Christmas & Epiphany Bible Study -- How to Notice the Sacred in Home Life
In this episode, we are joined by The Rev. Aaron and Elizabeth Ross. We met Aaron and Elizabeth at the consecration of Bishop Julia Whitworth in the Diocese of Massachusetts. Our shared need for childcare at the bishop's seating made us fast friends. And we've continued to bond over the delights of parenting two young children. Aaron is the curate at St. John the Evangelist, Duxbury. Elizabeth is a spiritual director and writer with an emphasis on noticing sacred light within the spiritual journey, creative practice, and family life.
Key moments in our conversation include:
01:00 The Importance of the Physical World in Scripture
04:06 Origin Story of Bedtime Chapel
05:30 Transitioning from Christmas to Epiphany in the Home
08:44 Practical Tips for Spiritual Practice in the Home Nurturing Vulnerability
13:26 Liberation Lens for Spiritual Practice
19:53 Proclaiming Jesus in the 21st Century
Things we talked about on this episode:
Charismatic Pentecostal Tradition
Richard Rohr, The Christ Mystery
Lisa Colón DeLay | Spark My Muse
Cindy S. Lee, Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation
Stay Connected to Elizabeth Ross:
- Substack: Elizabeth Ross Writes: Substack
- Instagram: Elzross
- Etsy Shop: This Gentle Light
If you missed them - listen to our first two Bible Study discussion with the Rev. Aaron and Elizabeth Ross. This one convers Advent 4 and the Nativity of Jesus. And this episode on the early days of Christmas and our Bible Discussion on the Incarnation.
Let’s stay connected!
Website: www.bedtimechapel.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bedtimechapel/
Facebook: Bedtime Chapel
Monthly Newsletter:Sign-Up Here
00:00:00 Natalie Thomas
Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly scripture study. I'm Natalie Thomas.
00:00:04 James Thomas
And I'm James Thomas. We're deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:08 Natalie Thomas
And Bedtime Chapel grew out of our shared desire to support families who are trying to center Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:15 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short gospel reading. In this episode, we'll be covering the last bit of Christmastide and coming into Epiphany.
00:00:24 Natalie Thomas
And we're here today for our third week of discussion with Elizabeth and Aaron Ross, who we serve with in this diocese and Aaron. Aaron's a deacon and Elizabeth is a spiritual director.
00:00:35 James Thomas
So we hear a few readings this week where John is intentional about describing the physical geography of the story. This happened in Cana. This happened at the Sea of Tiberius. We even get a little detail that there was plenty of grass there when we hear the feeding of the five thousand. Why do you think John added such specific details and how do they enrich our understanding of these stories.
00:01:00 Elizabeth Ross
Well, I can't speak for John, but I can make my best guess. The physical world around us is incredibly important, as we see in these descriptions to the story. Epiphany's emphasis is on manifestation, the manifestation of Christ, proclaiming Christ to the world. And so when we think about the manifestations of God's work, we're thinking about God revealing God's self through the created world, through the incarnation.
00:01:31 Elizabeth Ross
And so I like to think of the created world. There's a saying that says the created world was Scripture. Before that there was Bibles. And so God reveals God's self through these ordinary scenes, through the grass, through the sky, through the adjectives in the Bible, really, that the authors choose to use. And that gives us another revelation of God and who God is and what God loves.
00:01:57 Elizabeth Ross
And so these physical descriptions also help ground the incarnation story of Christ in the real world, our world, even as we read 2,000 years later.
00:02:08 Aaron Ross
Wow. Yeah. That is so good, Liz. I. For me, I kind of took a little bit of a different route in thinking about physical geography and everything like that. So how I understand the Gospel of John is how he wrote the Gospel for pretty much a broad audience in the fact that he's trying to hook people into recognizing, with an emphasis on Jesus being the Word made flesh, that this is the Son of God.
00:02:37 Aaron Ross
And for me, I kind of looked at when John is making these bits and pieces, right, he's naming these territorial pieces, he's actually deliberately contextualizing Jesus within a time and place. And this helps me recognize and relate to Jesus and his disciples in so many different ways. Right. In a contextual kind of way.
00:03:02 Aaron Ross
So there's a historical context that we're reading our Lord in and also understanding that his culture and his region has an effect on him. So looking at my own faith journey, my faith journey is deeply contextual. Being the child of immigrants, I grew up right outside D.C. i was raised in the charismatic Pentecostal tradition.
