O Key of David

"O Key of David, and Scepter of the house of Israel, you open and no one can shut, you shut and no one can open: Come and bring the captives out of the prison house, those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death."

Today's "'O' Antiphon" (try Googling that) speaks with confidence of release from whatever binds us.

Any living thing instinctively hates being imprisoned. The worse thing that can be done for a living thing is to accustom it to prison walls. With time we do adapt to wall and bars--many convicts are "recidivous", returning again and again to jail. We shake our heads at this, but perhaps we all tend to be "recidivous", co-operating with the forces and voices that would imprison us in a life, any life, that is not fully who and what we are called to be.

What we are called to be, to paraphrase one early church pastor, is fully alive. And that is the glory of God.

Awake, watch, says Advent. Awake especially to whatever binds us, whatever walls have grown around us. We are not the summation of our fears, our dreads, we are not what a consumer culture or an atmosphere of rage and fear and resentment tell us we are. We are freed by the One who is Free, who cries out within us, within our most true selves, and who cries in word and Sacrament to hear, to awake, to stand, to walk, and finally to run. See the Key who comes to the darkest place in which we have been shackled or, perhaps, where we have placed ourselves.