Be thou our guide while life shall last

Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guide while life shall last,
and our eternal home.

Today is the spiritual birthday of Dr. Isaac Watts, who passed from this life on November 25, 1748. We owe him much, but I am not going to write about that today.

He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches. (Revelation 2:29)

Advent is crazy. All who work for a church find it so; too much to do, too many demands. Observing signs of stress in a colleague after this morning's staff meeting, we prayed a few moments ago, seeking that God would prompt us to do what He considers important.

And that set me to thinking of the first three chapters of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. I consider these Letters to the Seven Churches to be essential in the understanding of the church in the world. He sees what is going on. “I know thy works” he says repeatedly: some good, some faulty, some that he would prefer to spue out of his mouth (3:16). He “walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks” (2:1), which we were told in the previous verse are the Seven Churches, and by extension all of the congregations committed to His care. It might be one of the great cathedrals. It might be a little mission church on a reservation with three old ladies all that is left of the congregation. It might be a “street church” community with no building at all. And it might be us, respectable downtown Episcopal congregation in a college town. He walks among us, He knows our works.

That frightens me when I consider all that we have left undone. But it is a comfort as well, indeed our only comfort. As C. S. Lewis wrote in his lecture “The Weight of Glory”:

A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside.

These chapters of Revelation conclude with a promise sufficient to sustain us through anything, a promise addressed to any person in any of the congregations throughout the world, whether bishop or vicar or sexton or choirmaster or altar guild lady or baker-of-cookies or church school teacher or child or old person or secretary or senior warden or barely-hanging-on occasional visitor:

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

We could be in the most dysfunctional of parishes, or places far worse (and there are many of them, I remind myself: prisons, hospital wards, parts of northern Iraq and Syria) and if He is with us, all is well. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me.”

May you hear the soft but persistent knock at your door, open to Him, and sup with Him this Advent.

A bit more of Dr. Watts, from number 100 in the Hymnal 1982:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
he comes to make his blessings flow
far as the curse is found.