Wednesday • 7/19/2023
Wednesday of the Seventh Week After Pentecost (Proper 10)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 38; 1 Samuel 20:1–23; Acts 12:18–25; Mark 2:13-22
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we ask how God might direct our lives from that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. This Wednesday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 10 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
“Change or die,” wrote Alan Deutschman in 2007. Since then, so many things have forced that choice on all of us: recession, racial strife, bruising political seasons, global pandemic. We’ve all faced one situation after another where we’ve wished: “Just show me the manual for how to deal with this!” But we discover that there is no manual, no script. Just the need to adapt or die.
So it’s been all the more important to become more deeply rooted in the biblical story—the one reality that gives perspective to everything else.
Mark: elasticity of spirit. There is one grounding truth that holds the whole Bible together, despite its range of genres, time periods, and angles of vision: God is wooing and winning a wayward world back to himself. One of the Bible’s most powerful metaphors for this dynamic is that of God as Groom and his people as Bride (Israel in the Old Testament, and the Church in the New). Among the many staggering claims Jesus makes for himself, none stands out more than this one: “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day” (Mark 2:19–20).
The reason that Jesus can calm storms, heal the sick, and forgive sins is that he is himself God-the-Groom come for his Bride, Israel reconstituted in the Church. Hosea’s taking to himself as wife the wanton woman Gomer was like a movie trailer for this bigger story, this larger reality: the bridegroom is here!
After eons of ups and downs on the way to this reality — of prophecies and predictions, of feeble embodiments and failed heroes and heroines — it takes a certain elasticity of spirit to accept it. Elasticity to realize you’ve been bereft of that kind of love. It’s the kind of elasticity that seemingly only people like rejected tax collectors and lost sinners are characterized by — people who know they have a deficit in the love column. Levi (Matthew) and his friends are ready to hear the call.
The “righteous,” however, are stuck. Like old wineskins, they don’t have the elasticity to adapt to the new wedding wine God is pouring out. Like cloth that’s too old, too set in its ways, and too fragile even to receive a patch, they find themselves unprepared to be incorporated into God’s people who are being newly configured around the Messiah-Groom.
Acts’ reality check: No, you’re not Numero Uno. Jesus’s message to Herod Agrippa (ruled A.D. 37 to 44), grandson of Herod the Great: “Dude, you really aren’t a god!”
Maybe the hardest adaptation for many of us to the coming of God’s Messiah is, well, taking ourselves off the throne of our lives and of the little fake kingdoms we’ve built for ourselves. Agrippa’s death by rot from within is a cautionary tale. Which tale is countered by the retelling of Peter’s release from jail with his almost comical reunion with Rhoda and company (in yesterday’s reading), and by the report of the continuation of the partnership between Paul and Barnabas in ministering among the Gentiles (in today’s reading).
1 Samuel: covenant love. There is profound joy in knowing Jesus as God’s Groom for us, as he binds himself to us by the blood of his covenant: “This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for you and for many” (blending Matthew 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:29). Maybe one of the greatest joys within that joy is experiencing relationships shaped by covenant love, like that between Jonathan and David.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+