Monday • 10/2/2023 •
Monday of the Eighteenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 21)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 89; 2 Kings 17:24–41; 1 Corinthians 7:25–31; Matthew 6:25–34
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we explore that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. This Monday in the Season After Pentecost our readings finds us in Proper 21 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
Matthew. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” — Matthew 6:34c KJV. I’m not really quite the Eeyore I publicly present myself to be. However, I admit I am a bit of a worrier. So this saying of Jesus has anchored my soul for years (it’s also the first phrase I teach my Greek students … and I encourage them to memorize it: ἀρκετὸν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἡ κακία αὐτῆς). It sums up Jesus’s teaching in this entire paragraph: each day brings its challenges, but each day also promises God’s provision. Oh, brother, do I hang onto that! Praise be!
Image adapted from Amitchell125, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Our Old Testament and Epistle readings shore up the teaching:
2 Kings. “Then the king of Assyria commanded, “Send there one of the priests whom you carried away from there; let him go and live there, and teach them the law of the god of the land.” So one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and lived in Bethel; he taught them how they should worship the Lord. But every nation still made gods of its own…” — 2 Kings 17:27–29a.
Being in the ministry myself, I can’t not think about the perspective of the lone priest whom the Assyrians send back into Israel. They sent him to teach the ways of Yahweh to pagan newcomers whom the Assyrians themselves have used to resettle the land, as well as to that minority of Israelites who had been left behind after the deportation.
What a discouraging scenario this priest faces. His Assyrian overlords think he’s representing a merely territorial deity. The newly arrived Assyrians are not about to abandon the deities they’ve brought with them. And the local Israelites have been accustomed for so long to syncretistic ways (fusing religious systems), that they are perfectly content to reconcile their loyalty to Yahweh with the pagan ways of their new neighbors.
How does this priest get up every day and face the same eyerolls and insincere head-nods? He does so, I imagine, because he knows in advance, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” The only measure of success is faithfulness to the call. That goes for all of us—not just professional clergy.
1 Corinthians. There’s also the perspective that Paul must maintain for himself and also must inculcate among his readers in 1 Corinthians. Christians in Corinth have mistakenly gotten the idea that with Jesus’s resurrection from the dead and with their own spiritual regeneration, they have come into the full experience of “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15). Because they have “arrived” (so they think), they don’t think they need a physical resurrection. They think they are “kings,” already reigning with Christ, and that they are “rich” with all the fullness of the Kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 4:8). They’ve allowed themselves, therefore, to confuse the blessings of this world (status, wealth, and either freedom of, or freedom from, full sexual expressiveness) with God’s (better) ultimate blessings. Too many Corinthians look down on the little people, the “foolish,” the “weak,” the “low and despised in this world, things that are not” (in the Greek, “the nobodies,” yes, literally, “the nobodies” — 1 Corinthians 1:27–28).
It’s led them to overvalue their present life status. And so, Paul writes:
“I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away” — 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 NRSV.
Paul is not saying that spouses need not love one another. He’s not saying that neither sad nor happy feelings should be felt. He’s not saying that possessions and endeavors in this life are a waste of time.
Paul is saying that we still live in anticipation of Christ’s return, and that until then we live with less than perfection. He is saying we dare not demand from a spouse an infinite love that only Christ can supply. He is saying that we cannot expect in this life a completely whole emotional life. He is saying that possessions must not possess us. He is saying that in our worldly affairs we will not accomplish all our hearts desire, even when our desires are that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That day will not arrive until the Lord returns in triumphant glory.
Until then, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Christ (not the other stuff) is our hope, as Paul says elsewhere (1 Timothy 1:1). And that’s good enough, because Christ is good enough.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+