The Covenant is About Presence - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 1/27/2022
Thursday of 3 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 50; Genesis 16:15–17:14; Hebrews 10:1–10; John 5:30–47

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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Genesis 17: gift and obligation

Chapters 15 and 17 of Genesis depict two different phases of God’s covenant-making. “The earlier chapter,” as commentator Derek Kidner explains, “fixed the basic pattern of grace and answering faith; nothing was asked of Abram but to believe and ‘know of a surety.’”* In Genesis 15, God promises and Abram believes; moreover, by the theophany of a flaming furnace, God says, in effect, “I’m all in!”**

If Genesis 15 teaches that righteousness is imputed to Abraham by faith (Genesis 15:6), Genesis 17 teaches that faith utterly devotes itself to the God who grants new identity and fellowships with us. For in Genesis 17, the covenant transaction takes on new layers: while God expands his promises, he calls on Abram to declare his own dedication to the covenant through the cutting of his foreskin. Abram declares and symbolizes his own being “all in.” It’s worth recalling Paul’s teaching that the Gentile believers of Colossae have been “circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, … when you were buried with [Christ] in baptism” (Colossians 2:11b–12a). If Abram’s circumcision marked his “all in,” our baptism marks ours. 

While Genesis 17 finds God repeating and expanding his promises of land and progeny (Genesis 17:6–8), this chapter also introduces two new factors into the relationship from God’s point of view. He confers a new identity on Abram and he draws near for fellowship with his people. 

 New name. God changes Abram’s name to Abraham, that is, from “Great Father” to “Father of a Multitude” (Genesis 17:4–5). A few verses later, God changes Sarai’s name to Sarah, that is, from one name that means “Princess” to another that means essentially the same thing (Genesis 17:15–16). These are the first of many name changes in the Bible—for instance, from “Not Loved” to “Loved,” and from “Not My People” to “My People” (Hosea 2:23; Romans 9:25). It’s not insignificant that Genesis 17 introduces a change in identity at the same time it introduces the Old Testament version of baptism. 

God renames strangers as friends, sinners as saints, rebels as disciples, and aliens as citizens. Quite in tune with the heart of God and the meaning of baptism, Jerusalem’s 4th century bishop named Cyril said that at our baptism we all receive the name Christopher, which means “Christ Bearer.” Amen!

Intimate presence. “…for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you…” — Genesis 17:7. In the words “to be God to you” lies the essence of the covenant. There’s land, to be sure, and there’s progeny and the establishment of an inheritance. But at its heart, the covenant is about presence. Kidner states it nicely, “Spiritually, the essence of the covenant is personal, like the ‘I will’ of a marriage: so the pledge I will be their God (8b; cf. 7b) far outweighs the particular benefits. This is the covenant” (Kidner, p. 129). 

Utter consecration. What Yahweh calls for at this stage in his unfolding of his covenant with us is commitment to him personally. He is not yet detailing a prescribed, encoded way of life; that dimension of the relationship awaits Moses. The point is, there’s a Person before there’s a Path. 

Consecration to God on my part (as in Genesis 17) is based on God’s prior consecration to me (as in Genesis 15)! Grace takes the lead, and grace stays in the lead. Even after the Law is introduced with the detailing of precepts and statutes and food regulations and ritual protocols, the covenant relationship remains fundamentally personal. When Moses in Deuteronomy and the Prophets after him develop their theology of circumcision, they make it a matter of the heart: “Circumcise, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer” (Deuteronomy 10:16; see also Jeremiah 4:4). 

I pray we daily find ourselves awed by the grace of the gift of new identity in Christ, and of the intimacy of our Heavenly Father’s love. May every day bring a heart-renewal of our baptismal consecration: to know and love the One who has first known and loved us. Amen!

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

* Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1967), p. 128. 

