Monday • 4/4/2022
Monday of 5 Lent, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 31; Exodus 4:10-31; 1 Corinthians 14:1-19; Mark 9:30-41

For a DDD “Riffing on Paul’s approach to tongue-speaking” in 1 Corinthians 14:12 from 10/12/2021

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)

The Book of Exodus is about many things, one of which is the long journey of Moses to be described finally as a “friend of God” (Exodus 33:1). Along the way, Moses has some lessons to learn. And his journey is an invitation for us to contemplate just what it is to be called “friend of God” and to know the Lord “face to face” (Exodus 33:11; Deuteronomy 34:10) … and what it takes to get there.

Candor about your inadequacies. We don’t know what made Moses protest his lack of eloquence and his “slowness of speech and tongue” (Exodus 4:10). He may have had a speech impediment. He may have felt his current forty years of wilderness life had eroded rhetorical skills he had learned his first forty years in Pharaoh’s courts. The point is, he acknowledges his inadequacy, and Yahweh accommodates.

Who can’t identify with Moses? Who feels completely up to every task to which they are called — a new job, the Spirit’s nudge to tell a friend about Jesus, a sense you might be called to minister in an uncomfortable setting? Who hasn’t sensed God’s displeasure at our refusal in the face of his promptings?

God supplies Moses with Aaron. Who hasn’t been grateful when the Lord has provided a Christian friend to provide wise counsel, just the right verse to get us back on track, or the right person to come alongside us to help with the task at hand? Praise be to the God of grace who meets us where we are … and is not content to leave us there!

Faithfulness to the basics. Moses had embarked upon the special task to which God had called him, but he had overlooked one of the fundamental requirements of covenantal relationship. He had failed to initiate his sons into the covenant community through circumcision.

Exactly what transpires during the night our reading describes as “the Lord met him and tried to kill him” is mysterious (Exodus 4:24). If ever there was ever a case of hyperbole in the Bible, it is here. If the God who sends the plagues against Egypt wanted to kill Moses, Moses would be dead. I suspect that the narrative depends upon Moses’s own account of a night-time terror that came upon him. Maybe it was a nightmare, maybe a nighttime visitation by the Angel of the Lord. We don’t know. Whatever it was, it felt to Moses like the Lord was trying to kill him. His wife, Zipporah knows exactly what to do (in the story, she’s the equivalent of Tami Taylor in the Friday Night Lights TV series, who always seems to know what to do!). Snip. Snip. Their child is brought into line with covenant life through circumcision … and so is the heretofore disobedient father. That’s why we sing, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way…”

Extraordinary gifts and calling do not remove the need for attention to the basics of obedience and character. The field is littered with celebrity pastors who have “fallen” because nobody called them to account for sins of pride, envy, greed, sexual license. Historically, the apparent “Christianizing” of the Roman Empire took place under the leadership of an unbaptized, and therefore undiscipled, Constantine.* The church has paid a high price: the toleration of a pick-and-choose attitude among professed believers toward fundamental things like what to believe, how to behave, and whether or not to belong to a church. Lent is a good time for all of us to ask ourselves straightforward questions about how we are doing with matters of basic discipleship: Bible study and prayer, faithfulness in worship and giving, loving our neighbor as ourselves and respecting the dignity of every human being. Again, “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way….”

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay

* See the analysis in Alan Kreider, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom (Trinity Press International, 1999; Wipf and Stock, 2006), especially Chapter 4, “Constantine Broadens the Attraction,” pp. 33–42.