Holy Restlessness Part 2 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 1/12/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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Holy Restlessness (Part Two of Three)

Yesterday, we considered the way the French medieval peasant monk Suger discovered a theology of light. Today, we explore the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day. 

Audacious Imagination

Sometimes it helps to be an amateur. Because Abbot Suger had not had the blinders of formal architectural training, he was innocent of the principles that dictated thick walls and small windows. 

Happily, Suger lived in a time of much experimentation with church architecture. However, no one before him imagined bringing as many innovations together in one building, because no one had yet become so driven to implement a fresh vision of height and light to worship. 

He imagined displacing weight from the walls themselves onto faux walls that would run perpendicular to the actual walls –what we now call “flying buttresses.” Working with bold and brilliant masons, Suger combined several fresh architectural features that allowed a tall skeletal structure to support wide windows: the flying buttresses, a revolutionary arch system, and clustered columns. 

Suger’s chief contribution was the concept of a ribbed vault, or arch system, using slender diagonal ribs of stone, to support the ceiling and roof. This configuration allowed modification in the construction of walls. Instead of the earlier massive and unyielding masonry, the walls of the chapels that surrounded Suger’s chancel area consisted of sixteen wide/large stained-glass windows that told redemption’s story and beamed multi-colored light onto a polished mosaic floor. It was dazzlingly beautiful, as Suger himself noted: “The entire sanctuary is thus pervaded by a wonderful and continuous light entering through the most sacred windows.” 

Abbot Suger’s building project at Saint-Denis marked a decisive beginning for a whole new movement in architecture,  eventually named “Gothic.” Historian Daniel Boorstin summarizes: “The new luminous skeleton of stone proclaimed a Church no longer on the defensive, but reaching prayerfully up to God and triumphantly to the world in an architecture of light.” 

Free to Fail

Innovations can fail to occur for one of two reasons. Would-be innovators try things they don’t have the authority to do. Non-innovators fail to try things they could have accomplished if only they’d had the courage. 

Many years ago, a wise pastor told me: “Reggie, when it comes to authority, people mess up in one of two ways. Either they try to use authority they mistakenly think they have – for which they eventually get themselves fired. Or they don’t understand how much authority they actually do have, and they play it way too safe. They don’t have the audacity to try anything that could get them fired, so they just wither, even if they keep their job. Your temptation will be to play it safe and wither. I want you to try things that could get you fired.”  That pastor encouraged freedom and flexibility, opportunity and openness, for the staff at his church. Risk-taking in an environment with this kind of permission was an awesome and unforgettable experience.

Abbot Suger’s story provides a worthwhile study in understanding what is possible to achieve in one’s own setting. It was Suger’s happy providence to have attended the same school in the monastery of Saint-Denis alongside the future king Louis VI of France. Later, he served the King well on a number of diplomatic missions, and he received free rein to think boldly about what he could accomplish, and he had access to any resources he needed. 

That’s just not going to be the case for most of us. Few of us have access to unlimited funds, or a personal relationship with someone as powerful as an earthly king. But we all have some measure of authority and relationship with a heavenly King. And therefore, discernment is an essential element in the employment of that authority in the service of “kingdom” innovation.

Go … or Let Go?

In basketball, one of the most difficult things for a player to acquire is the intuition to know when to pass the ball and when to take the shot, when to make an attempt and when to let it go. How do you know if something is a good idea or a bad idea? Go or no-go?

Scripture redounds with wisdom for discerning what innovations you ought to attempt. For example, Saul did not have the authority to offer sacrifice, but David did have the authority to eat the showbread. Simon Magus did not have the authority to use the Spirit to turn a quick buck, but Jesus did heal on the Sabbath. 

The Gentile gift for the (Jewish) Jerusalem church, conceived by the Apostle Paul in a difficult year of consensus-building, was perhaps the single most innovative project of the entire New Testament: a concrete symbol of Gentile and Jewish oneness in the gospel. Even then, Paul knew he was taking a calculated risk, and that things might not come off smoothly (see Acts 21:10-14; Romans 15:30-33). It was a good thing that Paul factored in the possibility of “failure”: he was arrested in Jerusalem and wrongly accused of allowing Gentiles to defile the Temple. 

Paul understood the limits of his authority and the extent of the risks involved in this innovative enterprise. Yet it was a “failure” only in a short term sense. Theologically, his arrest led him to some of his richest reflections on Gentile and Jewish oneness (Ephesians 2). Missiologically, his arrest provided him the opportunity to demand an audience with the Emperor.  

Today, in this second installment of “Holy Restlessness,” we’ve considered important lessons on worship leadership from Abbot Suger’s life: how discernment requires assessing accurately your authority, ascertaining the appropriateness of your idea, recognizing resources and risks, and estimating the effectiveness of initiating an innovation. In tomorrow’s third and final instalment, we will explore the way creative and successful worship leadership works with what resources are available and exercises innovative wisdom. Meanwhile, …

…be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons 

A Holy Restlessness Part 1 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 1/11/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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Holy Restlessness (Part One of Three)

Much of what insulated me from the toxic secularism of modern biblical scholarship in graduate school were the texts of the first half millennium of the church’s life. I came to recognize that across the centuries and across our cultures I shared much more with the likes of Ignatius of Antioch (d. 117) and the anonymous writer to Diognetus (early 2nd century) and Clement of Alexandria (ca. early 3rd century) than I did with the modern secularists who had come to set the agenda for modern biblical studies. 

When, many years later, Robert Webber invited me to consider not just the ideas of those ancient church writers but also their worship and their prayers and their songs, I came to realize that they thought so well because they worshiped and prayed and sang so well.

When I realized how chanting brought “head and heart” together, I began to introducing chant to my students. We practiced the basics of plainsong chant in the “Sacred Stairwell,” and returning students tell me they continue to chant during their personal devotional time. Among my students, there’s an excitement in learning to worship using these practices of the early church. As one student exclaimed on Facebook recently, “Chanting the Nicene Creed in Greek! How I love New Testament Greek!” I appreciate taking something old and making it new.

We are a creative bunch, we worship folk. Not only can we take ancient traditions and re-introduce them in new settings, we can also take ideas, and sculpt, chisel, mold, paint, project, pen, imagine, build them into something no one ever dreamed before.

A Peasant Monk

Enter one 12th century French statesman-abbot, known only as Suger (1081?-1151), abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. Abbot Suger was a small man of small beginnings. Born in northern France, his peasant family handed him over at age ten to be raised by the local monastery. Suger felt orphaned, and came to think of the monastery as his true family. He latched on to the “upward-leading” theology of his monastery’s patron saint: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the two converts Luke names from Paul’s ministry in Athens (Acts 17:34). 

In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had brought the gospel to northern France. In reality, it had been a third century namesake who had done so. In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had written several books of theology, with the theme of “God is light.” In reality, it had been a fifth or sixth century anonymous writer who had done so using Dionysius as a pen name. 

Regardless, “Saint Dionysius” (shortened to “Saint Denis”) was a voice from the ancient church who shaped Suger’s whole being: Saint Denis gave Suger an identity, an inspiration, and a mission. 

Though the pauper boy would eventually rise to become the monastery’s abbot, he was always conscious of his lowly origins: “I, the beggar, whom the strong hand of the Lord has lifted up from the dunghill.” 

Suger responded wholeheartedly to the generally “upward” lift of Dionysius’s theology, and especially to the theologian’s description of God as pure and creative light. 

Out of Darkness

By the year 1200, churches in the West had been accustomed for a thousand years to worshiping in the dark. First it was because of persecution. Before Constantine’s conversion, the church was – both metaphorically and literally – an underground movement. Churches had to meet in secret, sometimes in homes by night, often in catacombs by candlelight. After the Roman emperor’s conversion in the 4th century, the church moved above ground and experienced rapid – almost alarming – growth. The church’s success meant the building of larger and larger spaces for worship. Rather than private homes and small secret places, churches convened in large public spaces. But believers still worshiped in relative darkness because big buildings required strong thick walls to support the roof. Because windows would weaken the stability of the walls, windows were small and permitted very little light to enter the worship space. Thus, the bigger the building, the thicker the walls, and the tinier the windows. 

“There’s got to be a better way.” A voice from a different time and place might alert you to a biblical value that is missing from your own time and place.  The biblical value won’t leave you alone. There’s a gap between your reality and your vision. Great seeds of innovation often develop by rooting yourself in another reality – one that can give you a holy restlessness with what “is,” and the mental and spiritual space to imagine what “can be.” 

So it was with Abbot Suger. 

When, at the age of about 40, Suger was elected abbot of his monastery, he inherited a church building that was in ruins. For years he had meditated on the leading ideas of his theological hero, Dionysius. If, as the Bible teaches and as Dionysius had expounded, God is light and in him there is no darkness (1 John 1:5), why does our worship have to be done in the dark? And why in such a dismal and dilapidated building?

It seemed to Suger that a church ought to have a beauty and a loft to it that took us “from the material to the immaterial.”  Its interior should be filled with light so that the worship space would itself remind us that God is “the Father of the lights” and that his Son is “the first radiance” who reveals the Father to the world. 

Was there a way to rebuild the dim and deteriorating building? Could it be done in such a way that brought into worship the light and resplendence of which he had been reading?

Today, we’ve considered the way this peasant monk discovered a theology of light. Tomorrow we’ll explore the way an audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "Louvre ext. 32" by Maryade is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

From the Catacombs, A Song of Life - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 1/10/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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From the Catacombs, a Song of Life

Life was cheap and fear was everywhere. A culture of death ruled, and the world seemed out of control. Through fortune-tellers and animal sacrifice, people hoped to pacify the whims of hostile deities and spirits. Deformed or wrong-gender babies lay abandoned on mountainsides. 

Because it was illegal to worship another King besides Caesar, the Christians of 3rd century Rome met in underground burial caves. While death was pervasive above ground, in the catacombs the gathered Body of Christ found life and courage in the One who had come in the flesh, and who continued to come among them in the Bread and the Wine.

By candlelight, the persecuted church would gather and chant a prayer to celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death, and to consecrate the Bread and Wine that would nourish them in their daily lives. 

Above ground, these Christians told anyone who would listen that the world had been forever altered. Christ had triumphed over the evil one. The heavens had been made peaceable, and were now filled with the glory of their Creator and the kindness of our Redeemer. Above ground they scoured the mountainsides and rescued unwanted babies. Above ground, they testified to the truth that death had given way to resurrection. They found strength for life above ground because Christ met them underground in the Bread and the Wine, and in the song of his victory. 

Now, as then, we live in a culture of death. So too now, life is cheap and fear is everywhere. In our society to be conceived “unwanted” is a death sentence. Sex trafficking is a worldwide plague. Movie theatres aren’t safe. Neither are kindergartens. Gun stores can’t keep ammunition on their shelves. Soul-devouring idolatries are everywhere: whether consumerism and secularism and militarism, or tribalism and spiritism and despotism.

Still now, the world is hungry to know peace, to have courage, to have an anchor and context for life’s realities. Christ continues to call his people apart to sing of the world's one true King. We offer the truth that in his Son, God took all the suffering into himself and reaches out wounded and loving hands of love. 

We may no longer gather underground to sing and chant by candlelight, but we continue to meet, in large and small groups, for strength and encouragement – and as a sign to the world that its true story ends in life, not in death. In the same Bread and Wine shared by the early church, we find ourselves filled with a courage and strength and love that are not our own to take our part in extending Christ’s hands into the world.  

Twenty friends recently huddled around a table that was set with Bread and Wine. We were husbands and wives called to ministry, and we were on retreat, looking to the Lord and to each other for strength to keep going. The room was dark and, by the light of smartphones and tablets, we chanted that same 3rd century Eucharistic prayer that came from the persecuted church of Rome:

In fulfillment of your will
he stretched out his hands in suffering
to release from suffering
those who place their trust in you
and so won for you a holy people.

He freely accepted the death
to which he was handed over,
in order to destroy death
and to shatter the chains of the evil one;
to trample underfoot the powers of hell
and to lead the righteous into light;
to fix the boundaries of death
and to manifest the resurrection.*

Amen.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

* The prayer is an excerpt from the Apostolic Tradition. Though tradition attributes the prayer to the Roman pastor-theologian Hippolytus, current consensus scholarship questions Hippolytus’s authorship. The prayer is normally dated about A.D. 215. 

Thinking Large - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 1/7/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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Sing a Widescreen, HD Paradise

I am unutterably grateful when a Christian artist enables me to see spiritual reality in widescreen, high-definition. Ephrem the Syrian, a brilliant hymn writer for his era (ca. 306-373), does that for me. His lyrics – especially his Hymns on Paradise– still captivate. 

The beauties (of Paradise) are much diminished
by being depicted in the pale colors
with which you are familiar.*

Sing the Power of Metaphor

Ephrem trumpeted the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. He resisted the demands of those who “over-thought” the faith. They insisted on a straightforward explanation of Christ’s person, one that fit normal categories of reason: God or Man? Which is it? 

One group wanted to make Christ just like us, merely human. OK, maybe not merely human, but certainly more human than divine. A different group wanted to make Christ so divine that his humanity was nothing more than apparent – “drive-by” at best. 

Ephrem’s response: God doesn’t give us neat, tidy definitions. Instead, he provides a profound relationship with Someone the Bible describes in elegant metaphors and similes:

[God] clothed Himself in language,
so that he might clothe us
in his mode of life.

In one place He was like an Old Man
and the Ancient of Days,
then again, He became like a Hero,
a valiant Warrior.
For the purpose of judgment He was an Old Man,
but for conflict He was Valiant.

Grace clothed itself in our likeness
in order to bring us to the likeness of itself.

He gave us divinity,
We gave him humanity.

Sing the Whole of the Human Story

Ephrem celebrated the scale and sweep of Christ’s mission. He refused the heresy of mystical Narcissism. Back then, many were looking for a personal experience of “mystery,” just a little spiritual “somethin’ somethin” to help them get through. Today their spiritual descendants turn to Jesus as some sort of “rabbit’s foot,” a personal avatar they can enlist to make their lives (of which they remain firmly in control) turn out better.  

To counteract the spiritual Narcissism of his day, Ephrem wrote his Hymns of Paradise against a backdrop that includes the whole of the human story. My salvation comes with everybody else’s; everybody else’s includes mine. Thus (though it rather stretches the actual biblical text), Ephrem built on Hellenistic Jewish notions about Adam’s name coming from a Greek acrostic: 

“A” (Anatolē = East)
“D” (Dusis = West)
“A” (Arktos = North)
“M” (Mesēmbria = South). 

[God’s] hand took from every quarter
and created Adam,
so has he now been scattered in every quarter…
For progression is from the universe to Adam,
and then from him to the universe. 

The old Adam is all of us (“from the universe to Adam”); the new Adam came for all of us (“from him to the universe”). For this reason, Christ’s followers come from all quarters of the globe and our mission is to go to all quarters of the globe. 

Sing the Whole of Christ’s Work

And while then as now, many well-meaning believers whittle down Jesus’s work to one manageable dimension, Ephrem challenged believers to think large so they can thank large. 

Thus, Ephrem sings redemption’s story across a wide canvas: from original Paradise to a new, pristine Paradise. From the loss of Adam and Eve’s original “Robe of Glory,” to the Second Adam’s “putting on the body” from Mary, to His laying aside the “Robe of Glory” for us in Jordan’s baptismal waters, to our “putting on Christ” in our baptism, and finally to our being “Robed in Glory” at resurrection. Ephrem sings that the angel’s sword barring us from the Tree of Life becomes a centurion’s lance opening the way into Paradise:  

Whereas we had left that Garden
along with Adam, as he left it behind,
now that the sword has been removed by the lance,
we may return there.

Sing Widescreen, HD

At the invention of the small-screen, black and white, low-definition television, who could have imagined today’s widescreen, color, HD home theatre systems? Today’s experience makes yesterday’s seem, to use Ephrem the Syrian’s terms, “diminished” and “pale” by comparison. 