Image: Pixabay

** See the analysis of Meredith Kline in his By Oath Consigned. 

The Mediator of a New Covenant - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 1/26/2022
Wednesday of 3 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:49–72; Genesis 16:1–14; Hebrews 9:15–28; John 5:19–29

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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Genesis 16: getting ahead of God. When do you wait, and when do you act? When do you let events unfold, and when do you take things into your own hands? It’s not always easy to tell. By the time we get to Genesis 16, Abram and Sarai are in their mid-80s and mid-70s respectively, and it’s been ten long years since God promised them a child. They can be forgiven for wondering if they are supposed to continue letting nature take its course, or whether they need to help God’s promise along.

Sarai recommends they follow a path that enjoys legal sanction in surrounding cultures: see if Abram can father a child through her handmaid. A child born from a handmaid “at the knees” (see Genesis 30:3) of the wife could be counted the legal child and heir of an otherwise childless couple. Hagar’s becomes the original “handmaid’s tale,” and it is a tale filled with its own measure of pain and strife and abuse. 

The story shines a light on aspects of human sin that, in the long arc of the story, the God of the Bible has set about to address. Abram’s faith proves to be weak in going along with the plan in the first place, the fruit of which will be self-help religion (see Paul’s commentary in Galatians 4:21–31, where he calls Hagar’s child a “child of the flesh”). Then Abram slothfully backs out of the picture when conflict emerges between Sarai and Hagar. After giving birth to Ishmael, Hagar pridefully and scornfully declares her superiority to childless Sarai. Sarai shifts all the blame for the relational breakdown onto her husband. Envious of Hagar, Sarai banishes her and the once sought-after child into the wilderness and to their likely deaths. 

The story, yet more fundamentally, shines a light on the truth of Psalm 103:13–14: “As a father pities his children, so the LORD pities those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (RSV). He redeems human error and protects the wronged (Reformation Study Bible notes). 

Gerhard Von Rad notes the shifting identity of God’s intervening presence. Here the text says it is the messenger/angel of Yahweh who speaks (Genesis 16:7,9,10,11). There the text says it is Yahweh himself who is speaking (Genesis 16:13). Von Rad suggests: “[The one who speaks] is God himself in human form. … The angel of the Lord has conspicuous Christological qualities. … He is a type, a ‘shadow’ of Jesus Christ.” * God’s mediator “heeds the affliction” of the outcast Hagar, “sees” her plight (Genesis 16:13), and promises her a great progeny through Ishmael, even if that line is to be marked by an independence and pride of spirit like her own (“his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him” — Genesis 16:12 NASB).  

Hebrews: mediation by death. The mediation that is foreshadowed in Genesis comes to full expression, says the writer to the Hebrews, in Jesus Christ: “For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant” (Hebrews 9:15). And it is unavoidably true from the Bible’s point of view that this mediation comes only through death. Transgressions that separate us from God: our self-made religion, our vacillating faith, our manipulation of circumstances—they can only be covered by death. And transgressions that separate us from one another: our pride and envy, our abuse, our “hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against” us—they too require the shedding of blood.

For the longest time, the Old Covenant provided sketches of the shedding of reconciling blood of “goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow” (Hebrews 9:13). At long last, though, God’s own Son of the line of promise to Abram (for Genesis 16 is but an interlude in the story of God’s promise to bless the nations through Abram and his progeny), “has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26b). One and done! Praise be!! 

John: the hour of resurrection is coming. Not only does transgression require death, it calls for resurrection and for a final settling of all accounts. Jesus is the one who reconciles sinners by his shed blood, and he is also the one who raises dead people by his life. The utter tragedy of Jesus’s contemporaries is that they fail to see the life-giving promise of his signs, like the raising up of the lame man. They fail to see the healing and restorative promise of Sabbath itself; they fail to recognize the Lord of the Sabbath; and they fail to see their own hope for “the resurrection of life” (John 5:29). 

We can’t raise ourselves from pallets of lameness or sloth. We can hardly resist the urge to manipulate circumstances to what seem to be good ends to us. We can’t kill the beasts of pride and envy within ourselves.  We can’t seem to control hands “against everyone” and “hands against us.” We can’t solve the problem of millennia-long grudges between people from different tribes. That’s why God’s Mediator came. He came to interpose his blood to pay for our sins. He came to usher in the power of everlasting life. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Robert Dunkarton , CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

* Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev., The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), pp. 193,194. 

