Wednesday • 6/8/2022
We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, while I teach with my friends at the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. In our Daily Office Devotions this week, we are considering several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office next week.
An audio or video version of this devotional can be found here: Apple Podcast, Spotify Podcast, YouTube
“Things Which had Grown Old”
I have become less impressed with my own prayers, and more reliant on the church’s. One that is sustaining me now is a prayer that is at least 1500 years old, but which seems to me fresher than tomorrow. It is a prayer that my church prays every Good Friday and at every ordination service:
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light:
Look favorably on your whole Church,
that wonderful and sacred mystery;
by the effectual working of your providence,
carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation;
let the whole world see and know
that things which were cast down are being raised up,
and things which had grown old are being made new,
and that all things are being brought to their perfection
by him through whom all things were made,
your Son Jesus Christ our Lord;
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The church is a “sacred mystery.”
Sometime during the middle of the first millennium, this prayer appeared. After only 500 or so years of existence, the church had been through a lot – and must have seemed to many people to be tired, enfeebled, old, and ready to fade away. The early persecutions by hostile Roman emperors, the almost as fatal befriending of the church by a converted emperor, the battle over defining the oneness and threeness of deity and ditto the humanness and deity of Jesus, the disappointment that the adoption of the faith as “civil religion” failed to protect Roman society from invading armies, the emergence of a rift between Western and Eastern theological and liturgical sensibilities that was as much about “turf” as anything.
Even so, through this anonymous prayer, our forebears acknowledged that the church wasn’t their invention, but God’s. That she was a Bride beloved of a Divine Groom. She is what the apostle Paul described as “a mystery” (Eph 5:32) planted in the world as a picture of Divine Love. Because she is God’s creation, not ours, our heresies haven’t killed her, nor have our schisms. Yes, it’s our responsibility to respond well to Jesus’s question: “When the Son of Man appears, will he find faith on the earth?” Nonetheless, He is so much at work among us that, one way or another, He will make sure the question is answered in the affirmative.
We may be stressed, but God isn’t.
The human story is that God is working to make all things new. If history seems to be going the wrong way, we don’t have to worry that God has either forgotten, or lost his punch. The resurrection of his Son is his promise that all will one day rise – it can’t not happen. If we don’t see the church rising to the task to which she is called, it’s because we’re not looking hard enough. If the candle goes out here (say, Turkey after the rise of Islam, or Europe since the so-called Enlightenment), the light will get lit elsewhere (say, out of the waters of the Dniepre River way back when, or from Africa more recently). If the gospel becomes just another “product” in the US, it will become a transformative engine in Korea or China.
God is in the business of reversing things.
At the very moment demons howled at Jesus on the cross, the earth shook with what the ancient church took to be the breaking of the power of death and hell and Satan himself. On the cross, Divine Justice and Mercy embraced – and the beginning of the renewal of all things set in. As Paul would write: “He brought life and immortality to light” (2Tim 1:10).
“Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave,” wrote G. K. Chesterton.
When turmoil reigned in the ancient church, God raised up an Augustine to articulate a philosophy of the City of God, a Gregory to teach the church a “new song,” a Cyril to contribute liturgical coherence. When medieval Christendom was sliding into decadence and either indifference or moralism, God called a Francis to rebuild a broken-down countryside church building – and Francis realized God meant to rebuild his whole Church through repentance and love and care for the poor. While the 20th century American church was selling its soul for “relevance” and market share and while the European church was shuttering cathedrals or selling them as skate parks or shopping malls, God was sending a nun to find Jesus in the slums of India. We have yet to see what miracles God will do through other Augustines, Gregories, Francises, and Teresas.
Meanwhile, I’m grateful for words bigger than my own to ask God what I know He wants to – and surely will – do: raise up “things which were cast down” and renew “things which had become old.”
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: Nicholas Roerich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons