Introduction to the Acts of the Apostles.
During the three years of public life, Jesus set down the foundations of a new way to live as believers in the one God. It is understood by major Scripture scholars today that it was not Jesus’ intent to create a new church, but to reform the Jewish faith he belonged to Today we understand that Jesus remained a Jewish person of faith while He was crucified, died and risen. These facts help us to understand the Acts of the Apostles in a different light. Luke wrote this testimony not as a biography of Peter and Paul and the other disciples and apostles but as a testimony to the workings of the Holy Spirit of God.
Luke, the author of the third Gospel, wrote about these workings of the Holy Spirit using other texts from different communities of Christian followers of “The Way”–which is what early believers of the Jesus event were called at the time. Many of these followers were and remained Jewish until their deaths. Others, particularly the Greeks, usually called ‘pagans’ in Acts also were being converted in surprisingly great numbers. The Book of Acts documents the lives and ministries of Paul and Peter. Peter will be seen as to struggling with the dilemma of non-Jews that were being baptized by Paul.
Paul we will see, struggles with his own beliefs as a Jewish Teacher and persecutor of the Christians and his conversion on the road to Damascus, as being ‘legitimate’ to the people who knew and worked with Jesus before he rose from the dead.
The Book of the Acts does not follow a rigorous outline, but we can pick out some clear-cut divisions in the book that point to Luke’s task. Without focusing exclusively on Peter and Paul, Luke devotes the greater part of his work to them. In spite of many exceptions, Peter dominates the first twelve chapters, while it is Paul’s turn to dominate in the second part of the book. Luke keeping with his focus on the geography of the region, he again emphasizes the journey from Jerusalem, through Judea and Samaria to Rome. In this way, he is following the mission that Jesus gave his Apostles and followers when he ascended. The Holy Spirit is the major “actor” in this writing about a new birth of a new way. There are historians that site the early Christians as first calling this writing, “The Gospel of the Holy Spirit.” It is Luke’s intention to highlight in particular through the diverse preaching of Peter and Paul, how the mystery of Christ and of the early beginnings of Christianity, has been announced and prepared for in the Hebrew Scriptures, but also how this double mystery—Christ and the early Christian Churches—fulfills the Old Testament. From this perspective, Luke readily highlights the parallels between Jesus and the early church; the people of the Hebrew Scriptures; and that of the church that forming. We will see this in the parallels between the death of Stephen and that of Christ; between the journey to Jerusalem of Paul and that of Christ,; but also the opposition between the Tower of Babel and Pentecost. The Parallel between Paul’s sea journeys and those of Jonah is also apparent. Geographically speaking, Jerusalem constantly flows from the pen of Luke (58 times).
As he has done in his Gospel, where the Holy City is mentioned 30 times. Luke points to Jerusalem as the place where salvation is accomplished, and from where the Good News is taken to all nations.
The Book of Acts has 28 Chapters. It ends abruptly, as if Luke has accomplished his task.

Commonweal Magazine
Published on Commonweal Magazine (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org)
Home > Misenchantment

Photo by Vlad Busuioc on Unsplash
I come to praise Eugene McCarraher (rather lavishly, in fact), not to bury him. But I may as well begin with a complaint, if only so as to appear evenhanded. In the penultimate paragraph of his enormous and extraordinary new book The Enchantments of Mammon [1], McCarraher conflates Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous invocation of St. Benedict at the end of After Virtue with what has come misleadingly to be called the “Benedict Option [2],” rejecting both together as though they were identical in meaning—which is to say, as if both offered a counsel of Christian disengagement from modern society and issued a call to withdrawal into isolated communities. This is an error. The Benedict Option is the title of an earnest but intellectually confused book by a journalist whose ultimate recommendations are difficult to discern amid the turbulences of his passions and anxieties. By contrast, the figure of St. Benedict as MacIntyre employs it has a very precise meaning: Benedict represents a moment when—in the lengthening twilight of a dissolving classical and Christian civilization—the slow labor of rescuing, recovering, and even reconstructing a unified Christian ethos was inaugurated. That labor began under the shelter of new forms of association located at the very heart of culture. MacIntyre’s St. Benedict has nothing to do with disengagement, and everything to do with the preservation and redemption of communal memory and public reason.