A Making Right of All Things - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 1/25/2022
Tuesday of 3 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Genesis 15:1–11,17–21; Hebrews 9:1–14; John 5:1–18

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); 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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Let’s start with Hebrews 9. The writer to the Hebrews shines a light on the temporary nature of all the sacrifices that preceded Jesus’s: “For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, … (Hebrews 9:13). With these sacrifices, incomplete and imperfect as they are, the Old Covenant shows its leaning towards “a making right of all things” (Hebrews 9:10’s kairou diorthōsis). 

With Christ, that time has come! At bottom, that which most fundamentally had to be “made right” was our consciences, our capacity to reflect on who we are, literally, our “co-knower” (Latin: con-scientia; Greek: sun+oida). No matter how hard we tried to mute them, our consciences constantly shouted out to us that we are guilty and shameful. 

Now, let’s go to Genesis 15. Between them, the 15th and 17th and 22nd chapters of Genesis present a powerful triptych of the future “making right of all things” that constitute the Bible’s story.* In Genesis 15, God shows his utter commitment to restore us to new life; in Genesis 17, Abram answers in kind by dedicating his life to God. In Genesis 22, God provides a solution to the problem of Abram’s (and our!) inability to live up to his (and our!) end of the covenantal relationship.

In the logic of Ancient Near East ceremonies of “cutting a covenant,” God himself, under the figure of a flaming torch (a theophany), walks the path between pieces of slaughtered animals in Genesis 15:9–11. In the symbolic language of the ceremony, God is saying, “By my own life, I pledged thee my troth. May what has happened to these animals happen to me if I fail to keep my promise to you, Abram.” 

In Genesis 17, God calls forth from us a response of utter commitment in return; there, by the cutting of his foreskin, Abram will likewise proclaim: “By my own life, I pledge Thee my troth. May I myself be cut off from the land of the living if I fail to keep covenant with you, Yahweh” (Thursday’s DDD). 

In Genesis 22, God offers a vision of his own solution to the problem of the perfection of his promises, and the imperfection of our response, by staying an execution and providing a substitute in death (next Wednesday’s DDD). 

In so many ways, the book of Genesis conveys God’s promises—the promise to Eve of a son to crush the serpent’s head, the promise of an olive leaf and a rainbow. Now, in Genesis 15, a flaming torch (God’s own presence) passes between pieces of slaughtered animals (pointing to the Cross). In the symbolic language of Ancient Near Eastern covenant ceremonies, God is saying he is ready to give up his own life to make his promise to Abram of a vast family come true. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!

… And back to Hebrews 9. The Old Covenant’s constant offerings of animals and of sprinkling worshipers with the shed blood of those animals—all of it was a promissory picture. The entirety of the sacrificial system pointed forward to a singular offering and sprinkling that would make people not merely externally and ritually clean, but internally and definitively pure, altogether free from fear of judgment and disgrace. Convinced that despite everything we know about ourselves, and despite everything we know God knows about us, God’s love in Christ has reached down and made us clean: “…how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!” (Hebrews 9:14). 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

* Following the analysis of Meredith Kline in his By Oath Consigned. 

Image: From "Flaming Torch 4" by invisible_al is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

A High Priest in the Sanctuary - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 1/24/2022
Monday of 3 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 41; Psalm 52; Genesis 14:1–24; Hebrews 8:1–13; John 4:43–54

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)

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The main thing is that we have a high priest. 

“Now the main point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a minister (the Greek is leitourgos, or quite literally, a liturgist, a worship leader) in the sanctuary and the true tent that the Lord, and not any mortal, has set up” (Hebrews 8:1–2). 

“Now the main point in what we are saying is this:….” Nowhere else is the Bible quite as clear as this, is it? I believe there’s one thought to ponder from today’s readings: “We have such a priest”: “we have … a high priest, … a minister/liturgist/worship leader in the sanctuary.” 

What does that mean? Negatively, it means we do not have to figure our life out on our own. We do not have to “climb a stairway to heaven” for access to God. We do not have to attain competency to negotiate our own soul’s standing with God.

