Monday • 11/13/2023 •

Monday of the Twenty-fourth Week After Pentecost (Proper 27) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 80; Nehemiah 9:1–25; Revelation 18:1–8; Matthew 15:1–20 

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 27 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Matthew: “God commanded,” versus “But you said.” Commandments of God override traditions of men. Here is an important point in principle: we can’t improve on God’s requirements. Whenever we do, we do so either to dismiss or exaggerate. Either way, there’s diminishment. When we dismiss, we substitute our own desires. When we exaggerate, we hide God’s heart behind a wall of legalism. 

Jesus warns against drawing near with our lips while moving farther and farther away with our hearts. Jesus offers, as an example, dedicating to the Lord resources that are necessary for the care of elderly parents. There are lines you’d think pastors promoting stewardship would not cross; but I was once a part of a church where the senior pastor told people to give to the church even if it meant holding back their mortgage payment. If that’s not vain worship “teaching human precepts as doctrines…” (Matthew 15:9)!  

Then there’s the issue of blind spiritual guides. Jesus says God didn’t appoint them, and we should leave it to him to remove them: “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit” (Matthew 15:13–14). How prescient of Jesus to anticipate clueless church leaders who are blind to spiritual reality and who teach, for instance, that resurrection is incompatible with science, that only the gullible believe in miracles, and that activism substitutes for prayer. If we’re not responsible to call out and remove blind guides, we sure can spend every effort not to allow ourselves to be dragged into their pit of religious error, ethical confusion, and intellectual dissembling.  

Clean versus unclean. People today tend to think that the categories of “clean” and “unclean” don’t count anymore. That is unless you express an out-of-favor opinion about abortion, sexual ethics, or the Second Amendment. You find out quickly that some things are “clean” and others are “unclean.” Even people who have declared war on the sacred in the name of “desacralization” have boundary markers. Is nothing sacred, indeed? Well, some things clearly are.  

Jesus has hard words for those who place the boundary marker between “clean” and “unclean” in the wrong place: “For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15:19). We, it seems, are the problem.  

Nehemiah: Israel’s call to priesthood. The people of Israel had, in fact, been set aside to a holy end, that is, to be themselves a boundary marker between “clean” and “unclean.” “For I am the Lord your God; sanctify yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44). As God’s holy people, they were to be the incubator of God’s plan to bring redemption into the world, to reestablish holiness, to make clean again a world polluted by sin.  

That’s why Israelites were called to separate themselves from the nations during that incubation period—that is, during the era of the Old Covenant. That is why people in the era of Ezra and Nehemiah, as today’s passage says, “separated themselves from all foreigners, and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their ancestors. 3They stood up in their place and read from the book of the law of the Lord their God for a fourth part of the day, and for another fourth they made confession and worshiped the Lord their God” (Nehemiah 9:2–3). As a kingdom of priests, the returning Israelite exiles acknowledged their failings and submitted themselves to God’s Word. In doing so, they reasserted God’s original call on them as his people.  

Revelation: the church versus Babylon. Revelation 17 (Saturday’s reading) had described the unholy alliance between the beast (the antichrist) and unredeemed humanity (“Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations”). The “the mystery of the woman” is that she is at once temptress with abominations and impurities, and also persecutor of the church. She is a symbol of world rulers who unite their power with the beast to “make war on the Lamb” (Revelation 17:4).  

Revelation 18 (today’s reading) promises her demise: “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! … [H]er plagues will come in a single day—pestilence and mourning and famine—and she will be burned with fire; for mighty is the Lord God who judges her” (Revelation 18:2b,8).  

At the same time, God’s people, like everybody else, are susceptible to her charms (we’ve just read Jesus teaching that the problem is inside us, not outside us). For this reason, John records: “Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues’” (Revelation 18:4). Until the City of God descends from above, we will necessarily live in the City of Man. But we do not need to allow, indeed we dare not allow, the City of Man to live in us.  

I pray God’s grace for each of us to do the sober self-reflection (which only grace can truly enable) for what is “unclean” within and needs to be brought to the Lord for cleansing. I pray God’s grace for each of us to give ourselves to reading, marking, digesting, and obeying God’s Word. I pray God’s grace for each of us to live wisely as citizens of the “city above” during our sojourn “here below.”  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+