The misunderstanding is unfortunate, since it strikes a discordant note just at the close of a book that might well be called symphonic in form, and in the course of which McCarraher sounds a great many McIntyrean themes of his own. Like MacIntyre, McCarraher is impatient with those tedious modern dogmatisms that masquerade as deliverances of enlightened and disinterested rationality. He too finds the modern displacement of any moral grammar based on the cultivation of virtues by a fragmentary ethos of private values, public platitudes, and voluntarist individualisms a depressing reality. He too laments the reduction of ethical reasoning to little more than assertions of the will and celebrations of private property as the supreme index of the good. He too refuses to consent to modern secularism’s claims for itself, even while eschewing the traditionalist’s politics of nostalgia. Above all, like MacIntyre, McCarraher both recognizes and detests capitalism’s spoliations of creation and disintegration of communities, and casts a fond, forlorn eye toward the possibility of restoring a rationality of genuine human life.

But let me start again.

The Enchantments of Mammon is a magnificent book. It is, before all else, a sheer marvel of patient scholarship, history on a grand scale and in the best tradition of historical writing: a comprehensive account of the rise and triumph of capitalism in the modern age, not only as an economics, but also as our most pervasive and dominant system of ultimate values. But the book is far more than that. It is also a work of profound moral insight: a searing spiritual critique of a vision of reality that reduces everything mysterious, beautiful, fragile, and potentially transcendent in human experience to instances of—or opportunities for—acquisition and personal power, and that seeks no end higher than the transformation of creation’s substantial goods into the lifeless abstraction of monetary value. It is, moreover, a work delightfully subversive of the standard story of how this vision of things progressively became the very shape of the world we all now share (or, I suppose it would be better to say, the world we do not really share at all).

In McCarraher’s telling, capitalism as it has taken shape over the past few centuries is not the product of any kind of epochal “disenchantment” of the world (the Reformation, the scientific revolution, what have you). Far less does it represent the triumph of a more “realist” and “pragmatic” understanding of private wealth and civil society. Instead, it is another kind of religion, one whose chief tenets may be more irrational than almost any of the creeds it replaced at the various centers of global culture. It is the coldest and most stupefying of idolatries: a faith that has forsaken the sacral understanding of creation as something charged with God’s grandeur, flowing from the inexhaustible wellsprings of God’s charity, in favor of an entirely opposed order of sacred attachments. Rather than a sane calculation of material possibilities and human motives, it is in fact an enthusiast cult of insatiable consumption allied to a degrading metaphysics of human nature. And it is sustained, like any creed, by doctrines and miracles, mysteries and revelations, devotions and credulities, promises of beatitude and threats of dereliction. McCarraher urges us to stop thinking of the modern age as the godless sequel to the ages of faith, and recognize it instead as a period of the most destructive kind of superstition, one in which acquisition and ambition have become our highest moral aims, consumer goods (the more intrinsically worthless the better) our fetishes, and impossible promises of limitless material felicity our shared eschatology. And so deep is our faith in these things that we are willing to sacrifice the whole of creation in their service. McCarraher, therefore, prefers to speak not of disenchantment, but of “misenchantment”—spiritual captivity to the glamor of an especially squalid god.