Positively it means (ranging over today’s passages in no particular order):

“…It is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer” — Hebrews 8:3. A pressing reality for us humans—every one of us — is that there is guilt for things done that shouldn’t have been done, and for things not done that should have been done. There is also a shame over a nagging sense of unworthiness or defilement or unlovability. This guilt and this shame our high priest Jesus Christ has taken into himself on the Cross. There he has absorbed them and disposed of them, winning for us absolution and release. By Jesus’s priesthood, we 1) are freed in conscience, 2) made worthy to stand before God, 3) cleansed from sin, and 4)  counted altogether lovable — Hebrews 8:12. 

“…not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors … This is the covenant that I will make … I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts” — Hebrews 8:9a,10a). There is a waywardness of the human heart that can only be fixed by Jesus doing an internal work: by his indwelling presence, our liturgist from on high plants his laws in our minds and inscribes them on our hearts — Hebrews 8:10. 

“And King Melchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine; he was priest of God Most High”— Genesis 14:18. Reading Genesis 14 typologically (that is, as an anticipation of Christ, as does the writer to the Hebrews), our Melchizedekian priest brings us “bread and wine” from God’s holy altar (Genesis 14:18; Hebrews 13:10), blesses us in the name of God (Genesis 14:19–20; Hebrews 2:12), and receives the offering of our lips and our lives (Genesis 14:20c; Hebrews 13:15–16). 

“Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. 51 As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. 52 So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.’ 53 The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, ‘Your son will live.’ So he himself believed, along with his whole household” — John 4:50–53. The healer of people’s souls is not restricted by his lack of physical presence.

I pray that you and I rest in who Jesus is, in what he has done, and in what he continues to do in our lives. May we know he has come down to raise us up from death to life, from guilt to pardon, and from shame to God’s embrace. May we know freedom from wayward wandering, and, instead, the joy of responding to the inscribing of Jesus’s character into our minds and hearts. May we know the ongoing blessing of his heavenly ministry to us — at the Table, in the Word, and in our worship with our lips and our lives. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image:Pixabay

Living with Wonder and Delighted Optimism - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 1/21/2021
Friday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37; Genesis 11:27–12:8; Hebrews 7:1–17; John 4:16–26

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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Weeks before the end of her nearly 100 years of life, TV’s Gol

den Girls (and the Super Bowl’s Snickers Bar commercial) actress Betty White told people.com that her famously upbeat nature came from being born “a cockeyed optimist.”

Genesis 12: “cockeyed optimism.” The Bible as a whole is characterized by “cockeyed optimism,” and that is true of the book of Genesis in a special way. Biblical scholar Gerhard Von Rad says it well: 

The story about the Tower of Babel concludes with God’s judgment on mankind; there is no word of grace. The whole primeval history, therefore, seems to break off in shrill dissonance…: Is God’s relationship to the nations now finally broken; is God’s gracious forbearance now exhausted; has God rejected the nations in wrath forever? That is the burdensome question which no thoughtful reader of ch. 11 can avoid…. Only then is the reader properly prepared to take up the strangely new thing that now follows the comfortless story about the building of the tower: the election and blessing of Abraham. We stand here, therefore, at the point where primeval history and sacred history dovetail, and thus at one of the most important places in the entire Old Testament. *

It is “cockeyed optimism” that dares to hold out hope that despite the bleakness of the situation we are left with at the end of the story of the Tower of Babel, nonetheless “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3b). What makes the hope seem especially “cockeyed” is that this universal hope comes through one particular man and his posterity: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’” (Genesis 12:1). As only the Bible could image things, the reversal of the universal revolt against God’s rule begins with one man, without a word, doing what God says to do: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him…” (Genesis 12:4). 

