Tuesday • 10/1/2024 •
Tuesday of Proper 21
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 97; Psalm 99; Hosea 4:1-10; Acts 21:1-14; Luke 5:12-26
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)
Yesterday, we read the prophet Hosea’s promise that Yahweh will restore his marriage to his people in a “re-Edenized” creation. Today, however, Yahweh indicts his people for violating their marriage vows to the Lord. He points to the misery that Israel’s faithlessness has brought upon herself and upon creation. Faithfulness and loyalty have given way to swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and adultery: “bloodshed follows bloodshed” (Hosea 4:1-2). And because the destiny of all the rest of creation is tied to the destiny of God’s image bearers, the effects are felt in creation as well: “Therefore the land mourns … together with the wild animals, and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea” (Hosea 4:3). Israel’s life is supposed to anticipate God’s reunification of heaven and earth, and his reestablishment of shalom on the earth. Instead, her life manifests the great divorce between heaven and earth, and the brokenness of life on the earth without God.
Image: Nikolay Bogatov , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. — Hosea 4:6. To me personally, the most sobering part of Hosea’s indictment is the charge he brings against Israel’s priests. It’s their responsibility to teach people, to model what life in covenant with Yahweh looks like. They are the ones who are to hold before people the vision of the marriage of heaven and earth. It is to mirror piety in their own lives. It expresses an embracing of, and immersion in, “the law of your God” (Hosea 4:6). It echoes living and teaching as though, as the apostle Paul says, nothing matters but “keeping the commandments of God” (1 Corinthians 7:19). In a word, it displays the duality of simultaneously standing “on” and “under” the Word of God as authority.
When unbelief takes hold in the hearts of those charged with promoting belief, no good thing follows. I’ve seen that. Pulpits become platforms for personal and political agendas. “The way I read it” replaces “Thus says the Lord.” “What the Bible should have said” displaces “The Bible says.” People are taught to read Scripture (if they are taught to read it at all) through the lens of skepticism, suspicion, radical doubt, and readiness to correct. Claims to unmask hidden biases in the Bible mask hidden biases in the interpreter. As Peter puts it bluntly, when he denounces false teachers who “speak bombastic nonsense, and [who] with licentious desires of the flesh … entice people … They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption” (2 Peter 2:18-19). Or as Hosea puts it in today’s passage: “They feed on the sin of my people; they are greedy for their iniquity” (Hosea 4:8).
Inevitably, then, as Hosea says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Doubt begets doubt, skepticism begets skepticism, a critical spirit begets a critical spirit. A church that is supposed to promote Jesus Christ and his Kingdom promotes anything else, whether it’s one group’s mindset of greed (“how Jesus can make you rich”) or another’s platform of envy (“how Jesus wants you to take away their riches”).
In the Christian calendar, we are in the orb of the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. It is a time to praise God for the heavenly powers he uses to defend and protect his people—from Michael the Archangel, the “protector” of God’s people in the Book of Daniel (12:1), to the angels who stand guard over the seven churches in the Book of Revelation (chapters 2-3). It is a good day to call upon the Lord to bolster heaven’s armies for the bringing of fresh strength and new resolve to his servants on the earth. Especially in order that servants of the church may “feel a divine jealousy [for Christ’s church], … promised … in marriage to one husband, to present [her] as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:2).
Collect of St. Michael and All Angels
Everlasting God, who have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Be blessed this day.
Reggie Kidd+