The book tells not only of capitalism’s most buoyant apologists but also of its most caustic critics and dissidents—the anarchists, socialists, communists, distributists, and Christian recusants of every kind.
It all began, of course, as a Christian heresy. Even if McCarraher rejects the notion that ours is an age of disenchantment, he recognizes that its intrinsic hostility to everything genuinely enchanting is itself a kind of rapture of the soul toward impalpable realms and unseen divinities. And this is partly because our age inherited all the sacred intuitions and longings for glorious transformation that earlier ages had directed toward a Kingdom supposedly not of this world. The dreams of one epoch inevitably yield to the disappointments of another. Still, the hunger for the sacred always persists, even as one way of life grows old, suppressed forces reassert themselves, and new ideas arise to fill in the spaces vacated by discarded certitudes. A great part of capitalism’s power over our imaginations, McCar-raher suggests, is derived from the authority it borrowed from a Christian language that had become detached from the larger rationality of the sacramental love of the world. And, while McCarraher holds no particular variety of Christian wholly responsible for these developments, he does not hesitate to assign particular blame where he thinks it just to do so.

He devotes, for instance, many extremely illuminating pages to the Puritan ethic, as it took shape first in Britain and then in the American colonies, and to the ways in which Puritan homiletics and moral discourse provided an empty rhetoric denouncing Mammon’s seductions while quietly laying a firm basis for Mammon’s reign. Above all, he shows how pernicious the Puritan language of godly “improvement” proved when used to justify—even to sanctify—what otherwise would have been called avarice and plunder. What began as a destructive heresy in Britain—as factory manufacture displaced free artisanal production, and as enclosure of the commons progressively destroyed communal usufructs—was only made all the more pernicious by its transplantation to the New World. Here, bright with the luster of holiness but unencumbered by the cultural traces of older orders of spiritual value, it took deep root and flourished without hindrance. And, of course, it was this evangelical fervor for “improving” the land and the people who worked it that became the chief justification for displacing the native peoples of the New World, and for condemning them as lazy, unenterprising, sybaritic, and positively wicked in their preference for living off the land’s bounty rather than transforming the wilds into fixed forms of private property. (McCarraher’s treatment of John Winthrop’s “theology of ethnic cleansing” is especially harrowing.)

Hence American Puritanism’s ghastly combination of the unappeasable pursuit of ever-greater profit with a private ethos not of holy poverty, but of pious drabness. Hence too, America’s historically unique fusion of the opulent and the barbaric, the devout and the rapacious. In a sense, America was born out of the transition from a Christian to a capitalist religious sensibility, mediated through the Puritan’s odd inversion of Christianity’s celebration of sacred dispossession into an ethos of unostentatious wealth. The baptismal waters of the Atlantic washed away the last lingering traces of a genuinely Christian vision of things, and what reached our shores was an altogether new religion. From the first, the nation was already set on its course toward consumer culture’s counterfeit beatific vision, its zealous devotion to the technological domination of creation, and its unconquerable faith in the redemptive power of possessions righteously obtained and vigilantly protected. But only the most earnestly zealous of the apostles of this new faith could have imagined that theirs would one day become the sole unchallenged religion of the entire globe.

This, though, is only a small part of McCarraher’s narrative, which is too vast to distill into a summary in this space. And the value of the book lies not just in that grand overarching story, but also in the countless incidental details that throng the plot. On every page, there are poignant clarifications and illuminations and aperçus—the account of the Lockean elevation of monetary value over use-value, say, or observations of the legal personhood progressively ceded to joint-stock and limited-liability corporations, or bitter commentary on the rise of management theory and advertising strategies, and so forth. Moreover, as much as McCarraher’s is a history of capitalism’s slow but inexorable triumph, both as a concrete reality and as a transcendental ideal, it is also a more heartening history of resistance. The book tells not only of capitalism’s most buoyant apologists but also of its most caustic critics and dissidents—the anarchists, socialists, communists, distributists, and Christian recusants of every kind. And even these critics and dissidents are scrupulously differentiated from one another in McCarraher’s account, as are the varying degrees to which they either succeeded or failed in rejecting Mammon’s enchantments to the end.