00:03:26 Aaron Ross
I am a soldier, I'm a father. Right. I'm a husband. And all of these different pieces affect and add context to my witness as a believer in Christ and also an Anglican. Right. And how I see the living, how I see our Lord is through the sacraments. And all of these bits and pieces of my own life have an effect with my faith.
00:03:53 Aaron Ross
So Jesus's identity as a 1st century Palestinian Jew really adds some context to the witness of the Gospel, and it brings a mirror to my own journey as well.
00:04:06 James Thomas
So, Aaron, you were just mentioning the centrality of your Anglicanism in your life. And in this podcast, we are following the ancient practice of the monastic offices as realized since the Reformation in Anglicanism, of a rhythm of prayer in the morning and in the evening. A more modern innovation in the last couple of centuries is the restoration of the noonday office and the nighttime office called compline.
00:04:35 James Thomas
Right. And so, generally speaking, in our practice, the Gospel might have been proclaimed at the evening prayer, and then night prayer is actually more traditionally a service of psalms and short readings. But for the purposes of sharing stories, what we're doing here is we're using the gospel reading from the evening service and inserting it into the.
00:04:56 James Thomas
The night service. That's a little bit of the, the. The inside baseball of how the liturgy for the bedtime chapel comes together. For the most part, we are using the gospel, but we're also keeping a vigil to our principal feasts. And when that happens, that will occasionally bring in the epistle reading as opposed to the gospel reading.
00:05:14 James Thomas
So this week we do hear from Paul on both the first day of the week, which is the eve of the Epiphany, and the last day of the week, which is the eve of the baptism of Jesus. In Paul, we begin to experience this expansion from Jesus rooted as actually, as you were just saying, in a particular time and place.
00:05:30 James Thomas
In other words, from Christmas to an expansive vision in which all the nations are children of God. In other words, the epiphany. So this journey from Christmas to epiphany, which, not to suggest those are mutually exclusive, but As a journey, what does it look like to hold both Christmas, which maybe we might use the word Jesus to describe that, and Epiphany, and maybe we might use the word Christmas to describe that.
00:05:54 James Thomas
So how do we hold Jesus Christ in heart and mind?
00:05:59 Aaron Ross
So how I see this text, and I'm actually kind of. I believe I'm pulling from Richard Rohr here a bit. So I get two essential aspects that we hold in tension here. We have the historical figure, right? The first Palestinian Jew named Jesus. And then we also get the Christ who is the universal presence, right, that expands our worldview and makes the Gospels and the Scriptures relevant today, right?
00:06:21 Aaron Ross
There's that mystical piece, and then there's the contextual piece. So as faithful disciples, when we study the biblical text, we must not divorce the two. The historical context, right, and the mystical piece that pulls us outside of ourselves. And so we have a unique opportunity to teach our children that, as you mentioned before, this ancient tradition, right?
00:06:44 Aaron Ross
It reminds me of the line from Star wars, the Force Awakens. This is actually for the trailer, but it said, a thousand generations live through you. So this faith tradition that we have all been baptized into, right, through the waters of baptism, a thousand generations live through you and I, right? So children, right, were essential to Jesus.
00:07:06 Aaron Ross
And especially within that time, they were also the most vulnerable as we understood it. And we can imagine that children were playing with Jesus during his time, and they knew him. And through Jesus being the Christ, these same messages remain relevant to our children today, and particularly through the waters of baptism. So believing in Jesus Christ gives our youth the opportunity to see beyond their own borders and cultures.
00:07:33 Aaron Ross
And I think I've mentioned that, right, in specific to our tradition in the last podcast that we were together, the Anglican Communion offers our youth a chance to understand the church beyond its four walls here in North America, and that we are a part of a global church family that shares the same sacramental views and shares the same church calendar.
00:07:54 Aaron Ross
And that is so profound and rich and adds a certain context within our faith that really pulls us not only from ourselves, but also the little foxholes that we find ourselves in within our communities.
00:08:12 Elizabeth Ross
You mentioned the church calendar, and I'm a huge fan of the church calendar. And I think it becomes a bridge between the specific context in the Christ story and the world that we live in now, and a bridge between seeing the specifics of that story and how do we proclaim Christ in our world now, through those feast days, through the scriptures, through the prayers and the saints, and the history of our faith and it's something that our family has really enjoyed embracing.
00:08:44 Natalie Thomas
That's a good lead in to this last question that we have for y'all after all of this time together, which is about practical tips for families who are looking to integrate their prayer or just their spirituality into their lives. And we've heard from y'all in the last two conversations some of the ways that you are integrating that.
00:09:07 Natalie Thomas
But if you have, and if you have more specific examples of things that have worked within your home, your community, and the community that you're part of leading in Duxbury, we'd love to leave our listeners with those ideas.
