Monday • 1/10/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

From the Catacombs, a Song of Life

Life was cheap and fear was everywhere. A culture of death ruled, and the world seemed out of control. Through fortune-tellers and animal sacrifice, people hoped to pacify the whims of hostile deities and spirits. Deformed or wrong-gender babies lay abandoned on mountainsides. 

Because it was illegal to worship another King besides Caesar, the Christians of 3rd century Rome met in underground burial caves. While death was pervasive above ground, in the catacombs the gathered Body of Christ found life and courage in the One who had come in the flesh, and who continued to come among them in the Bread and the Wine.

By candlelight, the persecuted church would gather and chant a prayer to celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death, and to consecrate the Bread and Wine that would nourish them in their daily lives. 

Above ground, these Christians told anyone who would listen that the world had been forever altered. Christ had triumphed over the evil one. The heavens had been made peaceable, and were now filled with the glory of their Creator and the kindness of our Redeemer. Above ground they scoured the mountainsides and rescued unwanted babies. Above ground, they testified to the truth that death had given way to resurrection. They found strength for life above ground because Christ met them underground in the Bread and the Wine, and in the song of his victory. 

Now, as then, we live in a culture of death. So too now, life is cheap and fear is everywhere. In our society to be conceived “unwanted” is a death sentence. Sex trafficking is a worldwide plague. Movie theatres aren’t safe. Neither are kindergartens. Gun stores can’t keep ammunition on their shelves. Soul-devouring idolatries are everywhere: whether consumerism and secularism and militarism, or tribalism and spiritism and despotism.

Still now, the world is hungry to know peace, to have courage, to have an anchor and context for life’s realities. Christ continues to call his people apart to sing of the world's one true King. We offer the truth that in his Son, God took all the suffering into himself and reaches out wounded and loving hands of love. 

We may no longer gather underground to sing and chant by candlelight, but we continue to meet, in large and small groups, for strength and encouragement – and as a sign to the world that its true story ends in life, not in death. In the same Bread and Wine shared by the early church, we find ourselves filled with a courage and strength and love that are not our own to take our part in extending Christ’s hands into the world.  

Twenty friends recently huddled around a table that was set with Bread and Wine. We were husbands and wives called to ministry, and we were on retreat, looking to the Lord and to each other for strength to keep going. The room was dark and, by the light of smartphones and tablets, we chanted that same 3rd century Eucharistic prayer that came from the persecuted church of Rome:

In fulfillment of your will
he stretched out his hands in suffering
to release from suffering
those who place their trust in you
and so won for you a holy people.

He freely accepted the death
to which he was handed over,
in order to destroy death
and to shatter the chains of the evil one;
to trample underfoot the powers of hell
and to lead the righteous into light;
to fix the boundaries of death
and to manifest the resurrection.*

Amen.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

* The prayer is an excerpt from the Apostolic Tradition. Though tradition attributes the prayer to the Roman pastor-theologian Hippolytus, current consensus scholarship questions Hippolytus’s authorship. The prayer is normally dated about A.D. 215.