For instance, McCarraher is pitilessly honest about those forms of traditional socialism and communism that have all too often recapitulated the superstitions of industrial production and management, routinized labor, the technological conquest of nature, and the mechanisms of the modern nation-state. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, for example, McCarraher recognizes that the Marx who wrote the third volume of Das Kapital—with its elevation of unremitting labor over festal leisure, its fantasies of limitless manufacture and exploitation of the earth’s resources, and its insistence on a total central control of production—was at the end of the day the most monstrously ambitious corporatist in human history, one whose ideas, if realized, would have changed all of life and the whole of the world into one gigantic factory, human labor transformed into a machine of relentless and joyless production. In fact, much of the secular left comes across in these pages as, at best, naïve about capitalism’s power to absorb everything into the logic of the market and, at worst, complicit in that logic. One thing a reader will certainly take away from McCarraher’s treatment of many forms of classical socialism is that capitalism’s capacity for translating everything—even dissent from capitalism—into a kind of bourgeois commodity is all but infinite. And so his sympathies lie elsewhere.

McCarraher’s is an essentially Christian Romantic vision. For him, the only true path of resistance to capitalism’s destructive energies is one that leads away from the logic of the market: away, that is, from the idea that wealth-creation should be the highest constitutive good of any culture, and from the notion that technological power over nature should be the moral ideal of a sane human society. He longs instead for a truly sacral view of creation, approached with a sensibility open to transcendence. He longs for a culture that would treat nature not as a reservoir of morally neutral resources waiting to be converted into private affluence, but rather as an abundance freely given and freely shared within the embrace of a spiritual order of participation. Such a culture would treat the good things of creation as sacramental mediations and signs of the divine mystery upholding all things. McCarraher’s heroes are not so much Marx and Engels as John Ruskin and William Morris and others of similar disposition. And he has the discernment to recognize the potentially radical political philosophies latent in many places we might typically regard as lying altogether outside the political, such as John Muir’s nature-mysticism. The common ethos to which he is principally devoted is one that relies first upon God’s grace and love, as expressed in creation’s heedless generosity, and that presumes a kind of immanent sacredness in the world available only to those who are willing to receive it as a common inheritance. What he desires is an ethics of personal wonder and of the cultural hunger for God’s presence in the depths of things. It is an ethics, before all else, of the commons, permitted once again to flourish, to run to seed, to overflow, and to offer shelter to all.

So, in the end, while the story McCar-raher tells is principally one of alienation and loss, idolatry and willful blindness to beauty, it is also a tale about all those lingering sparks of an older metaphysics of creation as divine glory that might still be gathered up and kindled into a full flame. Perhaps there might arise a new St. Benedict or two, or a few million, who could strive to overcome the ethics of sanctified greed that separates human beings from one another and from the rest of the -natural world, and who might inspire a renewed awareness that the holiness of living things far surpasses the charms of lifeless wealth. McCarraher clearly believes that it is still possible to revive in ourselves, as late modern persons, a longing for the sort of abundance that is waiting for us when we do not seek to reduce everything into mere property. But this is an abundance visible only to love.

I risk making McCarraher’s book sound more rhapsodic than practical, and that would be an injustice. He understands that his is also a vision that requires a certain pragmatic economics, and he does not neglect material theory in recommending the spiritual values he believes in.

Of course, no story—or none worth telling—really has a single discrete beginning or a single definitive conclusion. Enormous as The Enchantments of Mammon is, it could well have been longer still. It might, if nothing else, have dwelt a little less exclusively on capitalism’s “Anglo-Saxonism” (as the French would say), and perhaps explored at greater length the rise of capitalism in the late-medieval and early-modern Italian city-states, or the occult ties between early capitalist economics and Iberian colonialism in the Americas and the rebirth of chattel slavery. There are Catholic chapters perhaps yet to be added to the predominantly Protestant story that McCarraher tells. But no book can do everything and this one is already a majestic achievement. It will enjoy a long posterity, I think, in both the academic world and the world of the general readership. It is exhaustive, precise, and rich. But more important still, it is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.