00:09:22 Aaron Ross
KISS Keep it simple, stupid. That's the phrase I like to use when it comes to spiritual formation. Right. And teaching our kids the faith. Simplicity is key. Now I'll speak in particular to having young children. Young children can really make the day feel overwhelming. And then also adding this added pressure of forming your children as disciples, like that is a lot.
00:09:48 Aaron Ross
And that's it. Almost the pressure of that almost makes one want to tap out. And so the purpose of spirituality in family life, in my opinion, is not to add burdens, but to lighten them, especially lighten them for the future. And so Elizabeth has just done such an amazing job of integrating spirituality within our home.
00:10:10 Aaron Ross
And in particular, like Liz does this thing with feast days. For example, St. Nicholas Day is. Was recently happened. And Liz puts little treats in the shoes of our girls for St. Nick's days. Even our 11 month old has little treats in her shoes. Or Liz makes a king cake for. For Epiphany.
00:10:31 Aaron Ross
And for me though, right. You know, that's the reality we have in our home. But other families are way too busy, right. For certain things like that. Or maybe not great bakers. So I have found, and I'll speak to my context as the youth and family person within my parish is church attendance.
00:10:54 Aaron Ross
Making church attendance a priority can sometimes just be enough. So I'm thinking of a particular family within the congregation who makes. They make Sundays like their sacred day. Like the kids have no sports, the parents have no activities. That is a day that they go to church and they spend the time together and they participate only on church things on Sundays, right.
00:11:17 Aaron Ross
And they are one of the healthiest families that I know. Like they are one of the healthiest, well integrated, service oriented, happy. They know what's going on in each other's lives because they have made the conscience decision to prioritize family over activities. And I believe our world and our society values activities and your output versus simply Being together.
00:11:43 Aaron Ross
So here's the. Here's a little alter call plug here. If you choose to make that commitment, it will change your life, your family will flourish here. So I'll leave with that.
00:11:53 Elizabeth Ross
As someone who does embrace the liturgical year, I myself personally enjoy all of the traditions and rituals and things, quote, unquote, to do that in and of itself has been a thing that has been relegated to women for so long. And so if prayer feels like another thing on the mental load, it is so important to communicate with whoever you're parenting with, whoever you're providing care with, what's actually important to you and your household and what is going to be meaningful in a prayerful way for your family.
00:12:31 Elizabeth Ross
And so a phrase that I always come back to is that prayer is simply allowing yourself to be loved by God. And so what practices, what postures are going to make that a reality is going to remind you of that. And so it's not, as my husband said, not something to burden you and overload your schedule or add just another thing to do.
00:12:54 Elizabeth Ross
But how are you able to inspire family, encourage your family? And it really doesn't have to look over complicated. You do not have to get in the kitchen if you don't want to. You don't have to memorize a bunch of things. You can simply sing a song. You can be together. You can go on a hike.
00:13:13 Elizabeth Ross
Prayer is an embodiment. It's not something that you check off, you know, week to week. It really should be something that brings you life and encouragement and a sense of purpose.
00:13:26 Natalie Thomas
I love that. Prayer is practicing the presence of God. That's a quote. I don't know exactly who I'm quoting, if anyone can help me there, but that's a quote. We'll figure it out before we put it on there. But prayer is practicing God, the presence of God. And what it reminds me of, Elizabeth, is a conversation I had with Bishop Gail Harris, who was bishop suffragan of this diocese for a long time, 20 years.
00:13:48 Natalie Thomas
And I was going through something challenging in my own life and saying, oh, I haven't even really been making time for me to pray, and I'm not doing the office. And she said, you know, she's a black woman, and said, that's something I'd like to offer you. Is that so often white folks think about time to pray as I've gotta get up in the morning and I have to sit here and then I have to do my prayers.
00:14:11 Natalie Thomas
And if I haven't done it, she said in the Black Tradition, we're praying all the time just by paying attention and being attuned to the way that God is loving us. And I saw, Elizabeth, on something that you wrote in the past, how so often spiritual practice and prayer practices gets taught as this systematic thing, mostly from the white male point of view and how black indigenous brown women and their understanding of prayer and spiritual practice has been so formative for you.
00:14:41 Natalie Thomas
And I'm curious, if not to completely put you on the spot, but if you'd be open to talking a little bit about what resources have really helped you develop a wider understanding of prayer practices and anything in particular from those, again, very diverse traditions, meaning diverse in that there isn't one way of seeing spiritual practice as a black indigenous brown woman, but how that myriad of traditions has informed you, I think that's a.
