Bloom’s Sunday Mass<\/strong>, and this morning the Church asks you to receive one another, which is a smaller instruction than it sounds and a harder one to get out of. This is the Second Sunday of Advent, first class, and the vestments are violet for a second week. We offer this Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition, following the 1962 Roman Rite, and we are not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church\u2014the same honest naming Old Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities have used for well over a century. Beloved, grace and peace to you this morning, wherever you have got to in your own believing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today is a first-class Sunday and it takes the whole day. The seventh of December is the feast of Saint Ambrose, Bishop, Confessor and Doctor, third class and white, and this year he gives way entirely: no oration, not even a commemoration, and no white anywhere in this Mass. So there is a Sunday, two readings, and a question asked out of a prison cell by the last man in scripture you would expect to ask it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last Sunday opened the year with a change of clothes, and told us all to put on the armour of light<\/a> at whatever hour we happened to wake. Through the week the ferias carried that Sunday forward and kept telling us to lift up your heads<\/a>. This morning the season turns from what we are given to wear towards what we are asked to do with each other, and the asking is one line long: receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One last thing before we begin. Nothing in the next half hour requires you to be certain of it first. If you have ever put a question to your own faith and found the question treated as the problem, this morning’s Gospel was written down for you specifically, and the theology is optional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Confiteor and Kyrie are said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We begin the way the Church has always begun\u2014not with an achievement, but with an honest accounting. Each of us names what we have done and left undone, in whatever words we actually have, and none of it is said aloud to anybody else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the pause. Today’s Gospel is about a man who asked a hard question and was not rebuked for it, so bring your questions in here as well as your failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Gloria is not said today. It is omitted on the Sundays of Advent, and the Mass goes straight from the Kyrie to the Collect.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n So there is a gap here this morning where the song usually goes, and the gap is deliberate. Advent keeps something back on purpose, the way you keep a chair empty for somebody expected. The Church is not withholding joy from you; it is holding a place open, and the Introit has already told you where the joy is coming from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Isa. 30:30; Ps. 79:2. The antiphon’s opening clause is not in the chapter: the Missal’s own text runs<\/em> Populus Sion, ecce Dominus veniet ad salvandas gentes, and only the second half is drawn from the verse. The Douay of Isaias 30:30 reads “And the Lord shall make the glory of his voice to be heard, and shall shew the terror of his arm”\u2014where the antiphon stops at the voice and adds the joy. The liturgical text is printed here and the verse is linked.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n People of Sion, behold the Lord shall come to save the nations: and the Lord shall make the glory of his voice<\/a> to be heard, in the joy of your heart.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2123. Give ear, O thou that rulest Israel: thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep<\/a>. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two things are promised and both are audible. A voice, and gladness at hearing it. The season’s first gift is not a sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to prepare the ways of Your only-begotten Son, so that through His coming we may be able to serve You with purified minds. Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Note where the work lands. Something in us is asked to be stirred, and what it is stirred to do is roadmending\u2014preparing a way for somebody else’s arrival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Romans 15:4-13<\/a>, Douay-Rheims)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Missal opens the Lesson with the address “Brethren,” which is not in the verse, and drops the Douay’s opening conjunction “For.”)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Brethren: What things soever were written, were written for our learning: that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope. Now the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be of one mind one towards another, according to Jesus Christ: that with one mind, and with one mouth, you may glorify God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wherefore receive one another, as Christ also hath received you unto the honour of God. For I say that Christ Jesus was minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers. But that the Gentiles are to glorify God for his mercy, as it is written: Therefore will I confess to thee, O Lord, among the Gentiles, and will sing to thy name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And again he saith: Rejoice, ye Gentiles, with his people. And again: Praise the Lord, all ye Gentiles; and magnify him, all ye people. And again Isaias saith: There shall be a root of Jesse; and he that shall rise up to rule the Gentiles, in him the Gentiles shall hope. Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing; that you may abound in hope, and in the power of the Holy Ghost.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 49:2-3, 5; Ps. 121:1. The Missal prints both under a single heading this morning, as it did last Sunday, the Gradual running straight into the Alleluia without a separate rubric. The response joins the whole of Psalm 49 verse two to the opening clause only of verse three; the rest of verse three, “our God shall come, and shall not keep silence,” is not sung.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Out of Sion the loveliness of his beauty: God shall come manifestly<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2123. Gather ye together his saints to him: who set his covenant before sacrifices. Alleluia, alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2123. I rejoiced at the things that were said to me: we shall go into the house of the Lord<\/a>. Alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Matthew 11:2-10<\/a>, Douay-Rheims)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Missal supplies the address “At that time,” which belongs to the arrangement rather than to the verse, and drops the Douay’s opening “Now.”)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time: When John had heard in prison the works of Christ: sending two of his disciples he said to him: Art thou he that art to come, or look we for another?