Monday • 7/10/2023
A Monday in the Season After Pentecost (Proper 9)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 1; Psalm 2; Psalm 3; 1 Samuel 15:1–3,7–23; Acts 9:19b–31; Luke 23:44–56a
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 find us in Proper 9 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
For my wife and many others who cook, recipes are invitations to creativity. For them, the joy of cooking lies in substituting ingredients and changing measurements at will, seemingly whimsically at times. The results can be spectacular, resulting in meals that taste better than if directions had been meticulously followed.
By contrast, I once had a job assembling lawnmowers. The instructions were clear: “Turn this screw two and a half times to secure the motor to the frame. If you turn the screw only two times, the motor will eventually come loose from the frame, and the customer will not be happy. If you turn the screw three times, you will strip the threads and we’ll have to throw the frame away.”
Sometimes it’s OK to take instructions as suggestions. Sometimes it’s not.
Wisdom knows when to improvise, and when to do what you’re told. In the Bible, it’s a matter of the heart, a matter of discernment. Somebody once noted, “Saul had no heart for God and lost the kingdom. David had a whole heart for God and saw the kingdom united. Solomon had half a heart for God, and we see the kingdom divided after his death.” The narratives of Samuel and Kings bear out these observations.
1 Samuel. Because David had a heart for God, his improvisations on God’s commands were acceptable, as when (as we will read next week), he and his men ate the “bread of the Presence” (1 Samuel 21:1–15). Because Saul’s heart is far from God, however, his improvisations on God’s instructions backfire. Yahweh puts the Amalekites, inveterate enemies of Israel, completely under the ban. For that reason, Saul is commissioned to impose God’s sentence of judgment. Saul improvises: he spares Agag the Amalekites’ king, and he allows his soldiers to spare “the best of the sheep and of the cattle and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was valuable” (1 Samuel 15:9).
After the fact, Saul makes a show of piety. He builds an altar purportedly for sacrifice. In reality, however, it is a monument to his own ego. The altar is, as the New International Version nicely renders, “in his own honor” (1 Samuel 15:10). Taken alive, Agag is potentially worthwhile to Saul as a walking trophy, a constant reminder of his own military prowess. And the booty (“… all that was valuable”) that the soldiers were allowed to “swoop down on” (1 Samuel 15:19) and take as plunder—well, it was just that, plunder, not sacrifice. The “sacrifice” is just theatre.
No, King Saul’s mandate from God is like the instructions I received to turn the screw exactly two and a half times. His situation is not like my wife’s, where the instructions on the page invite her to see potential beyond the words on the page. What Yahweh has been inviting from Saul throughout his life is an aligning of Saul’s heart with his. Yahweh’s “delight” would have lain in finding Saul delighting in Him. Instead, Saul proves his unerring instinct is for self. And his show of religiosity is a cover for rebellion and arrogance (1 Samuel 15:23). He has rejected Yahweh’s overture, and Yahweh has reluctantly (oh the mystery!) said, “OK, Saul, have it your way. You want to be a law unto yourself, you are free to go.” Lord, have mercy, on me a sinner!
Acts. The sad demise of King Saul sets in striking relief the redemption of his namesake and fellow Benjamite (Philippians 3:5), Saul of Tarsus.
Claimed by Christ and newly baptized, Saul of Tarsus finds Scripture’s story coming alive with Jesus-as-Son-of-God-and-Messiah as its centerpiece. He begins to give powerful voice to that reality in Damascus, among the believers whom he had been sent to persecute: “For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’ All who heard him were amazed … Saul became increasingly more powerful and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Messiah” (Acts 9:19b–21a,22).
The result of Christ’s work in Saul of Tarsus’s heart is that we begin to see the transformation of a meticulous instruction-follower who thought he had been given a mandate like that of the earlier Saul: kill the infidels! Now, humbled and made new by the cross and resurrection of Christ, he reads the biblical story more deeply. Now, he adjusts and adapts to whatever situation the Lord puts before him in order to carry out his new mission: to tell the good news, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16).
Case in point is this Saul’s willingness to undergo the first of many humbling experiences for the sake of the gospel: he lets himself be lowered from the city wall of Damascus in a basket, he permits himself to be scrutinized by (understandably) skeptical Christ-followers in Jerusalem, and he submits to being secreted out of Jerusalem to his hometown Tarsus.
This is not the most direct route to the position of prominence the Book of Acts will assign to him. Then again, this heart is being molded after the likeness of the Christ who conquered through defeat, and who ennobled others by suffering ignobility himself. As a result, this Saul, unlike the previous Saul, will come to embody the deeper reality Scripture had always sought beyond “burnt offerings and sacrifices”: the presenting of one’s whole being as a sacrifice, “living, holy, and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:2).
With that same power at work in you, may you be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+