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Compared to the Blessed Saint Lucy, there is a veritable mountain of evidentiary documentation about Saint Nicholas. But that’s okay because it’s only sinful man that forgets. God never forgets. The Lord never forgets His own beloved lambs. You all forget that He never forgets—hence your sinful feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and self-centered attention seeking. But Jesus never forgets His own.

The Daily Divine Service Book: A Lutheran Daily Missal, gathering its material from countless Reformation era, and later, German Lutheran agendas and prayer books, provides us two of today’s pericopes as well as Psalm 45 for Lucia’s festival. “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Grace is poured into thy lips, therefore God hath blessed thee for ever.”  Of course Lucy has the promise of the Resurrection and of life eternal, because she, like you last Sunday, had Grace poured into her lips in the Holy Sacrament. She had absolution poured on her head in Holy + Washing and into her ears in the Gospel of Loosing.

Another salutary Christian (and non-Romanist) breviary (i.e. prayer book) records that Lucy was early recognized as one of the most illustrious of virgin martyrs. She along with Agatha, Agnes, and Cecilia are mentioned in the Gregorian canon.  We can say with Christ-centered veracity, and charitable hope, that Lucia witnessed to Christ about the year 304, at Syracuse. Excising all the synergistic dross that has come down through the centuries, one can nonetheless affirm that Lucy did not wish to be married, and instead made sure that her sizeable monetary dowry was given away to the poor. In a cruciform way, she was putting her life on the line with such a bold and decisive move: “Thy will be done” knowing that it is the Lord’s will that we love our neighbor as ourselves.  Her fiance was so enraged with the sizeable loss of mammon that he delivered her to the Governmental prefect as a “traitorous Christian.” This was during the Diocletian persecutions and thus the torturers did their best to secure an admission of wrongdoing and an abjuration (an apostasy) from The Faith, but to no avail.  Like the Apostles and earlier martyrs, The Holy Ghost kept Lucy’s spirit strong and indomitable while her body was ravaged and ravished. She was humiliated, she had her eyes gouged out, and she was run through with a sword. Requiescat in pace (R.I.P) + Saint Lucia.   

Adventide is penitential because the entire life of the Church, and of the Christian, of you, needs to be penitential. You don’t repent as if you are a pagan but you do repent of your daily trespasses, including those times when your lack of faith, your lack of fully fearing, loving, and trusting in God above all things fans the embers of your “old Adam” who desires you to be a pagan.  The violet (purple) of the Season is also the color of dark blood…blood tinged with sweat, spittle, dirt, and decay; the admixture of the washing off of sin.  The color of the blood that is pouring from The Redeemer’s wounds…you being cleansed.  We respect with reverence the themes of Advent, both the waiting and longing anticipation of Christmastide—the yearly celebration of The Lord’s Nativity, but also the waiting and longing anticipation of The Christ’s return in Glory and the Resurrection of all flesh from the dead—The End of All Things—The Christ Everlasting!

We love Advent also because we remember that there is no Jesus, no God/Man for us, in an abstract way or apart from earthly means. There is no Jesus without His Church and there is no babe in the manger, and nursing at a breast, without the Blessed Virgin, Saint Mary Theotokos.  It’s felicitous that both the rose-colored Gaudete candle, paraments, and vestments, as well as the fact that some parishes have switched to blue for their Advent color, causes many of us to recognize these colors as being representative of the Ever-Virgin.  And so now as we thank The Lord for the gift of His Son, Immanuel, we also thank Him that The Word of Christ, The Word Made Flesh, was given so generously to Saint Lucia by the Paraclete, and that in her final hour, she too, like John The Baptist, Saint Stephen Proto-Martyr, and legions of other Virgins and Martyrs held on to He Who is her Body and Blood, her eyes, ears, members, and all her senses.  She confessed with her heart and lips, but also with her shed blood. These two Virgins are emblematic of the Virgin Bride of Christ—all of you—the Holy Church—washed in His blood and made pure, chaste, innocent, intact-in-Him, and without blemish; whiter than snow or than any fuller’s soap could scrub you.

Like St. Mary of Nazareth, you treasure all the mysteries—the Holy Sacraments in your heart, i.e. your soul, because He Who was Immanuel in her virginal womb is now Immanuel in your ears and in your virginal imputed righteous spirit. Like St. Lucy of Syracuse, who is also a more modern Mary of Bethany, you too fix your eyes on Jesus even if the evil blaspheming enemies of The Christ should one day pluck those eyes out of their sockets and sever that head from your earthly body. Jesus is your one thing needful; He is the only spouse that the Church Catholic needs, the only husband. Jesus is your light that shines in your eyes—in the darkness of your heart and in the darkness of this sinful world. Like Lucia, you wait for the consummation of all things—the end of mammon and the day of Just Judgment.

There is only one end to Advent, and that will be heaven or hell. For The Blessed Virgin Saint Mary, the Blessed Virgin Martyr Saint Lucy, and the Blessed Saints of Augsburg, your deaths and judgments have already been paid for in Christ’s own suffering and death. Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Grace is poured into thy lips, therefore God hath blessed thee for ever.

In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost

 

 

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