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And Jesus making answer said to them: Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen. The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he that shall not be scandalized in me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And when they went their way, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John: What went you out into the desert to see? a reed shaken with the wind? But what went you out to see? a man clothed in soft garments? Behold they that are clothed in soft garments, are in the houses of kings. But what went you out to see? a prophet? yea I tell you, and more than a prophet. For this is he of whom it is written: Behold I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The Nicene Creed is said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We say it together, out loud, at the same speed, whatever each of us is privately able to mean by it this morning. It is the oldest thing we do here, and it has never required everybody saying it to mean it identically. Say the lines you can say and let the room carry the rest for you. Today of all Sundays that is not a concession\u2014it is the shape of the Gospel we have just heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Start with the question, because the question is the astonishing part, and because it is the reason the Epistle can ask us to receive one another at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Art thou he that art to come, or look we for another?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That is John the Baptist. The man who spent his life pointing at somebody, who named him at the river, who lost his liberty for saying an unwelcome thing out loud. He is in prison at Machaerus, and he sends two of his disciples to ask whether he had the wrong man. Hold that a moment before we receive one another, because the Church did not have to put this passage in Advent and did. It chose, for the second Sunday of a new year, to open with a question rather than an answer\u2014which already tells you something about the terms on which we receive one another here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the shape of it, and this is where the reading turns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything in this Gospel that sounds like it is about looking is not what the passage is doing. Christ asks the crowd three times what they went out into the desert to see, and it is a rebuke of sightseeing, delivered once and then dropped. The load of the passage sits on a different verb entirely: he that art to come<\/em>. John’s question is about an arrival, and the Epistle’s answer is about a reception. Between those two words there is a whole Advent, and the instruction inside it is to receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So set the spectacle aside. Advent’s question was never whether he is worth going out to look at. Advent’s question is whether he is received when he gets here, and Paul makes the astonishing move of handing that same question straight to us: receive one another, as Christ also hath received you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now what Christ actually sends back, because he does not send back a yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen.<\/em> Then six clauses, and every one of them is about somebody else. The blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, the dead, the poor. Not one word about himself, not one claim, not one title. A man asks are you the one<\/em> and receives an inventory of other people’s mornings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the pattern the Epistle will turn into a command. Christ answers a question about his own identity by naming what has happened to a room full of other people, and Paul answers a question about who belongs by telling the room to receive one another. Both replies move the weight off the self and onto the neighbour. Receive one another is the Epistle’s version of go and relate what you have heard<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And notice the last of the six, because it is the one that does not fit. Five are things done to bodies; the sixth is the poor have the gospel preached to them<\/em>, which is not a healing at all but something somebody else came and did. On the third of this month we sat with Paul asking how anyone hears without a sent messenger, and heard how beautiful are the feet<\/a> of the people who go. Christ counts being spoken to as one of his six credentials, which means being addressed is itself on the list of things wrong with the world when it is missing\u2014and it is one of the plainest ways we receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the move I want to slow down on, because it is easily missed and it is the reason this Gospel can be trusted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Christ does not tell John what to conclude. He sends the evidence back down the road and lets a man in a cell do the reading of it himself. There is no interpretation attached, no instruction, no and therefore<\/em>. The two disciples walk out carrying facts, and the judgment stays with the person who asked the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last Sunday we took the fig tree out of Luke, where fruit rather than age is the criterion, and put on the armour of light<\/a> on the strength of it. This morning does something different with the same material. Last week the point was which test to apply; this week the point is who gets to apply it. Christ hands the test to the man who doubted him, which is the last person a nervous institution would trust with it. That trust is what it looks like when God receives one another’s questions, and it is what we are being told to copy when we receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, with John’s messengers barely out of earshot, Christ turns to the crowd and calls him more than a prophet<\/a>. The commendation comes after<\/em> the question, and it is spoken about a man who is not in the room to hear it. Nothing has been resolved. John is still in prison, still without an answer he can hold. And he is praised in the third person while the doubt is still live, which is the most generous thing in the passage and the pattern for how we receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the harm, and the Gospel has already done the work of exposing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a way of running a church\u2014running any room where belief is the currency\u2014in which a question counts as a resignation. Somebody says I am not sure any more<\/em>, and the room hears I have left<\/em>. They are not thrown out. They are simply reclassified: from participant to project, from a person you receive one another with to a situation somebody ought to have a word about. The question becomes the offence, and the person learns quickly that the safe thing is to stop asking out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And a room cannot receive one another and manage one another at the same time. Those are two different postures towards the same person, and only one of them is in the Epistle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am naming who this lands on. People who are in the middle of losing the certainty they had and are still turning up. People who came back after twenty years away and have one honest question they have never risked in a room. People who have never had any faith at all, who are here this morning, and who assume the price of admission is arriving already convinced. Every one of them is somebody the Epistle tells the rest of us to receive one another with, on exactly the terms Christ used with John.