Ephrem offers us a glimpse into a reality that “has come” and “is coming” where the colors are even more vibrant and the definition even sharper than we’ve yet begun to imagine. 

May God grant the grace to grow in our capacity to worship in yet bolder colors, more vibrant textures, sweeter sounds, and sharper shapes. The reality is that good. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: iStock

* All quotations from Ephrem are in Ephrem & Sebastian Brock, St. Ephrem: Hymns on Paradise (St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1998).

Knowing that Christ is King - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 1/6/2022
The Feast of Epiphany

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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Dude! Bach is Bodacious!

If I could borrow Bill & Ted’s most excellent time-traveling phone booth, one of my first stops would be Leipzig, Germany, January 6, 1735. That’s the time and place one of the greatest worship leaders of all time worked some of his deepest magic.

Beginning on Christmas Day that 1734-1735 Christmas season, Johann Sebastian Bach had treated his congregation in Leipzig to five different cantatas celebrating different aspects of Christ’s birth. Now, on the Day of Epiphany (celebrating Christ’s “manifestation” as Savior of the world), Bach closes out his Christmas Oratorio with a sixth cantata. 

This last cantata in the Christmas cycle is an extended meditation on the Gentile magi bringing tribute to Israel’s — and their — newly born King. That’s standard Epiphany fare, with, of course, desperately power-mad King Herod playing the churlish foil, a pretend king resisting the coming of the true King. 

Yeah, we’ve all heard it before. So had Bach’s congregants. 

How to get their attention? How to keep the sublime truth of the magnificent reign of King Jesus and the stunning overthrow of faux-sovereigns like Herod from becoming just so much background music for our distracted lives? 

I wish I could have been there to hear the closing piece of the Christmas Oratorio BVW 248, “Nun seid ihr wohl gerochen” (English translation below).* For the first thirty seconds of the final piece of the cantata, the orchestra blasts out a bright baroque trumpet fanfare. They’re in the key of D major — the brightest and most triumphant of keys. Suddenly, the choir breaks in. The feel is still triumphant, and the key is still D major, but the tune is “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” — a melody that people had associated with Jesus’s suffering for our sins long before Bach made it the centerpiece of his St. Matthew’s Passion seven years earlier. The text the choir is singing now, though, is not about Jesus’s suffering. It’s about his victory over all that is evil, and about our resuming our rightful place at God’s right hand:

Now are You well avenged
Upon your enemies,
For Christ has broken asunder
All might of adversaries.
Death, Devil, Sin, and Hellfire
Are vanquished entirely;
In its true place, by God’s side
Now stands the human race.

Jaws must have been dropping. I know I would have been in tears. The precious truth of Jesus’s mission to die as our substitute can so easily become a coping mechanism at best, a prompt to morbid self-absorption at worst. The complementary truth of Jesus’s mission as our “Christus Victor” calls us to do more than merely put up with life’s tough stuff. Somehow King Jesus empowers us to share in his reclamation of life. Knowing that Christ is King “fortifies” us, as Calvin says, “with courage to stand unconquerable against all the assaults of spiritual enemies” (Institutes 2.15.4). 

Worship is a place where we get to enjoy the whole package deal. Worship craftsmanship calls forth from us — as it did from master worship leader J. S. Bach — the most faithfully imaginative ways of expanding our spirits to take in the fullness of God’s story. Christ is our substitute. We sob. Christ is our champion. We dance. He bears our sins. We drop to our knees. He breaks our bondage to sin. We rise with hands uplifted. He suffers for the world. We intercede. He empowers us to make the world different. We go to tell and live the story — excellently, even bodaciously. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay license

Sidebar — Resources

We’re all called to exercise the craft of worship leadership in different settings. Regardless of your setting, you personally may find Bach a worthy docent. No one has ever embodied theology more profoundly in music. Before we get too far past Christmas and Epiphany, his Christmas Oratorio would be worth a listen. 

Let me also recommend church historian Jaroslov Pelikan’s brilliant little book, Bach Among the Theologians (Wipf & Stock, 1986, 2003). Read about — and, of course, listen to — the way Bach fleshed out the twin portraits of “Christ our Substitute” in his Saint Matthew Passion and of “Christus Victor” in his Saint John Passion. 

* The YouTube rendering here is by Canzona and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, 12/24/2020

Welcome to Transformation - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 1/5/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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Undressed for Church

Jesus tells a parable about a man who accepts a king’s invitation to a wedding banquet but who shows up without clothes appropriate to the occasion (Matthew 22:11-14). Noticed by the king, he is kicked out. 

Whenever I read the parable, I think of myself in the early and woefully immature days of my faith – and of how my first pastor, Mort Whitman, related to me. I think of the several times I sensed in Mort’s sad eyes the King’s expectation: “Do you understand Who invited you? And to what an amazing occasion it is that you have been invited?” There were both sadness and tenderness — both a rebuke and a further invitation — in Mort’s gaze. 

Room to Grow

Every time I caught that look, I felt undressed, and was reduced (as was the fellow in the parable) to silence. Unlike the parable, though, strong arms didn’t grab me and throw me out. Happily, the King gave me time and space to move from a sullen silence to a teachable silence. Over time, the kindness with which Mort’s eyes answered my spiritual childishness melted my cold heart.

Mort welcomed me past the entrance, and into the expansive living spaces of God’s Kingdom palace. He did so by reminding me of the worth of the faith that I had embraced – or that had embraced me (I’ve never fully sorted that out).  

Early Church

Mort’s method was a lot like that of Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem (mid-4th century). In Cyril’s Jerusalem, becoming a Christian was the “deal.” The huge and elegant Church of the Holy Sepulchre had just been built over the site of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection (replacing a pagan temple to Venus). 

The city was awash with pilgrims and new residents. Many were flirting with the faith. Many sought baptism, the prerequisite for inclusion at the Christian Feast (Communion). Some sought baptism because they genuinely believed; some because they thought baptism might help them get a job; some because they thought baptism might help them find a mate; and some out of sheer curiosity. 

Cyril asked candidates for baptism a cautionary question: “Do you expect to see without being seen? Do you think that you can be curious about what is going on without God being curious about your heart?” (Procatechesis 2).* 

This is not just any occasion, so not any old clothes will do. The One in whose honor this feast is being held, after all, is “Bridegroom of souls.” Cyril reminds the candidates of the parable of the man who dressed wrongly for the king’s wedding feast: “If your soul is dressed in avarice, change your clothes before you come in…. Take off fornication and impurity, and put on the shining white garment of chastity.” 

Overdressed

Cyril wasn’t asking people to clean themselves up so God would accept them. As they would eventually discover, no matter what they wore, on the day of their baptism they were going to have to strip – yes, literally (in the dark, men and women separately) — and undergo baptism without benefit of any clothing! As Christ hung naked in his crucifixion, Cyril explained, so we go naked into the baptismal waters where we share our co-crucifixion with Christ. As Adam and Eve were originally garbed in nothing but their innocence, so, in Christ, we rise as those to whom innocence has been restored! Cyril’s message was: don’t think you can take your greed and impurity with you into the baptismal waters; he loves you too much to let you hold on to that stuff!

When the newly baptized emerged naked from the waters, they were wrapped with new, white robes. The message: in place of whatever clothes we start with, Christ offers “a shining garment,” “the garment of salvation,” and “the tunic of gladness.”** The newly baptized wore those robes during the next week, when they received daily teaching about the mysteries they had just experienced and about the baptized life that now lay before them. 

Welcome to Transformation

The King has sent for everybody, “the evil and the good” (Matthew 22:10). But the One who invites insists on meddling. He refuses to rubber-stamp the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs we bring with us. Our “Bridegroom of souls” insists we surrender the right to define who we are – all of who we are: our occupational, our musical, our political, our sexual selves. Jesus, insists Cyril, calls us to welcome people all the way into baptismal waters, where grace transforms everything. 

My take-away from Mort’s penetrating gaze and Cyril’s challenging words: worship worthy of the Feast is welcoming worship that helps us all understand that a change of clothes will be necessary. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Imge: iStock Image

* References are from Edward Yarnold, S.J., Cyril of Jerusalem (Routledge, 2000), pp. 79,80,85,180-181.

** (Procatechesis 16; Mystagogy 4.8; the latter two phrases, quoting Isaiah 61:10)

"High Touch" Worship - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 1/4/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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High-Touch Worship: “The Peace of the Lord”

“Christian worship has always been a “high-touch” affair. “Greet one another with a holy kiss,” Paul told worshipers (2 Cor 13:12). Peter urged those gathered for the reading of his letter, “Greet one another with the kiss of love” (1 Pet 5:14). Accordingly, from the 2nd century on we find Christians exchanging signs of mutual affection and reconciliation before they go to the Table. 

I think that’s a good thing.  

There’s a genuine artistry to the way the classical liturgy makes the passing of the peace a part of worship. In the 4th century one of the great voices of the ancient church, Cyril of Jerusalem, explained why believers exchange a kiss of peace just before they approach the Lord’s Table. 

Next let us embrace one another and give the kiss of peace. Do not think this is the kiss which friends are accustomed to give one another when they meet in the marketplace. This is not such a kiss. This unites souls to one another and destroys all resentment. The kiss is a sign of the union of souls. 

That was Awkward. 

Recently, an advice columnist responded to a complaint about being forced to greet fellow attendees in church. The columnist countered that in a world as disjointed as ours, we should be grateful that the church tries to bring people together. I agree! But I also feel the sense of artificiality and of being put upon when there’s a “meet & greet” that is no different than what I might experience at the Chamber of Commerce. 

To me it’s a wonderful thing to be asked to look my neighbor full in the face and wish him or her Christ’s peace. That makes me (along with all my fellow believers) a priest who offers God’s healing touch. Respectfully, though, it’s a turn-off to be told to smile, turn to the person next to me and say, essentially, “How ya doin’?” 

The first act invites Christ into the moment and makes us family; the second makes two awkward strangers even more awkward about not knowing each other. At least the Chamber of Commerce encourages us to exchange business cards. 

Welcoming Peace

When I coached Little League, a friend and “master coach” gave me some good advice: “Kids this age have too many challenges, and not enough encouragement. Every practice you should go to each player, put a hand on their shoulder, look them in the eyes, and say, ‘I’m glad you’re on this team. You make a big difference for us.’” 

When I come to worship I never know what sort of pain my neighbor is in, how much it can help him or her to be touched and to be reminded: whatever the deficit, whatever the enmity, whatever the trouble, whatever the funk, Christ speaks his peace into it.  

Healing Peace 

Benjamin Barber writes that we live in a world split between the centripetal force of McWorld (the forced unification of a global market) and the centrifugal force of Jihad (the fracturing of the human race around tribal loyalties). We all, I think, feel those wounds in one way or another. 

Followers of Christ believe that if there’s any hope for overcoming the evil twin forces of MacWorld and Jihad, it’s living and telling the subversive story of God’s invasion of the planet through his Son. In Jesus, as the song goes, “Heaven’s peace and perfect justice kissed a guilty world in love.” When we pass the peace of Christ to one another, heaven’s peace becomes embodied once again. Then at the Table we taste how Jesus even now “unites souls to one another and destroys all resentment.”

Possible applications:

Some of us are in churches where it might be worth opening up the following conversation: ”Are we so respectful of people’s privacy, of their personal space, that we miss the opportunity to let them know that this is a place – no, the place — where the lonely, the estranged, the fearful, and the broken, can be touched and can hear that God has come near to them?”

Others of us are in churches where it might be worth opening up a different conversation: “When’s the last time we asked people to think about what a holy and healing thing it is that they do when they offer the Lord’s peace?”

The peace of the Lord be always with you,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay License 

A Mirror for Our Soul - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 1/3/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. 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 Monday January 17.

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From Centerfield: Athanasius, the Psalms, and Making the Right Play

I once attended a college baseball game in which the crowd cheered a spectacularly dumb throw from deep centerfield to home plate. The throw itself was quite a feat (though it had no chance of catching the runner). But it was dumb, because it gave the game away by allowing what would become the tying run to get to second base. What could have saved the game would have been a less impressive throw to second base, keeping that runner at first.

Four Ecumenical Councils took place between A.D. 325 and 451. They exemplified game-saving wisdom, of the sort the college centerfielder should have shown.

Those Councils made four statements in response to spectacularly dumb things that were being said about Christ. The Councils’ statements can be crisply put, and their implications are profound: first, Christ is fully divine, since only God can save. Second, Christ is fully human, since “only that which is assumed can be healed.” Third, Christ is one integral person, since a bi-polar Savior could not restore us to inner wholeness. Fourth, Christ’s divine nature does not eclipse his human nature, since he came to glorify our humanity and not diminish it.

A small often overlooked letter on the psalms by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria and one of the inspirers of the Councils’ statements, sheds light on the origins of such spiritual and theological insight.

A friend named Marcellinus wrote to Athanasius looking for guidance on how to get to know the psalms better. In his response, Epistle to Marcellinus, Athanasius sounds the very themes the Councils will later apply to Christ.

Divinity

In the Incarnation, God has funneled his fullness to us through one Man; in the Psalter, God has concentrated for us the whole Bible in miniature. Each of the other books, says Athanasius, “is like a garden which grows one special kind of fruit; by contrast, the Psalter is a garden which, besides its special fruit, grows also some of those of all the rest.” In Genesis, for example, we read about the creation; in Psalms 19 & 24 we celebrate creation in song. Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy recount the exodus from Egypt; in Psalms 87, 105, 106, and 114 we “fitly sing it.” Impressively, Athanasius shows how virtually every theme of the Bible shows up somewhere in the Psalter. Through the psalms, God’s great cosmic story becomes our personal story as well.

Humanity

The psalms aren’t just a way into God’s story; they provide a mirror for our soul. In them, “you learn about yourself.” They describe us better than we can describe ourselves. Moreover, while other portions of Scripture tell us what to do, the Psalter shows us how. Elsewhere, for instance, Scripture tells us to repent, but the psalms “show you how to set about repenting and with what words your repentance may be expressed.” Elsewhere, Scripture tells us to bear up under persecution, but the psalms describe “how afflictions should be borne, and what the afflicted ought to say, both at the time and when his troubles cease.”

Integrity

Most of us can identify with the horrible split the apostle Paul experienced between his inner self and his outer self: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. … Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:19,24). Paul’s answer, of course, is Christ. The Councils affirmed, therefore, that Christ himself was unified, rather than split, in his Person. Otherwise, there’d be no hope for the splits within us. In the same vein, Athanasius encourages – no, urges – us not merely to read the psalms, but to sing them. When we sing, our inner being and our outer being have to work together: our “usual disharmony of mind and corresponding bodily confusion is resolved.” The result is that when we sing psalms, Christ heals our inner brokenness.

Dignity

Do you get the sense that some believers think that when Christ comes into their lives he replaces their souls? Do you personally know spiritual zombies you can’t even have a conversation with because all you get is Bible verses or spiritual clichés?

Athanasius must have known people like that too. One of the most impressive things he does in his epistle is comment on almost every psalm, and invite Marcellinus to look – really look – at whatever life-situation he might find himself in and ask how that psalm could fortify him: “Has some Goliath risen up against the people and yourself? Fear not, but trust in God, as David did, and sing his words in Psalm 144.”

The message: God wishes to meet you in your life, not give you some sort of escape button to get you out of your life. The psalms – like Christ himself – are here to enhance, not diminish, what it is to be fully human.

Through practice and scrimmage and games and, well, simply breathing baseball, a centerfielder should know where to throw, without even having to think about it. Through worship and prayer and study and, well, simple immersion in the faith of the psalms, may we absorb their “game-saving wisdom.”

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Image:  "Lady in the mirror" by ftphotostudio is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Jesus Offers to Fix What's Broken - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 12/31/2021
Friday of Christmas Week, New Year’s Eve Day, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 46; Psalm 48; 1 Kings 3:5–14; James 4:13–17; 5:7–11; John 5:1–15

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

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Turning towards a new year, I think less in terms of resolutions, and more in terms of requests from the God from whom every good gift comes. God’s Word commends four worthy requests:

1 Kings 3: Solomon and a wise and discerning heart. King Solomon represents an elevated phase in God’s plan to restore the human race to its fundamental mission: to tend God’s garden, to exercise dominion over creation, and to make the earth redound to his glory. 

I daresay none of us has quite the governing responsibilities of a Solomon. But every one of us does have some realm to rule or space to oversee. It may be a kitchen to keep clean and productive, a lawn to tend, a store to manage, a spreadsheet to keep balanced, maybe even, I dunno, a rocket to help launch. 

The greatest gift we can seek from the Lord is that which Solomon sought: a grasp of the reality we face, its opportunities and its challenges; and the wisdom to discern how to further God’s beautifying and redemptive purposes for the creation he loves.

Prayer for Guidance: Direct us, O Lord, in all our doings with your most gracious favor, and further us with your continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in you, we may glorify your holy Name, and finally, by your mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 832)

James 4: Circumspection in planning. James 4:13–17’s wisdom is an expansion of Proverbs 16:9, “The mind of a person plans their way, but Yahweh directs their steps” (my translation). I can’t help but think of the semi-irreverent adage: “We plan. God laughs.” He may not laugh at us, but perhaps we should laugh at ourselves when we think we have life all planned out. The past couple of years have called upon every person I know to be flexible, adaptable, and nimble. It’s been a time to reckon much more seriously with passages like this one. We are fragile, and our days on this earth are fleeting. James cautions us against smugly over-planning: “Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15). 

It’s not a bad thing to have been put in a position where we are virtually forced to pray along with the psalmist: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). 

James 5: The ability to wait out hard times. As if you need to be told, crazy abounds. Miami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen was once asked how he could expect his readers to accept his utterly bizarre scenarios about life in South Florida. His answer was (I paraphrase from memory): “Every time I write something that seems over the top, and tell myself people will think I’ve lost my grip on reality, I read something crazier in the newspaper. My imagination isn’t big enough to capture the crazy.” That’s our world. A once-in-a-century killer disease rages. The corridors of power ring with incivility. News agencies pick sides. People in everyday life do the stupidest things, and keep the 24/7 news cycle cycling. 

James says, “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. … You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts…” (James 5:7a,8a). To some extent, what we are called to do (besides calling out what craziness we can!) is to outlast it. Yes, crazy comes in waves. Those waves will crest and crash and eventually exhaust themselves. We must simply keep ourselves from being swept under or away. God, give us grace. 

Prayer for Quiet Confidence: O God of peace, you who have taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray you, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 832)

John 5: The willingness to accept healing from Jesus. Jesus offers to fix what’s broken, in this case, non-functioning legs, for a man he encounters by a healing pool in Jerusalem. And Jesus winds up healing him over his excuse-making: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me” (John 5:7). 

It may not be our legs that don’t work. It may not be that we have seen opportunity after opportunity to address our brokenness pass us by for 38 years. But we all have reservoirs of hurt or secret obsessions or masked pretenses that one day will have to be purged. And it may be that this next year is when Jesus will come up to us and ask, “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6b). May God give us the grace to say “Yes!” to Jesus. 

Prayer for Trust in God in Time of Sickness: O God, the source of all health: So fill my heart with faith in your love, that with calm expectancy I may make room for your power to possess me, and gracefully accept your healing; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP, p. 461). 

Be blessed this day, and every day in the year ahead!

Reggie Kidd+

God Comes to Heal - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 12/30/2021
The Sixth Day of Christmas, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 20; Psalm 21; 1 Kings 17:17–24; 3 John 1–15; John 4:46–54

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

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Elijah’s widow in 1 Kings: God comes to heal the nations. 1 Kings 17 recounts a non-Israelite widow receiving a revived son at the ministration of Yahweh’s prophet Elijah. For Jesus, this healing is a picture of Israel’s mission in the world: to be the source of healing for the world (Luke 4:25–26). Israel incubated God’s love for the world to the end that his love would eventually break out and flow everywhere. 

The royal official in John: God comes to heal all sorts of people. In Cana of Galilee, Jesus is approached by delegates of a “royal” (tis basilikos), presumably an official or member of the house of Herod Antipas. It’s notable that someone of such high rank would “beg [Jesus] to come down and heal his son” who is at the point of death (John 4:47). Jesus heals from afar. Though there are several matters worthy of attention in this account, here at Christmas and in conjunction with the other passages in today’s readings, what strikes me is the way this royal personage shows how upper-crust people are not beyond the reach of God’s love. In Jesus, God comes for the non-privileged (shepherds and deplorables) and for the privileged (royalty and influencers [like Nicodemus, one chapter prior]) alike.

3 John: missional hospitality. God is intent on reaching all the nations for all kinds of people. Some of us go. Some of us stay behind and help others go. That’s what makes the inclusion of 3 John in the canon of Scripture so intriguing. 3 John is a letter about hospitality, especially hospitality for the sake of the mission of God in the world. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). To the end that word of God’s astounding Son-giving love would get out to the whole world, the resurrected Jesus has breathed the Spirit upon and into his disciples (John 20:21–22). Bearing that Spirit, some of Jesus’s disciples carry the mission, and some of his disciples host the mission. 

What prompts the writing of 3 John is that, on the one hand, John wants to commend Gaius and the members of his church for hosting emissaries of Christ; and on the other hand, he feels compelled to denounce a certain Diotrephes, who “prevents those who want to do so and expels them from the church” (3 John 10). We don’t know whether Diotrephes is motivated by pure personal animus against John or whether he is one of the antichristian promoters of heresy John refers to in 1 and 2 John. The point for John is that Diotrephes’s pride and arrogance are blocking the mission of God’s love for the nations. 

When he sees ego and lovelessness at play in the church, John’s hackles get raised! John describes Diotrephes as one “who likes to put himself first” (philoprōteuōn), which is precisely the opposite of the quality of leadership Jesus says he is looking for.  

John, you may recall, has come by this lesson the hard way. One of the “Sons of Zebedee,” John and his brother—and their mother!—had made a play to get themselves moved up the ecclesiastical escalator. Jesus disabused them of confusing the Kingdom of God with some sort of Game of Thrones: “Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to him with her sons, and kneeling before him, she asked a favor of him. 21 And he said to her, “What do you want?” She said to him, “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom” (Matthew 20:20–21). Jesus responds by assuring them they are not prepared for the “baptism” and the “cup” that lie before him. Moreover, he says, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first (prōtos) among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:25–28). 

Catch that one phrase? “Whoever wishes to be first (prōtos) among you must be your slave” (Matthew 20:26

John could have been Diotrephes, “he who likes to put himself first” (philoprōteuōn). No, John was Diotrephes. Except that following the rebuke of Matthew 20, Jesus’s teaching about servant leadership in that context, his modeling of servant leadership at the foot washing in John 13, and Jesus’s giving himself up on the Cross, the John who writes 3 John is a different person. 

On the plus side: generosity makes you a missionary. “Therefore we ought to support such people, so that we may become co-workers with the truth” (3 John 8). Some are missionaries by going. Some are missionaries by staying and supporting. That’s not mere rhetoric. It’s the stone cold sober truth! I praise God for those I know—and they are many!—with the heart of the generous Gaius (“my dear brother whom I love in truth”—3 John 1) and Demetrius (who “has been testified to by all, even by the truth itself”—3 John 12) whom John commends in this brief gem of a letter as counter-examples to egotistical Diotrephes. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: iStock photo

Life Is Holy - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 12/29/2021
Feast of Holy Innocents (transferred), Year 2

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 2; Psalm 26; Isaiah 49:13–23; Matthew 18:1–14

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)

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Feast of the Holy Innocents. 

The third panel in our “Christmas Triptych” is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, a remembrance of “martyrs in deed if not in will,” and a reminder of the church’s resolute embracing of life as holy. The lectionary offers passages in the Psalms, Isaiah 49 and Matthew 18 for today, presupposing we know the story of Herod the Great’s murder of Bethlehem babies in a vain attempt to kill a rival newborn king (Matthew 2). “It’s a bloody story,” notes Professor Esau McCaulley, “out of which hope fights its way to the surface.”

Psalm 2: the folly of opposing God’s Anointed. Psalm 2 begins with these pointed questions: “Why are the nations in an uproar? Why do the peoples mutter empty threats? Why do the kings of the earth rise up in revolt, and the princes plot together, against the Lord and against his Anointed?” Upon the release of John and Peter from prison in Jerusalem, the church lifts these very words in praise of God’s saving acts (Acts 4:25–28). King Herod the Great had tried to kill Jesus as an infant. His son Herod Antipas had been party to the conspiracy that put Jesus on the Cross. But the grave couldn’t hold Jesus. As Psalm 2 had said: “He whose throne is in heaven is laughing” (Psalm 2:4). All that the evil conspiracy had accomplished was to effect God’s predestined plan to inaugurate the good news of the world’s true king, the crucified-resurrected-ascended King Jesus. 

Professor McCaulley’s words are true not just for the incident of the Holy Innocents, but for all the savagery, injustice, and callousness of the human story. In all of it God is at work in the “bloody story, out of which hope fights its way to the surface.” 

Matthew 18: “Let the little ones come to me.” The murdered children are a reminder to us that Jesus entered a world full of “Herods.” Jesus said, “Let the little ones come to me.” And so, from the beginning of the church’s history, Christians have declared their solidarity with “the little ones.”* May our homes and our churches be places of safety, peace, truth, and love—places of life for “the little ones.” 

Isaiah 49: God’s love never quits.

Even as Isaiah was delivering the bad news to Judah about the upcoming Babylonian Captivity, he promised that Yahweh’s love would push through and ultimately win the day. The St. Louis Jesuits’ song “Though the Mountains May Fall” asks and answers the musical question:

Could the Lord ever leave you? Could the Lord forget his love?
Though a mother forsake her child, he will not abandon you. 

Though the mountains may fall and the hills turn to dust,
Yet the love of the Lord will stand
As a shelter for all who will call on his name.
Sing the praise and the glory of God.

One thing we can hold onto in this life is that the love of God never quits, no matter what baggage we carry, no matter how laden with guilt and in need of forgiveness we are, and no matter how weary and in need of strength we are. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay

* The early Christian catechism, the Didache, forbids both the abandoning of the newborn and the aborting of unborn children (Didache 2.2). Clement of Alexandria laments the “aborting of human feeling (philanthōpia)” that comes with such practices (Pedagogus 2.10.96.1). Bishop Augustine of Hippo writes of “holy virgins” rescuing unwanted and exposed babies, nurturing them, and preparing them for baptism (Epistle to Boniface). Christians gained a reputation for being on the side of life.