Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, which is apparently one of the high holy days in the Christian calendar, a “major feast.” Hey, I’m always up for feasting. Odd that this would be considered such a high day and yet I only stumbled upon it by chance through reading a summer post by Phyllis Tickle. She writes,

For lack of anything better, I’m starting a meme… but hopefully an interesting one that’s not too hard to handle. Rules are simple: name your favorite book of the Bible, and explain why. Link back here and tag 5-ish people. Jump in with a comment below if you don’t have a blog, or to point back to your entries.

Naturally, I’ll dive in first.

Favorite book: John’s Gospel.

Now that we’ve wrapped up our brief look at John’s Prologue as an introduction to the themes of Advent and Christmas, I wanted to dwell a bit more on the canticle I used for the compline in the fourth week of Advent, which was unfortunately too short this year. I carefully selected a song by Mike Koop of St. Benedict’s Table fame. John’s prologue is a hymn for Christmas and all year long, and if you wanted to know what an updated song for Christmas and all year long would look like if you wrote it with your head filled with gospel images while staring at the prologue to John (1:1-18), I think I have the answer. It would need to be something written as an epiphany, like John’s gospel — portraying Jesus’ entry into, accomplishment of his task, and exit from the temporal scene with the transcendence of an Eternal God stepping in and out of time at will. It would need to reflect the fullness of both his Godhood and his humanity, in the same breath wherever possible.

For the record, there are twelve days to the Christmastide season… let the feasting continue! We should know this from the famous Christmas carol, yet these days most of us may just scratch our heads as to what, when, and why the twelve days are. It turns out that the 12 days song actually has some relation to a variety of theological themes. Coming to the point thought, we’ve moved out of the Advent season and into the Christmas season. In my Advent book, I have included an extra set of daily offices for use during the Christmas season… kind of a bonus for those who made the purchase. Although the Advent synchroblog has ended, the daily office and the celebration of Christmas go on. The extra office is designed to keep the Christmas themes present in our minds throughout the season. In the book, I introduced it this way:

This was the year we decided to introduce our kids to the hilarity of A Christmas Story. Our youngest fell asleep, and there were bits of explaining to do with our oldest so she’d get some of the jokes… the ones we wanted her to! ;^) It is of course the story of a childhood Christmas, but told from the perspective of an adult reflecting — and naturally that’s the only way it works. I thought about the late Darren McGavin’s portrayal of The Old Man in the movie. Let’s say he had, er, a crusty exterior. Not quite the model of an exemplary parent given the particular medium of his artistry. Yet there’s something soft about him, deep down. The story arc of the entire movie makes two things fairly clear. First, The Old Man and his sons are relationally distant, and you wonder in fact whether The Old Man knows or sees at all what’s going on with his boys, so easily distracted is he by the newspaper, sports conversations, puzzles, or “major awards.” Second, the unwavering focus on a certain Christmas present that was simply not going to happen, for fear of the loss of an eye.

As we carry on in our Johannine Advent blogging through my Advent Daily Office with the prologue to John’s gospel, we arrive at a pair of fairly significant verses… I might even say favorites, and if the structure of the passage didn’t convince me otherwise I might say that verse 14 is the climax of the passage. Well, in many ways it is the thematic climax, but the main point is yet to come. Verses 9-10 and 14 are linked in their subject matter, both positively and negatively. In 9-10 the Word comes into the world he created but his people don’t recognize him; in verse 14, he “pitches his tent” among his people and at least some recognized him and “beheld his glory.”

With the start of the second week of Advent yesterday, we began the theme of Peace, and we begin a new set of readings and prayers in our Advent Daily Office. We continue in John’s prologue, and for the first half of the week we settle on verses 4&5, paired with verse 16. The Old Testament texts are from Isaiah.

John 1:4-5, JBP, JB Margin
     In him appeared life,
          and this life was the light of mankind.
     The light still shines in the darkness,
          and the darkness has never grasped it.

Isaiah 9:2-7 (A great light appears in the darkness)

Our texts for the first half of this week get us started into the prologue to John’s gospel, where we’ll be spending most of our time through Advent… backed by the Old Testament readings, of course. It is thought by some scholars that these first 18 verses of John were originally an early Christian hymn, which is an idea I just love for some reason. I can imagine it sung… the Greek text has a poetic flavour to it that many translations just don’t get. John also uses words very carefully, being at times deliberately ambiguous it seems, or using words with double-meanings. Again, the translations don’t always catch these. No fault to them, double-meanings are very difficult to deal with in translation.

‘Tis true, on both counts. This is post #1500! I’m 7 days shy of my 3^rd blogiversary, and after all the words I’ve spilled, I’ve finally put some in a book of my own. Actually, the book has a lot of other people’s words… saints, scriptures, Celtic traditional prayers, songs, psalms, creeds, quotes lifted out of Pascal’s Pensees, the Dead Sea Scrolls, traditional Jewish prayers… it’s all in there! Are you thankful yet?

Might as well make it official — my first book, That You Might Believe: Praying Advent with the Gospel of John will be out this week. I’ve a hurdle or two left, such as finishing the cover design and getting fonts to display nicely, but those should be done soon and we’ll be off to the races. I will publish at Lulu.com and will also offer it as a PDF download once I work out the functional details of doing the download after the payment processing with PayPal. I will work on getting a small batch into my own hands if anyone wishes to buy direct… pricing TBA once the Lulu details are sorted out.

I’ve been away at Seabeck Conference Center this past week, participating in the Missional Order conversation and hanging with the likes of Andrew Jones, Rick Meigs, Alan Roxburgh, Bill Kinnon, Pete Askew from Northumbria, Bob Roxburgh, Mark Priddy, Len Hjalmarson and others. I will be saying more about the gathering, just not immediately… I just got home on Friday evening and will spend the weekend with my kids before saying anything substantive about it. This post and tomorrow’s were mostly composed a week ago before I left for the gathering, for just this reason. And I’m tired. If you didn’t know, this is also why I haven’t been in the comments during the past week… I’ll still go through and read the ones I’ve missed, probably respond to a few as well. As well of course, I’ve not been keeping up with blog reading as much as usual. Nevertheless I’ve, had some linkage collected…