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of that survives contact with this passage. The man this same reading calls more than a prophet asks the most disqualifying question available\u2014did I get the wrong man<\/em>\u2014and receives no rebuke, no probation, and a commendation in front of the crowd before the passage ends. If asking cost you your standing, that sentence could not be in the reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the first of this month we heard the Church tell a room to lift up your heads<\/a>, and today differs from it. That day was about retention: whether what you were given stays yours when you cannot feel it. Today is about enquiry: whether the act of asking is itself the thing that forfeits it. One concerns a possession, the other concerns a question, and a person can be reassured about the first while still learning to keep quiet about the second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The distinction from the fifteenth of last month matters too, and that day was out of season<\/a>. There the harmful teaching was that wanting something makes your report of it untrue\u2014your answer is inadmissible. Here it is narrower and lands earlier: your question<\/em> is inadmissible, before any answer has been given. Christ takes John’s question as admissible on its face, and so must we if we mean to receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weigh that habit by what it grows, and weigh it against our own record, because ours is the record we are obliged to examine. It grows congregations where the most thoughtful person present is the quietest. It grows people who perform a certainty they lost years ago, because performing it is cheaper than losing the room. It grows a faith that cannot survive being examined, which is a fragile thing to hand anybody. And it grows the exact opposite of what Paul asks, since a room where questions are costly cannot receive one another honestly at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a woman of thirty-one who had been in the country eight months and had almost no English, and who was sent one February morning to a small bakery that started work at four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She arrived at ten to four with a folded piece of paper and did not know what she had been sent to do. The man who ran the proving room was fifty-odd and had six people on his early shift. What he did in the first two minutes is the whole of it: he took the chalk stub out of the runner, asked her twice how her name was spelled, got it right, and wrote it on the board with the other six, in the same hand and the same size, under the same heading. Then he showed her where the baskets were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her name went up before she had worked a morning. There was no trial line at the bottom of the board, and no separate column. She had not yet proved she could do the job, and the board did not distinguish between her and a man who had been there eleven years. That is what it looks like to receive one another at four in the morning, and it is the Epistle’s word made about as small and as physical as it goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three things I want to be honest about. She was slow for a long time. She learned the word for proving before she learned the word for bread. And twice in the first month she cried in the yard, which is not a detail the story usually keeps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not going to tell you it became something. The bakery shut when the lease ran out two years later, the wall was painted over, and the arrangement was never written into any policy\u2014the man who started it would not have called it one. What there is, is a board in a back room on which a name appeared before a shift did, because somebody decided to receive one another in the order Paul put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the Epistle’s own argument, because Paul is doing something structurally identical and it is worth seeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He has a room with two kinds of people in it and a live question about whether the newcomers really belong. He does not answer it with an assertion either. He stacks four quotations\u2014I will confess to thee among the Gentiles<\/em>, rejoice, ye Gentiles<\/em>, praise the Lord, all ye Gentiles<\/em>, there shall be a root of Jesse<\/em>\u2014out of the scriptures the insiders already held, and lets them do the arguing. Receive one another comes first in the passage; the proof comes after it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That ordering is the point. Paul does not say here is why they qualify, therefore receive one another<\/em>. He says receive one another, as Christ also hath received you<\/em>, and only then opens the book. The reason given is not the newcomers’ credentials. It is what has already been done to the people being addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is why the imperative can stand at all. If receiving were a favour the established extend at their discretion, it could be withdrawn at their discretion too. Paul cuts that off by making it imitation: you receive one another because you were received, and you were not asked for a record when it happened to you. Take the theology out and the ethics are unchanged\u2014a welcome you did not earn is not yours to ration. That is the whole reason the imperative reads as a debt rather than a kindness: we receive one another on somebody else’s account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the Secret says the same thing in a single clause when we get to it. Where the support of our own merits is lacking<\/em>\u2014the Church’s own prayer, on a Sunday, assumes the support is lacking. On the fifth of this month we sat with a Postcommunion making the identical admission and called it any merits of ours<\/a>. A room that has just prayed that has no standing left to audit anybody, which is another way of saying it has nothing left to do but receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Advent is four weeks about somebody arriving, and this Sunday quietly hands you the half of it you can actually do. You cannot make him come. You can decide, this week, what happens to the person who turns up in your room with a question they are frightened of. Receive one another<\/a>, and let the arriving take care