00:15:10 Elizabeth Ross
Huge conversation that we can only tap into. But at this point, the understanding of what is contemplative I think is really important to begin to acknowledge that contemplation is not, as you've said, not this quiet time that takes 30 minutes. And I'm going to do this particular thing and I'm going to be in a very quiet space.
00:15:32 Elizabeth Ross
My kids are going to be well behaved and everything is going to be crisp and clean and perfect. Contemplation is this wide, expansive experience that can be embodied in so many different ways. And it's really freeing to be able to open up what is contemplative for you. I remember I was working on my rule of life.
00:15:53 Elizabeth Ross
I was very, very pregnant. I was so tired. I had another child at home. And I all I could do, and I knew I needed to do it to have some contemplative space was to work on this rule and to do it in the midst of everything else that was going on. And it was loud, it was messy, it was downright chaotic, if I may be so bold to say that with the two year old running around and dinner needed to be cleaned up, but I needed to sit and have just do it in that space.
00:16:26 Elizabeth Ross
I just needed to do it. And it was still refreshing and it was still wonderful. And when we broaden what our understanding of what is contemplative, we're able to recognize the sacredness in all the different Christian traditions of their forms of praise, their forms of worship, their forms of acknowledgment of God's presence, whether that might be similar or different than our own.
00:16:48 Elizabeth Ross
There's a couple books that I'm thinking of because I am an enneagram5 and most of my inspiration comes from reading. And so there's two books. Lisa Colin Delay, I believe is her name, and Cindy Lee are both women that I have looked up to in their work and basically expanding that view of what spiritual practice can be outside of a purely white male lens.
00:17:14 Elizabeth Ross
And so we can, I can give you those links.
00:17:16 Natalie Thomas
Great, thanks. We will link those books in the show notes.
00:17:19 Elizabeth Ross
For sure.
00:17:20 Aaron Ross
For sure.
00:17:22 James Thomas
So we're going to wrap up and before I close, I just want to circle back to the point that Aaron made a second ago about the practice of carving out some space for church on Sunday, as you said it would rich your life and everything. And let me reiterate, I believe the closing that Natalie gave a week or two ago in this scripture study episode about Bedtime Chapel as a support system and a community of support.
00:17:46 James Thomas
When we choose to do that, it is a countercultural decision. And yes, the hockey parents are not going to like those mispractices. And yes, the marching band director is not going to like that mispractice. And as children get older, that may even bring in employers and things like that. And when we introduce this podcast every week, we mention that it is an increasingly post Christian world and that it's harder to just say, yeah, we don't do Sundays or to keep a liturgical practice in the home or to pass on scripture study to young children.
00:18:23 James Thomas
And so our sincere desire with this ministry of Bedtime Chapel and with this podcast is that this will be a support system. So if you're hearing this and you're saying, I am thirsty to do that, I am thirsty to have a more countercultural way of moving through the world, a Jesus shaped way, the cruciform or cross shaped vocation.
00:18:45 James Thomas
And you're trying to make that happen, but in your own circumstances, there's forces against you. I will just briefly, briefly say that, you know, Natalie and I are now, and this is by no means the hill that we would die on by, this is not a big deal to us, but we're sort of negotiating Santa with our extended family.
00:19:05 James Thomas
Right. And these are the questions. These are the questions of a Christian household, the church and the world, and the life of the world to come that we are wrestling with that many others are not. So from our home to yours, let this be a support system. Let us help you find a way to a countercultural life and following Jesus, which is the simple truth of Christianity.
00:19:32 Natalie Thomas
Yeah. And even a more direct plug. It's my understanding, Elizabeth, that you do work supporting people to bring spiritual practice, this into the home. So we will. Liz's information is in the last three episodes. She's linked in our show notes. And we as much as this is a resource for your children, we really understand this to be a family resource and we are here to support you to be the kind of caregivers that you want to be to raise the kids that love God.
00:20:01 Natalie Thomas
The raise kids that love God. And we are each of us, all four of us are here for you and here with you and please stay in touch with us. Yes, yes.
00:20:12 Aaron Ross
Yes.
00:20:13 Natalie Thomas
All four of us at this little table are here for you and with you. And until the next episode, please stay in touch. You can find us. Our handle is Bedtime Chapel. That's our email. That's our website. That's where we are on Facebook and Instagram. We want to hear from you. We want to be there for you.
00:20:33 Natalie Thomas
We want to know what's working. We want to know what's not working. And until then, we will be praying with you!