Hebrews 7: Melchizedek’s “Easter egg.” Furthering the “cockeyed optimism” of the Bible, the writer to the Hebrews delivers one of the most delightful “Easter eggs” in the entire Bible. He recalls a moment in Abraham’s life when the patriarch points dramatically to the coming of Christ. Abraham has himself just played the role of deliverer, rescuing his nephew Lot in a great military victory over “the five kings.” Returning home from his victory, Abraham meets a mysterious priest and king named Melchizedek, who, according to the writer to the Hebrews, prefigures Christ. His name means “King of Righteousness” and he is king of a city named Salem, which means “Peace” (the future Jerusalem, “City of Peace”). So he is “King of Righteousness” and “King of Peace.” But he is also a priest of the “Most High God” (Hebrews 7:1). 

Because no father or mother or genealogy or birth date or death date is recorded of him, Melchizedek prefigures Christ’s eternality (Hebrews 7:3). Because he receives a tithe from Abraham, he represents a priesthood that is superior to the Levitical priesthood that will descend from Abraham (Hebrews 7:4–9). And because he is a Gentile, he stands as a testimony that the children of Abraham’s mission are also recipients  of God’s kind intentions for the whole world. Jesus’s own priesthood is emphatically patterned after Melchizedek’s—or in the “cockeyed” logic of typology (Old Testament shadow-prefigurements of New Testament realities), perhaps it’s better to say that Melchizedek’s is patterned after Christ’s!

John 4: God’s “cockeyed” grace. The true and living God whom the non-Jew Melchizedek serves as the “Most High God” will reveal himself to Moses as the great “I AM” in the burning bush of Exodus 3. In John 4, the great “I AM” makes the most explicit of his self-revelations: “The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I AM, the one who is speaking to you’” (John 4:25–26). Jesus makes this astounding revelation to this “fallen” woman of the Samaritan well, she whose illicit liaisons force her to come for water in the middle of the day. Here is God’s “cockeyed” grace—“grace upon grace” (John 1:16). 

Moreover, Jesus, as the great “I AM,” has come not just to bring reconciliation to the likes of this lost woman, he has come to heal the breaches in the fractured human race. Jews and Samaritans looked at one another across a No Man’s Land of religious loathing and disdain. But Jesus has come to heal tribal antipathies and reconcile brothers lost to each other in religious warfare: “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24). 

The words are not empty, nor are they naïve optimism. The Father’s “seeking” leads Jesus, as Athanasius puts it, to “stretch out his hands, that with the one he might draw the ancient people and with the other those from the Gentiles, and join both together in himself” (On the Incarnation 25). The results are as sure as Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, and they begin to take effect when apostles from Jerusalem return  to Samaria to witness the Spirit of Pentecost baptizing people there just as it had in Jerusalem (Acts 8:14–17). 

May you and I live with cockeyed wonder and delighted optimism at the saving power of God in Christ. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

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

* Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev., The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), p. 153.

A New Start for Humanity - Daily Devotions with the Dean

.Thursday • 1/20/2021
Thursday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37; Genesis 11:1–9; Hebrews 6:13–20; John 4:1–15

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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The Tower of Babel: the nadir of primeval history. Throughout the story of human origins in Genesis 1–11, God’s severe judgments are accompanied by merciful grace. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden; but they are nonetheless graciously allowed to live, they are clothed, and are even promised that their seed will bruise their tempter’s head (Genesis 3:16). Cain is cursed for murdering his brother and is banished from Yahweh’s presence, becoming a “vagrant and wanderer on the earth.” And yet, surprisingly and graciously, Yahweh protects his life (Genesis 4:14–16). The washing away of wickedness in the flood in Noah’s day is followed by an olive leaf of hope, a rainbow of divine reconciliation, and the covenant of a new start for humanity (Genesis 6–9).  

Genesis 11’s story of the Tower of Babel marks the culmination of primordial history. This story ends on a decidedly bleak note: “Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). If there’s any grace here, it lies only in the fact that the divinely imposed confusion and scattering prevent humans from magnifying the error of their ways.

We receive this huge lesson from the Bible’s account of human origins: left to ourselves after the Fall, we would either destroy ourselves and each other (Cain versus Abel) or we would recapitulate the fundamental error of Adam and Eve in the Garden by coming together in a horrible conspiracy to try to make ourselves equal to God. That would be the universal human story … if Genesis 11 were the end of the story. 