of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the Offertory with you, too, because it asks for exactly one thing. Shew us, O Lord, thy mercy; and grant us thy salvation<\/a><\/em>\u2014which is verse eight of the psalm we heard twice last Sunday when we were told to put on the armour of light<\/a>. Three appearances in eight days, in three different places in the Mass: last Sunday’s Alleluia verse, last Sunday’s Communion, and this morning’s Offertory. It never once asks to be shown a record. It asks to be shown mercy, and then goes and does the same for the next person: receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And take John. He never got a straight answer, as far as the Gospel tells us. He got a list of things happening to strangers, he was called more than a prophet anyway, and he was still in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your faith this morning is a question with two disciples walking away from it and no reply yet, you are standing exactly where the man Christ called more than a prophet was standing. That is not a failure of belief. It is a place the Gospel has been before, and it is the reason we can receive one another without first checking who is sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 84:7-8. The Missal’s own English turns verse seven into a question\u2014”Will you not, O God, give us life”\u2014where both the Latin<\/em> tu conversus vivificabis nos and the Douay are plain statements. The Douay is printed.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Thou wilt turn, O God, and bring us to life: and thy people shall rejoice in thee. Shew us, O Lord, thy mercy; and grant us thy salvation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Be appeased, we beseech You, O Lord, by the prayers and offerings of our human frailty, and where the support of our own merits is lacking, come to our assistance with Your protection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The Preface of the Most Holy Trinity, the Sanctus, and the Canon through the Consecration are prayed here, from the Missal, and the Consecration made within Bloom’s own Independent Catholic tradition.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here the Mass stops explaining itself and simply proceeds. The words are old and fixed and adding to them does not improve them, and they are prayed here as a real celebration within our own tradition rather than a claim on anybody else’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever you carried in\u2014the question you have stopped asking out loud, the certainty that went without warning, the person in your own room you have been quietly assessing\u2014set it down here. Bread and wine are the plainest things in the building, and they are what the Church chose to work with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A host cannot travel down a livestream, and that is true of every Mass offered over video by anyone at all. What stands in is the Church’s own long-standing practice, the same one recommended to parishes joining from home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My Jesus, I believe that Thou art truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love Thee above all things and I desire to receive Thee into my soul. Since I cannot now receive Thee sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace Thee as if Thou wert already there, and unite myself wholly to Thee. Never permit me to be separated from Thee. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n If those words are not available to you this morning, sit quietly through them. Being here in a different way is not being here less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Bar. 5:5; 4:36. The antiphon joins the opening clause of Baruch chapter five verse five to the closing clause of chapter four verse thirty-six\u2014the later chapter first. Both halves are printed in the Douay wording of their own verses.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Arise, O Jerusalem, and stand on high<\/a>: and behold the joy that cometh to thee from God<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Hear what the Church puts in your ear on the way out. Stand up, and look for something arriving. Not an inspection\u2014a joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We who have been refreshed by the food of spiritual nourishment, humbly beseech You, O Lord, that through partaking of this sacrament You will teach us to disdain the things of earth and love those of heaven. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (Given as Bloom’s own pastor, within Bloom’s own tradition)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n So: go home and receive one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you believe this morning: your question is not your resignation. The man Christ called more than a prophet put the worst question available to him directly, and was answered with facts and honoured out loud, and the doubt was never the thing held against him. You are asked to extend the same courtesy across your own kitchen table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you believe none of it, take the same thing with the theology removed. A room that punishes questions gets silence and calls it agreement, and a welcome you were given freely is not a thing you are entitled to ration. Receive one another means: put the name on the board first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May God, whose voice this season promises will be heard, keep your questions safe in your own mouth, receive you as you are and not as you can account for yourself, and fill you with all joy and peace in believing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Go, and write the name on the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Penitential Rite<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Gloria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gradual and Alleluia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Creed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The question is about coming, not about looking<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What comes back instead of an answer<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The verdict is left with the man who asked<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Who this lands on<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A chalkboard in a proving room<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Four citations and one imperative<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Where this leaves us<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Offertory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Canon and Consecration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Act of Spiritual Communion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Communion Antiphon<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Postcommunion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Closing Blessing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nFrequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n