God's Judgment: a short observation

from wikimedia commons, Christ the King icon, from St. Catherine's monastery, Mt. Sinai, PD:old.

It strikes me, on reading the Lord’s statement to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion,” that the correct answer is, “Yes, Lord, and have mercy on me.”


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Celebrating the Church Year: Christ the King Sunday

-something to ponder:

“And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

-Luke 21:25-28 (emphasis mine).

-something to read:  "The World's Last Night" by John Donne, and . . . "The World's Last Night", by C. S. Lewis.

-something to listen to: "Dust Bowl Dance" (just for the apocalyptic overtones)

-something to sing:  "Lo, He Comes In Clouds Descending"

-something to do: This is the church's New Year's Eve: next Sunday is Advent, which is the beginning of the Christian year. Use this time to look back on the past year, a month before the rest of the world will be doing it. Remember God's mercies. Ask for His grace and guidance in the year to come. Prepare your heart for the repentance and fasting of Advent. Thank the Lord for His constant dear presence. And maybe raise a toast to the turning of the year. :)

But still remember the seriousness of this feast:

We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge.

 We therefore pray thee, help thy servants . . .

Amen, Lord Jesus, come quickly.


(For more ideas on celebrating the church year, pick up a copy of "Let Us Keep the Feast: Living the Church Year at Home".)

Happy Christ the King Sunday!

It's the last Sunday of the church year, when we celebrate Christ as King. It's my favorite Sunday of the entire year. In the words of the Te Deum:

Thou art the king of glory, oh Christ!

Thou art the everlasting son of the Father!

When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man,

thou didst humble thyself to be born of a Virgin.

When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death,

thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.

Thou sittest at the right hand of God, in the glory of the Father.

We believe that thou shalt come to be our judge.

     We therefore pray thee, help thy servants,

     whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.

     Make them to be numbered with thy saints,

     in glory everlasting.

And, to accompany that, here's some properly apocalyptic music, both heartening and sobering - because he will come, and he will surely come soon:

7 Quick Takes

1. Is it bad that the two reasons I like our cat are: 1) because he's pretty, and 2) because he's nuts? The pretty part makes him aesthetically pleasing and the nuts part makes him funny.

I'm pretty sure I'd be upset if those were the two reasons someone liked me.

2. My son asked me this week if "things" is "spelled with an F."  As I tried not to laugh, I realized I'm going to be very sad when he loses that last bit of baby-lisp.

3. Last night, after the marathon of teeth-brushing, bathing, and bedtime prayers, as Adam and I were making the rounds amongst the kids' four beds, kissing and doing the last tucking-in rituals, we caught each other's eyes and I mouthed, "we're almost there!" and he nodded excitedly back, "I know!"

Seriously. Those two hours between when the kids go to bed and when we do? Gold. Pure gold.

4. I think I need to take the presidential elections more seriously, but it's really hard to do when you not only don't live in a swing state, you live in a state that doesn't even know what a swing is. I keep reading all these very serious articles, and I know the election matters, but it's so hard to take them seriously because all of them seem to be trying to convince me of something and you know what? Convincing me of something will make no difference whatsoever in the course of the election. I live in California. My senators could paint themselves pink and walk into the next session of Congress on their hands, and I still wouldn't be able to vote them out of office.

So, I have my opinions, but they don't feel very real.

5. It's almost Advent! And it's less than a month till Christ the King Sunday! Which is my very favorite Sunday in the whole church year. Yay!

6. I like Christ the King Sunday so much because it's our yearly reminder that everything turns out okay in the end. There's such security in knowing the end of the story. I don't know how we get there, I don't know what we're going to have to endure, but I believe the Lord's promise that He will return and judge the earth. And so, trusting in that promise, I have absolute safety in following Him. He is in control, and obeying him is the path to life, and life abundant, and life eternal.

7. In the much shorter term, it's almost the weekend. Which means the six of us in our family get more time together than apart, and that is a very great blessing indeed.


For more Quick Takes, head over to Jen's place at Conversion Diary.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

on not just beginning

From Finding God's Will for You, by St. Francis de Sales:

“The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he evens suggests the wish to undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. He does not care how many plans and beginnings we make, provided nothing is finished. No more than Pharaoh does he wish to prevent ‘the mystical women of Israel’ – that is, Christian souls – from bringing forth male children, provided they are slain before they grow up.