But it’s not the end of the story. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s introduction of the singular family, Abram’s, through which God’s grace and mercy re-engage the human situation.  Through Abram, God promises to bring good out of evil, redemption out of captivity, unity out of enmity, clarity out of confusion, and beauty out of chaos—and all this, for all the world.  

In the end, the Bible’s world is a world of promise and of love—a promise of redemption for a broken humanity, and a love that reunifies a scattered humanity. 

Hebrews 6: hope as an anchor for the soul. The writer to the Hebrews presents the summit of God’s promises. Those promises go all the way back to Genesis: that the seed of the woman will bruise the head of the serpent, that never again will there be a world-destroying flood, and that all nations will be blessed by one obscure Ancient Near Eastern family (Genesis 3,9,12). 

For the writer to the Hebrews, the various promises of the Old Testament culminate in the coming of Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1–4). The grace that comes with his once-for-all sacrifice and with his ongoing heavenly ministry is so sure that the writer to the Hebrews says wavering souls can have a firm anchor: “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered…” (Hebrews 6:19–20a). We have God’s word on it, sealed by the blood of Jesus and by the certainty of his resurrection. I pray we can hold onto that surety through all the turbulence of our lives. 

John 4: let the regathering begin. Most of us are likely familiar with the gorgeous story of Jesus’s encounter with the woman at the well in Samaria. Jesus crosses multiple social barriers and violates various ethnic, moral, and cultural taboos to engage this “fallen” woman. She’s living with her fifth “husband,” to whom she’s not even married. It’s generally considered that her scandalous reputation (even among people who themselves are considered corrupt by faithful Jews!) is what has her at the village well alone in the heat of the day rather than in the company of the other women of the village in the cool of the morning. 

Jesus’s conversation with her begins with the ordinarily casual matter of a drink of water, but quickly goes to the “the deep end of the pool”: her morally impossible situation, and the God who seeks lost people just like her and her fellow heterodox Samaritans. 

The Tower of Babel narrative recounts the loss of the clear meaning of words as a punishing means of scattering people in confusion. Here in John 4, by contrast, Jesus employs misdirection (“give me a drink” … “bring me your husband”) and double entendre (“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”) in a gloriously redemptive and salvific way. Here complexity of communication becomes a blessing not a curse, a means of evoking faith not of confounding. 

In Jesus’s hands, density of language and wordplay unite people instead of dividing them. “He told me everything I’ve ever done,” she tells fellow villagers, “He couldn’t be the Messiah could he?” And with such irony-rich words, this woman of questionable moral character and, as a Samaritan, a decidedly impure bloodline, becomes the first missionary in John’s Gospel. Grace has taken the field, putting the curse of the Tower of Babel into reverse. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Thomas Virnich: Turm zu Babel, 2002 in Mönchengladbach/Germany

Fotograf: Hans Peter Schaefer, Url: http://www.reserv-a-rt.de

The original uploader was Hps-poll at German Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

To Be Friend of the Bridegroom - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 1/19/2022
Wednesday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 38; Genesis 9:18–29; Hebrews 6:1–12; John 3:22–36

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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Genesis 9: a hitch in the new beginning. “Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, …” — Genesis 9:20. The translation “Noah was the first to plant a vineyard” is misleading. The text would be better rendered as “Noah planted a vineyard for the first time.” Likely he is both an inexperienced vintner and an inexperienced drinker. Wise is biblical counsel to enjoy wine, but not to excess (see Psalm 104:15; Proverbs 23:29–35). 

“…and he lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father…” — Genesis 9:21a–22. The biblical language of “seeing the nakedness” of one’s father is delicate. While we don’t know the specific details of Ham’s sin against his father Noah, what he does is profoundly and inexcusably dishonoring. Yahweh covered Adam and Eve’s shame with clothes; Shem and Japheth do so with a garment for their father (Genesis 3:21; 9:23). Noah’s curse of Ham and his son Canaan accounts for the enmity throughout the Old Testament between Israelites (descendants of Shem) and the surrounding peoples: the Canaanites, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. 

