On the 3rd day of Christmas...

...we celebrate the Feast of St. John. Now, some Christian circles believe in praying to saints. I do not. However, I do think it completely appropriate to commemorate the lives they lived for Christ and to pray that we might exemplify them, as they exemplified Christ. December 27th is the Feast of St. John. In Living the Christian Year, Bobby Gross tells us "On December 27 we remember the apostle who wrote of the Word become flesh, the disciple "beloved" by Jesus, the Evangelist who, according to tradition, received the Revelation while exiled on the island of Patmos."

The Book of Common Prayer suggests this Collect as a prayer to be prayed on this day:

"Merciful Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church, that it being enlightened by the doctrine of they blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John may so walk in the light of thy truth, that it may at length attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

The Book also tells us to read from 1 John 1 and John 21:19ff.  The last verse in John is perhaps my most favorite verse in the Bible: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." What a whimsical, yet true statement! John communicates the Truth of Jesus' majesty with the wonderment of a child. John is, of course, a poet. He uses contrasting figures such as light and dark and love and hate to communicate the nature of the Kingdom of God and its battle against the kingdom of darkness.  

Of course, the Kingdom of God is all about opposites, contrast, inversion. Poet Luci Shaw states it this way in her piece, Descent: 

Down he came from up,

and in from out,

and here from there.

A long leap,

an incandescent fall

from magnificent

to naked, frail, small,

through space,

between stars,

into our chill night air,

shrunk, in infant grace,

to our damp, cramped

earthly place

among all

the shivering sheep.

And now, after all,

there he lies, 

fast asleep.

And my prayer this day is that we might all remember the magnitude of this promise and lay claim to it: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9)