            “On the contrary, as the great St. Jerome says, ‘Among Christians it is not so much the beginning as the end that counts.’ We must not swallow so much food that we cannot digest what we have taken. The spirit of the seducer holds us down to mere starts and keeps us content with a flowery springtime. The Spirit of God makes us consider beginnings only so as to arrive at the end, and makes us rejoice in the flowers of the spring only in expectation of enjoying the fruits of summer and autumn.”

            -St. Francis de Sales, from Finding God’s Will for You

The beginning of that quotation seemed familiar as I read it tonight; I'm guessing that Jen over at Conversion Diary probably quoted it at some time or another. 

But, wow. Does that not strike you as very true? It reminds me about my last post, rambling on about  books. Really, the important thing isn't having a lot of books in the house. It's reading them. What's even lovelier than getting those books from the used book sale? Finishing Knight's Castle with my daughter tonight, and having her giggle in delight over the ending.  And that's not even one of the "spiritual works" that de Sales is referring to.

That quotation from St. Jerome: "Among Christians it is not so much the beginning as the end that counts." True. And it being just past Ascension, it makes me think of when Christ will be returning out of the sky, as the angels predicted. That will be the end, and the one we have in mind as we undertake all these other "spiritual works" to prepare ourselves for the day.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Links: Christ the King, egalitarianism, weight-lifting and more!

Amy of Splendor in the Ordinary has a great post up about Christ the King Sunday (my favorite Sunday of the church year!), with ideas for how to celebrate it as a family. (Okay, this is a little late - but hey! ideas for next year!)

Allen Yeh's Biblical defense of egalitarianism is well-worth reading. He explains what he's trying to do at the start:

I am not trying to prove egalitarianism without doubt from Scripture. I think it is impossible to prove either egalitarianism or complementarianism without doubt from Scripture, which is why it is considered one of these indeterminate nonessential things, like paedobaptism vs. credobaptism, premill vs. amill vs. postmill, and Calvinism vs. Arminianism. What I hope to do is show that a case can be made from Scripture about egalitarianism. I’m afraid that some complementarians often hold the Scriptural “high ground” as if somehow egalitarianism is a non-Biblical position. All I want to do is show that it is not as clear-cut as all that; that a case can be made for egalitarianism; and hopefully we can be more charitable toward each other recognizing that good evangelicals can hold various interpretations on such disputed nonessential, non-heretical matters.

I liked this interview with fitness trainer, Mike Heatlie. He advocates women lifting heavy weights (yay!) and points out that you're not going to see a six-pack unless you have a low body-fat percentage (somehow, all those ab-machine people forget to point that out). I think cardio is more useful than he seems to - but it's useful for general health, and he's right that resistance is the way to go to lose fat (though all cardio is a bit resistance and all resistance is a bit cardio). And I like tricep kickbacks, but I know they're not as efficient as squats :)

Here's a new webcomic, and aside from the fact that a quick glance could fool you into thinking the characters are Starbucks coffee cups, I don't see anything to dislike about it.

And speaking of webcomics, this one my husband forwarded me (and that I've seen other places too) about natural parenting is hilarious. (Reminds me of the old joke: what do you call people who practice NFP? Parents.)

peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Christ the King Sunday

Yesterday was my favorite Sunday of the church year: Christ the King Sunday. And we heard a really good sermon, which I'm still thinking about.

The priest asked us to think about how many of us would raise our hands if he asked if we knew Christ as our Savior, then asked us to think about how many of us would raise our hands if he asked if we knew Christ as our king. 

There was a lot to the sermon - he talked about how the good king must be obeyed, and how he protects his people from their enemies, and how he heals (he drew a lot from Tolkien's Aragorn character, which I think is fair, given Tolkien's theology) - but what is sticking in my head this morning is his challenge, asking if we were willing to do the things our King asks us to do. Basically: do you respect Jesus Christ's authority in your life?

I want to keep thinking about that this week, checking to see if I am listening and obeying, using my moments and my days the way my Lord would have me use them, because He is my Lord, and He is my king. This is challenging, because I would like to think that I own my moments and my days.

