The flesh from which the Word was made flesh - Rector's Rambling for December 8, 2019

Last week in this space we talked about the Church calendar starting anew with the Advent season beginning the new year.  The “Already and Not Yet” of the season is underway.  We are looking forward to Christmas, which is looking back to Jesus’ birth, and preparing for Jesus’ return at the end of time.

We are now a full week and a day into the season, and we have a little “calendar” hiccup to toss in.  Ecclesiastical (a fancy word for Church) calendars have some overlapping celebrations that have to sorted out on what is called the Tables of Precedence within the section called Tables and Rules for the Movable and Immovable Feasts, found on pages l & li in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

December 8 on the Universal Calendar of the Church is celebrated as the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The Church gives thanks for that moment in the womb of St. Anne that Mary’s life began through natural generation with Anne’s husband St. Joachim.  Ss. Anne and Joachim would be the earthly grandparents of Jesus.

The reason the church commemorates this feast is to ground us in the reality of the humanity of Jesus as Truly Man: he was born of a woman whose humanity is by natural generation by relations of her parents.  Jesus’ earthly flesh, His very DNA, is of Mary’s.  But of course Jesus’ conception was miraculous in that His conception was by the Holy Ghost, not a human father, which reminds us that he is also Truly God at the same time.

But getting back to our Tables of Precedence we see that the Sundays in Advent take precedence over any other Sunday or Holy Day.  It cannot be bumped, even if it is something as theologically important as Jesus’ lineage, which would then lead to His own Incarnation and which we honor on the feast of His Birth – Christmas.

Bishop Dan Martins of Springfield, when he posts things like this on Facebook, calls it “insider baseball”.  But it is helpful to see the workings of the Church calendar, and to be edified by it.