This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Ecclesiastes 2:16-26; Galatians 1:18–2:10; Matthew 13:53-58

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

If death truly marks the end, and if death itself is a slide into nothingness, then everything before it is nothingness too—a kind of living death. Trying to live a life worth being remembered for? Pointless: “For there is no enduring remembrance of the wise or of fools, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten” (Ecclesiastes 2:16). Ambitious projects? (And Solomon’s were nothing if not ambitious, and lavish, from palaces to stables to, of course, God’s very house). It’ll all be left for people who didn’t toil for it. Again, pointless: “This also is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 2:18-19). 

Solomon’s perspective is one of a life turned in on itself, and it’s not pretty. But at the end of this paragraph, in verses 24-26, Solomon gets a glimmer of insight. If you see God as the giver of life, it’s possible to receive food and drink as a gift, and even to find enjoyment in the work he gives you to do. If the goal is to please him and not self or posterity, it’s just possible that “wisdom and knowledge and joy” will come. 

I linger over one observation from Paul’s letter to the Galatians: that is, that it takes him a decade and a half from his conversion before he puts pen to paper. 

Some things take time. It’s either seventeen years or fourteen years from Paul’s conversion and initial contact with the Jerusalem leaders of the church (scholars still debate the time frame) until he appears to them to lay out his understanding of his call. A lot of water has gone under the bridge: time in Arabia (whether in seclusion or under tutelage) and a decade of ministry in a church of mixed Jews and Gentiles in Syrian Antioch. 

When he does emerge for this consultation, it’s clear that three things have jelled for him. We can be grateful for them—and that he took the time to get them right. First, it is God’s sheer grace in Christ that saves—which is largely the burden of this letter. Second, it is the shape of God’s plan to bring Jews and Gentiles together as equal citizens in the Kingdom of God (Galatians 3:28). Third, it is his mission to pursue the Gentile-inclusion part of God’s plan—so much so, that he will risk alienating key Jerusalem leadership (Galatians 2:3-5, and tomorrow’s passage). Fourth, he is so eager for his fellow Jews to understand God’s reconciling love and power that he plans to raise support among his Gentile churches to support the impoverished Jewish church in Jerusalem: “They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor (i.e., the church in Jerusalem—a story for another day), which was actually what I was eager to do” (Galatians 2:10).

Let me commend to you three ways to pray for God’s good timing—even if it may seem slow to us—to show itself for you and for our world. 

In your own life, I pray you not feel like you are stuck in some sort of perpetual hovering pattern, just circling the airport, never landing. Go to him daily, ready to hear him say, “Wait on me,” or “Here we go!”

Pray for the lifting of the curse and for the dissipation of this coronavirus. Pray for wise leaders and wise citizens, for failed and failing businesses, for furloughed workers and exhausted workers, for going-out-of-their-minds moms. Pray for those in the medical profession, those who minister to the sick and suffering, those who keep the lights on, and those who seek a cure and a vaccine. 

Pray for the healing of racial woundedness in our society. Pray for—and, friends, work towards—the day when people of color do not have to live with fear of police or of taunts from white people just for being alive. Pray that that day is not as far out into the future as 1619, when the first slave ship breasted the horizon of the coast of Virginia, is in our past. And don’t lose heart, even now. 

Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+