Connected to this, on the theme of self-examination, I've been reading some John Donne, and last night came across a place in one of his sermons where he says (emphasis mine):

You hear of one man that was drowned in a vessel of wine, but how many thousands in ordinary water? And he was no more drowned in that precious liquor, than they in that common water. A gad of steel does no more choke a man, than a feather, than a hair; Men perish with whispering sins, nay with silent sins, sins that never tell the conscience they are sins, as often as with crying sins: And in hell there shall meet as many men, that never thought what was sin, as that spent all their thoughts in the compassing of sin; as man, who in a slack inconsideration, never thought  upon that place, as that by searing their conscience, overcame the sense and fear of that place. Great sins are great possessions, but levities and vanities possess us too. *

It seems to be a good meditation to go into Advent on.

peace of Christ to you, 

Jessica Snell

*From a sermon preached March 4, 1625

Link: Jesus Christ Victor

Over at Touchstone's Mere Comments, Anthony Esolen explains exactly what it means that Christ is our King, and that our King is Christ. I especially appreciate this insight on today's gospel, that of the repentant thief on the cross next to Jesus:

He does not speak to Jesus man to man. He speaks to him as subject to King: "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom." That can make sense only if he understands, somehow, without any theological sophistication, that Jesus is both Lord and God. He's asking Jesus not only to remember him, but to forget -- because he knows well what kind of life he has led. Only God's memory conquers the grave; only God's forgetting cancels out our wickedness. The thief's prayer is granted, and he enjoys a privilege unique in history: the only Christian to die next to Christ.

Read the rest of Mr. Esolen's essay here.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Christ the King Sunday

Tomorrow is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the church year. Also, my favorite ordinary (i.e., not-a-major-feast) Sunday. And I'm not entirely sure why. The picture in my head when I think of Christ the King Sunday is a big tangle of the beginning of the second part of the Te Deum ("Thou art the King of glory, oh Christ/Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father . . .") and the Christo Pantokrator icon and the music of "Crown Him with Many Crowns" and vaguer pictures of what the last judgement will be like.

I think my affinity for the day goes back to the first time I really celebrated Lent, when I chose as my meditation for the forty days C.S. Lewis' essay "What if this Present were the World's Last Night?" and the John Donne poem from which it took its title. It's a great essay (the poem's good too) that I recommend to everyone, and Lewis made in it the point that the main two things that Christ said about His return was that He would certainly return and that we certainly would not know when, leading to the third point: because we do not know when He will return, we ought always to be doing what we ought to be doing, so that He will find us doing it when He comes back.

So, on Christ the King Sunday, I think both about the greatness of our Lord, His absolute righteousness, and the absolute obedience He expects from us.

And yet, somehow it's heartening, and not disheartening. Because He's going to come back for us, and - as one of my college professors told us - He always gives what He demands.

So Christ the King Sunday is, to me, the most comforting Sunday, because it is the one where I remember that everything is going to come right. Christ will surely come, He will judge the world, He will judge us. But, as Michael Card said, we will look into our Judge's face, and see a Savior there.

Thanks be to God!

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

It's almost Pentecost!

Which is not my favorite holiday of the church year, but it does mean that my favorite hanging will be up in our sanctuary. One Sunday only, the Altar Guild puts the dove hanging on the lectern. I don't know who made this particular hanging, but it's a dove descending on a scarlet background, and somehow the needlewoman made the dove look exactly like a dove and exactly like a bird of prey at the same time. It's amazing.

I say that Pentecost is not my favorite holiday, but maybe it should be. Of course, I think that whenever a new holiday comes around. Epiphany, say. "But it's the light of the Gospel being revealed to the Gentiles! Of course it should be my favorite holiday!"

And how much more so for the gift of the Holy Spirit?

Christ the King Sunday is actually my favorite holiday of the Church Year. Christ Triumphant, Christ Returning. And I don't think that's going to change.

But the Holy Spirit is the one with me constantly, minute to minute, day to day. It is his holiday this Sunday, and I am glad it is there in the church year. The Holy Spirit always seems to be the most neglected member of the Trinity in public and private worship, and I once had a professor explain that this was, in part, because of his primary function, which was to point to Jesus. He said you could, in one way, picture it like this: say there's a blackboard with a picture of Jesus on it. The Holy Spirit is going to be the fellow standing behind the blackboard, reading his hand round the side to point at Jesus: "Look there, look at Him!" So when you are listening to the Holy Spirit, you are going to be looking at Jesus.

So maybe it's not so bad that Christ the King Sunday is my favorite. :D Still, five days from now is going to find me in red, in honor of the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica