s pregnancy and later repeated in living sacrifices of the holy martyrs. These saints were surely overtaken by the glory of the Lord but not consumed. Instead, they were transformed.
Rather than gush forth in song, such experiences render us as fearfully mute as Moses and the shepherds. As recipients of Christ’s sanctifying love, then, we must invite and embrace this flame. Like Mary, we can say, “let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Like the martyred Apostle, we can accept that we’ll be, “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:7-12). Just as the fiery bush rests atop a hospitable table in Tanja Butler’s painting, bearing this tension between life and death draws others toward Christ’s sanctifying love. So, don’t be afraid of your own silence. To keep silent and let this fire rage within is one beautiful way to live in this newfound peace and goodwill toward men.
Prayer:
“Let me seek, Lord, the gift of silence, stillness, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned to prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. Permit me to feel my helplessness before you so that I may let go of frustration, alienation, and shame. Grant me attentiveness to your loving presence and to your will so that I may adore you in the center of my being. From within my solitude and silence, draw out my song of praise and celebration, for the life of grace on earth is the beginning of the life of glory.
Amen.”
–Adapted from reflections by Thomas Merton
Devotion Author:
Dr. Taylor Worley
Visiting Associate Professor of Art History
Wheaton College
Wheaton, Illinois
For more information about the artwork, music, poetry, and devotional writer selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork #1:
Icon of Moses and the Burning Bush
Unknown Artist
About the Artwork #2:
Burning Bush
Tanja Butler
2005
4 x 10 in.
Oil on canvas
Massachusetts-based artist and illustrator Tanja Butler is known for her liturgically based works. Her paintings utilize different “symbolic systems of stylization to describe an internal reality,” she explains. Byzantine icons, for example, “use an inverted perspective to portray space as if seen from the viewpoint of eternity.” A cubist fragmentation of space in her compositions can be used to describe “multiple perspectives as a metaphor of the transformation and growth initiated by the Spirit.” Butler combines different artistic genres, theologies, Scriptures, and symbols to create what she calls “multilayered metaphors of God’s sojourn with us.”
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/art/burning-bush-and-ezekiel-s-dream-tanja-butler
About the Artist #2:
Tanja Butler (b. 1955) was born in Germany and moved to the United States as a young girl. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Albany. Her artistic practice has focused on liturgical art, illustration, and community service projects. She is inspired by Byzantine icons, American and European folk art, Persian manuscripts and textile patterns, African art, early Christian art, Russian suprematist paintings, cubism, and fauvist color. Informed by studies in art history and time working in Italy, she was particularly influenced by the frescoes of early Renaissance artist Fra Angelico in the Monastery of San Marco in Florence. Her collection of six hundred graphic images, Icon: Visual Images for Every Sunday, was published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Her work is included in the collections of the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, the Billy Graham Center Museum at Wheaton, the Boston Public Library, the DeCordova Museum, and the Armand Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA. In 2014 she retired from her position as an associate professor of art at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, where she taught painting, drawing, liturgical art, and illustration.
www.tanjabutler.com
About the Music:
“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” from the album Storm
Lyrics:
Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly-minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.
King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heav'nly food.
Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the pow'rs of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.
At His feet the six-winged seraph,
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry:
"Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Lord Most High!"
About the Performer:
Fernando Ortega is an evangelical Christian singer-songwriter and worship leader heavily influenced by traditional hymns as well as his family’s Albuquerque, New Mexico, heritage. Much of his current inspiration comes from the North American Anglican liturgy. From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, he served in music ministry at a number of churches in New Mexico and Southern California. From 1993 to the present, Ortega has worked as a concert/recording artist, and has released fourteen albums. “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” is from his album Storm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Ortega
http://www.fernandoortega.com/
Composer:
“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” is a traditional hymn based on the tune "Picardy,” a hymn tune used in Christian churches, based on a French carol. The tune dates back at least to the seventeenth century, and was originally used for the folk song "Jésus-Christ s'habille en pauvre.” First published in the 1848 collection Chansons populaires des provinces de France, "Picardy" was most famously arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1906 for the hymn "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” in the English Hymnal. The words are taken from the Byzantine Greek Liturgy of St. James translated by Gerard Moultrie, a chaplain at Shrewsbury School in England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picardy_(hymn)
About the Poet:
Katie Ford (b. 1975) is an American poet, essayist, and professor. Ford is the author of If You Have to Go (2018), Blood Lyrics (2014), Colosseum (2008), and Deposition (2002). She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Levis Reading Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
https://poets.org/poet/katie-ford
About the Devotion Author:
Dr. Taylor Worley
Visiting Associate Professor of Art History
Wheaton College
Wheaton, illinois
Taylor Worley is currently a visiting associate professor of art history at Wheaton College. He completed a Ph.D. in the areas of contemporary art and theological aesthetics in the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews and is the author of Memento Mori in Contemporary Art: Theologies of Lament and Hope (Routledge, 2020). Taylor is married to Anna, and they have four children: Elizabeth, Quinn, Graham, and Lillian.