The Enchantments of Mammon
How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity
Eugene McCarraher
Harvard University Press, $39.95, 816 pp.

Issue:
January 2020 [3]

War Wisdom
by J. A. Dick
8 January 2020
From Jack:
(I usually post a reflection on Friday.
Due to current developments, I post this a couple days earlier.)

In January 2003, I was invited to meet with a group of about twenty US Army and Air Force chaplains at a US base in Germany. I often met with them for what were called “days of recollection.” This time the presentation and discussion were about the “Just War Theory” and what was already being seen as an impending US invasion of Iraq. (That happened of course in March 2003.) As I explained the main points of the traditional understanding of a just war, one young chaplain became very restless. Rather emotionally he called out to me: “If I understand what you are saying, it would be immoral for the US to launch a war in Iraq.” Very calmly I said: “Yes. I think it would be immoral and unjustified.” I looked around the room. Just about every chaplain there was shaking his head in agreement. The young chaplain then said, with great restlessness, that he could not be a part of such an invasion and didn’t know what to do. Then an older chaplain, whom I have always greatly respected, said: “Young man pull yourself together. I was a chaplain in Vietnam. I understand just and unjust wars. Your responsibility is not to implement government policy per se but to travel with your soldiers and be with them in their own difficult journeys.”

Now, with President Donald Trump’s decision to kill the Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, those just war reflections jump back at me, with fears of a major military escalation. What is morally legitimate and responsible international behavior these days?

As I explained to the chaplains back in 2003, the traditional just war theory defines four conditions that must be met in order for a war to be just:

1) The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.

2) All other means of putting an end to the initial problem must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.

3) There must be serious prospects of success.

4) The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

The first consideration, I would suggest, is not whether an act of war is just but whether or not it is wise. I remember the remark of the American writer, Issac Asimov: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” A January 3rd editorial in the New York Times, titled “The Game Has Changed,” expressed it this way: “The real question to ask about the American drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise. Many pieces of the puzzle are still missing, but the killing is a big leap in an uncertain direction.”

My second consideration would be that the traditional four-points just war theory totally ignores our contemporary situation. With today’s atomic, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction can there ever be a “Just war”?

Today, we need to explore and implement other ways of resolving international conflicts. We need to reinforce and collaborate with international organizations like the United Nations. We need to see that the function of the military is not to make war but to maintain peace.

I resonate with the January 3, 2020 statement by Johnny Zokovitch, Executive Director of Pax Christi USA:

“The decision by the Trump Administration to assassinate Iran’s General Soleimani on Iraqi soil, reportedly by drone strike, has only succeeded in escalating tensions in the Middle East and put in jeopardy the lives of innocent men, women and children who will bear the brunt of back-and-forth retaliation between the US and Iran. This is another in a long string of failures by this administration to pursue diplomacy and act with prudence in addressing the complicated problems of the region, many of which have been exacerbated by or are the direct result of decades of bad decisions undertaken by the US in the Middle East.”

Yes. We are moving into a new decade……We must “beat swords into plowshares” and pursue peace. This is not just pious rhetoric. It is now our practical life or death reality. I think 2020 will be chaotic, unpredictable, and enormously consequential.

Jack

J. A. Dick | January 8, 2020 at 9:08 am | Categories: being a theologian | URL: https://wp.me/pSvU4-yf

This page is dedicated to Joe Humphries who tells them and Mary Humphries who still laughs at them! JESUS LAUGHED! Holy Moly… good, clean, humor!

What Gifts Shall We Bring?  From LaCrox Publication January 2020
God did not speak to them through his prophets; he came secretly to deposit in them, at the heart of their assiduous research, the intuition of his mystery (maxppp.com)

The Magi figure prominently in our cribs, wearing crowns and velvet, flanked by their camels. But were they really the colorful princes of the Thousand and One Nights?

In the light of Psalm 72 and Isaiah 60, they were intended to be kings and more, to express the universality of the revelation, of different ages and continents.

