Tuesday • 2/9/2021
Week of 5 Epiphany

This morning’s Scriptures are: This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 78:1–39; Isaiah 59:1–15a; 2 Timothy 1:1–14; Mark 9:42–50

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)

Isaiah: a call to justice and truth. Justice is dead among God’s people because they don’t care about what is true. “Justice is far from us,” because, Isaiah says, “truth is lacking” (Isaiah 59:9,15). “No one goes to court honestly; they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies, conceiving mischief and begetting iniquity” (Isaiah 59:4).

In the context of chapters forty through sixty-six, Isaiah is preparing the children of Israel to return to their homeland. He means more than just a physical re-acquisition of their birthright. He means a complete reinhabiting of their identity as God’s “peculiar people,” a “holy priesthood,” a “kingdom of priests.” Isaiah calls God’s people to covenant renewal—to being the point of the spear in God’s campaign to reclaim this planet that has fallen temporarily to the power of darkness, death, decay, evil, injustice, and lovelessness. God is calling them once again to be the one people among the entire human race where the halls ring with truth, and where courts reward good and hold evil and folly to account.

In later books, notably Ezra and Nehemiah, we will see efforts towards this end: a recapturing of a reverent reading of Scripture, and the realigning of lives in accordance with the description of the flourishing and faithful life given in the Law of Moses.

I submit that if there is hope for a church that ministers in a world like ours, where, as in Isaiah’s day, “truth is lacking,” this hope lies down the same path: forsaking the downgrading of Scripture as a merely human witness and a merely negotiable life-option. It means learning to re-read it as God’s story and as divine prescription for human flourishing. Even where (especially where) it steps on our toes!

2 Timothy: a call to courage and suffering. Who hasn’t felt like they are in over their heads? Timothy sure did, when, despite his youth, his mentor called him to lead the church in Ephesus, one of the largest churches of the new Christian movement! In an earlier letter, Paul urges Timothy: “Don’t let them despise your youth” (1 Timothy 4:12).

In this letter, Paul calls upon his young protégé to do his forebears proud, and to fight like a good soldier, even to the point of suffering in the same way his Savior had done and as his martyr-in-preparation mentor was currently doing. In a word, Paul urges upon Timothy the virtue of courage: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7). Bracing words. Sobering words. But words filled with the promise of God’s renewing work by the Spirit.

God has unleashed the “power of God for salvation” upon the earth. Timothy’s job is to proclaim that truth. In the face of those who claim that death is the end (more about that on Thursday), Timothy must bravely proclaim the truth that “the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus [has] abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

Paul advises that Timothy’s love for his mother, his grandmother, his “father” in the faith (Paul), and most of all, for the Savior who suffered on his behalf, must ready him for his own share in those sufferings.

And when everything in Timothy screams that he should turn and run, the Spirit who gives self-control gives him the principal thing that marks every good soldier: the sheer unwillingness to do anything but betray those who are counting on him. “Hold to the standard of sound words you heard from me and do so with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 1:13 NET). In other words, hold to the same faith the Lord Jesus showed in his Father to vindicate him on the far side of death, and the same love for lost sinners that led Jesus to spread his arms on the hard wood of the cross. Or, as Paul will tell Timothy in the next chapter: “Take your share of sufferings like a good soldier” (1 Timothy 2:3).

Mark: a call to self-control and love. The strongest, most graphic exhortations Jesus ever gives are these about cutting off a hand or a foot, or cutting out an eye, if that’s what it takes to control our impulses. The recommendations to do so are hyperbolic, but they make their point powerfully. Every one of us would do well to give them serious thought, because we all have trouble saying “No!” to something.

What may be easy to overlook here is the way Jesus brackets this portion of his teaching with considerations of love: caring about the “little ones” who believe in him, and being “at peace with one another” (Mark 9:42,50). The sad fact is that the indulgence of “secret sins” or of seemingly private acts of pleasure-seeking is not at all victimless. Alcoholics tend to abuse. Cultivators of an alternative reality of their own fantasy treat real people callously, even sometimes brutally. It’s just possible that pausing to count the cost to somebody else—that is, asking, “What love would do here?” and, “What would make for peace?” may very well lead to a better result.

Collect for the 5th Sunday after the Epiphany. Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins, and give us the liberty of that abundant life which you have made known to us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Timothy and Eunice, from stained glass, Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, FL