They were even given names and it was decreed that there were three of them, no doubt because they offer the child of Bethlehem three symbolic gifts: gold, as to a king, frankincense, as to the high priest, myrrh, as to the death he will also experience.

But Saint Matthew simply calls them Magi, that is to say, scholars, researchers, perhaps from the Persian priestly class. So they are not Jews. God did not speak to them through his prophets; he came secretly to deposit in them, at the heart of their assiduous research, the intuition of his mystery.

Meditate

From now on, in the sky, the star may well disappear, if it has risen forever in their hearts!

Here are the Magi finally at the quayside of their long search. They were looking for a king, they find a newborn baby, fragile and devoid of everything.

They will not stay on the doorstep, simply curious.

Solemnly then, they cross the threshold of a very poor stable, to accomplish in truth a very mysterious office.

The evangelist wanted to note precisely each of their gestures, as if it were a celebration as much as a visit.

They fell to their knees, prostrated themselves and, to offer their gifts, like their hearts, they then opened their boxes very wide. Not a word.

Not the coveted riches that people produce, nor the powers they give themselves, but innocence, constantly scorned, constantly chased, before which, one day, the knees end up bending anyway.

These three do not come all the way to Bethlehem for a banal homage, a somewhat outward, formal recognition. Their beautiful visible offerings, so symbolic, no doubt hide the essential.

In the shattering face-to-face of our lives with the innocence of that God, all the trinkets of existence suddenly lose their luster. Finally, illusions fall, and our fear with them.

As a gift, in truth, Christ desires only one thing: like the Magi their precious cassettes, that we open to him without fear the sometimes well-sealed box of our lives.

That we present to him our least avowable and most secret miseries, that we give him all our life in the depths, our poor life, which we know will then shine only with the gold of his merciful gaze.

Yes, that chest, unique to each one of us and so wide open to the most intimate part of our hearts, that we can without fear bring it to the crib and truly open it to him. Of all the beautiful offerings, for him, without doubt the most precious.

(Patrick Laudet is a deacon at Saint Jean Cathedral in the Archdiocese of Lyon (France).

The Great Tree —A Christian Symbol? 

There is a much longer history and explanation, but in here is the core story.
When Christians went north of the Alps, we found the Celtic world decorating their sacred tree (the oak) in preparation for the Winter Solstice Festival, marking a need for the re-birth of sun and oak tree. The day before the Festival began, fruits were hung in the oak tree’s recently bared limbs. Christians, seeing this ritual, perceived the telling of an ancient text whereby there was a garden, a tree and its fruit. 
From that garden at the beginning of time, humans had been expelled. 
Yet now, in the presence of The Christ, lives another garden, one without end.  Those Celtic Christians named the preparation day for Solstice (Dec 24) as the Feast of Adam and Eve. On that day, communities gathered to decorate the sacred tree of a new Eden, a tree located in the village square or church courtyard. 
Today, rather than only apples and pears, we hand every manner of bobble in our trees.  Yet the result is the same.  The decorated tree awakens in us a childlike wonder and awe, a living experience of an Eden here and now. 

As we gather round our trees (living or made of other substances) let us feel the deep love, wonder and generosity of the ancients made new in our midst.  These qualities are our true deep self.  The Christ – an Eden here and now in the deepest dark. O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree how lovely are thy branches …. 
To each and to all -May this Christmas be true – if today in the midst of our troubles we cannot sense it.  It is true. It is true. 
 Historical Notes
-Dec 25 was the ancient date of the Winter Solstice. And Dec 24 was the preparation day for Solstice. named in the old Christian calendar as the Feast of Adam and Eve. 
– It appears that by Victorian times that we were adding the practice of decorating individual trees in homes rather than only a communal sacred tree. 
-By Victorian times, the decorated tree had become the fir.  The great oak forests of Europe had been decimated.  
 

An Advent Reflection
We prepare for the story of the birth of Jesus,
by waking up to the truth
that we, like him, are called to be fully human.
To get this means to be startled
by the coming of God into our lives.
It turns out that what we are called to prepare for
is the birth of the True Human in us,
in our community,
and in the world.

This is not secular humanism,
for the human, we know intuitively,
is participating in a repair/co-creation
that is part of a divine plan or intention.
We understand that the gospel story is an externalization
of our own story told through the life, death, and resurrection
of one who was Human and that we are to become that!
This carries with it an immense responsibility,
to consciously participate in our own evolution.

We are anticipating,
in other words, our own recreation,
rendering us active agents
in the repair and recreation of the world.
The practice of the Advent season
is to purge ourselves of everything in our lives
that is not love,
that is not freedom,
that is not truth.

Needless to say, this is not an easy path.
It certainly is not a passive path.
You and I are completing or perfecting the love
that was known in Jesus of Nazareth,
and in all courageous souls,
willing to join the lineage of the heart-broken ones.
But over a lifetime
we may discover that
we too will be lifted up,
with Jesus, to the Home of God where Love reigns eternally.
And the Human One will have once again
disrupted the way of greed and fear.
Through us, and the body of Christ,
by God’s grace, the cosmogenesis,
the Birth of the Universe occurs, again and again.

  BLESSED ARE YOU,LORD OUR GOD,
BEFORE WHO ALL THE TREES OF THE FOREST SING FOR JOY,
FOR YOU HAVE COME TO RULE THE EARTH AND ALL OF IT’S PEOPLES
IN YOUR BELOVED SON, JESUS CHRIST, THE PRINCE OF PEACE.
BY HIS DEATH ON THE CROSS AND HIS RISING TO GLORY, THE TREE OF
DEFEAT HAS BECOME OUR TREE OF VICTORY, AND THE PUR LIGHT OF CHRIST FOREVER
GLADDENS OUR WAITING WORLD.

WE ASK YOU TO SEND YOUR BLESSING UPON THIS TREE
WHICH WE HAVE DECORATED IN HONOR OF YOUR SON’S BIRTH.
LET IT HELP US TO CELEBRATE THIS HOLY SEASON AS LIVING BRANCHES OF HIM,
AND BEAR THE FRUIT OF GOOD WORKS FOR YOUR GLORY,
THIS DAY AND EVERY DAY,
BOTH NOW AND FOREVER…..AMEN

  LOVING GOD, YOUR CHURCH JOYFULLY AWAITS THE COMING OF ITS SAVIOR.
   CHRIST, JESUS WHO ENLIGHTENS OUR HEARTS AND DISPELS THE DARKNESS OF
   IGNORANCE AND SIN.  POUR FORTH YOUR BLESSINGS UPON US AS WE LIGHT THE
  CANDLES OF THIS WREATH;  MAY THEIR LIGHT REFLECT THE SPLENDOR OF CHRIST
  WHO LIVES AMONG US AND WHO IS LORD, FOREVER AND EVER.  AMEN

SAINT ANTHONY’S ADVENT 2020
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT:  ” BE Watchful! BE Alert!”
Beginning Cycle B in the Revised Common Lectionary
First Reading:  Isaiah 63-64  Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 1: 3-9  Gospel:  Mark:  13:33-37

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT: “Prepare the way for our God, make straight every path.”
First Reading:  Isaiah 40:  1-111  Second Reading: 2 Peter 3:8-14  Gospel:  Mark 1: 1-8

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT:  John the Baptist:  “I am the voice of one crying in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord.”
First Reading  Isaiah 61:  1-11  Second Reading: 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 Gospel: John 1: 6-8, 19-28

FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT:  The Annunciation” Behold you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.”  First Reading: 2 Samuel 7: 1-16 
Second Reading:  Romans 16:  25-27  Gospel  Luke 1:26-38

 
CHRISTMAS Nativity of the Lord MASS WILL BE HELD AT 3:00 PM. ON THURSDAY DECEMBER 24