The lines drawn here are not of race, but rather a matter of faith versus unfaith. Messiah will come from Israel, of the line of Shem. And through Messiah, all peoples will be blessed. That reality comes to fruition at Pentecost where all nations are represented at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and in the terms of the Great Commission, where the disciples are instructed to make disciples of all the nations. But the Old Testament, too, is replete with promises of the ultimate reconciliation of all people groups in the age of and through Israel’s Messiah: for example, “On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians” (Isaiah 19:23), and “Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; Philistia too, and Tyre, with Ethiopia—'This one was born there,’ they say” (Psalm 87:4).

John 3: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” John the Baptist stands at the summit of the history of the prophetic ministry that had been pointing forward to the coming of Messiah. John the Baptist is the culmination of that ministry, for the “forward” to which he points happens to be “now” to him! “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” he had declared (John 1:29). While John’s Gospel deftly and discretely points to the arrest (and therefore to the subsequent martyrdom) of John the Baptist (John 3:24), this Gospel emphasizes John the Baptist’s realization of the monumental transition in the staging of God’s plan to redeem the world: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). 

Beautifully, gloriously, wonderfully, John the Baptist realizes that the Divine Bridegroom long anticipated and longed for in Scripture has come. The Bride, the church, has been prepared through the millennia of human history and Israel’s struggles. Now begins the celebration foreshadowed in Hosea’s ministry and Solomon’s Song of Songs, and even symbolized by Jesus’s “sign” at the Wedding of Cana (John 2). How can John be jealous that people are following Jesus, not him? The friend of the bridegroom is at the wedding to share in the bridegroom’s joy! 

There’s a good word here for all of us who participate in church life. Our job is not to point to ourselves, the splendor of our buildings, the beauty of our music, the refinement of our gifts, much less the cultivation of our brand or the measuring of our following. We exist to point, constantly and faithfully, to the Bridegroom, and to rejoice in the honor of being called “Friend of the Bridegroom.” 

Hebrews 6: Don’t even think about turning back. The congregation to whom the Epistle to the Hebrews is written is in danger of letting other things “increase” and Jesus “decrease.” The Greek of this epistle (or treatise) is the most complex in the New Testament, and its argumentation the most sophisticated. 

There’s probably good reason for the writer to chide his readers about how they ought to be teachers (Hebrews 5:12). They’ve let themselves get sidetracked and nearly derailed because their view of Jesus has become diminished. What’s become more important to them is preservation of their national heritage: saving the earthly Jerusalem, protecting the temple, renewing its sacrifices, and reverting to an eschatological expectation that has more to do with angelic powers than with Messiah’s rule. 

Here in Hebrews 6, the writer says he thinks “better things concerning you” when it comes to their grip on salvation (Hebrews 6:9). He nonetheless feels compelled to show them the absurd potential results of a drift into apostasy. It’s important for them firmly to hold onto truths they are in danger of forgetting. In Christ they have come to the heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:22). They are beyond the need of the physical temple that is on the verge of passing away (Hebrews 8:13). They need no sacrifices beyond the once for all sacrifice that Jesus has performed for them (Hebrews 10:10). And they are not to look forward to a day when angels will rule, because, in fact, when Christ comes back they will rule with him (Hebrews 2:5–13). 

I think the anonymous writer should be taken at his word: he genuinely thinks better of this congregation than that they would overthrow their faith in Christ for something less. Nonetheless, he wants them to see what an impossible position they would put themselves in if they turned their back on their once-crucified, now-risen-and-mediating, and one-day-returning Prophet, Priest, and King! 

I pray we never ever lose sight of what a wonderful gift it is that we have in Jesus, what an honor it is to be not just “Friend of the Bridegroom,” but his Bride. And what a joy it is, even as the Bride of the Bridegroom from Heaven, to say, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Image: iStock

God's Beautiful Rainbows - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 1/18/2022
Tuesday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 26; Psalm 28; Genesis 9:1–17; Hebrews 5:7–14; John 3:16–21

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); 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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Genesis 9: “Double rainbow!” Sometimes when I get a bit down, I go to YouTube and pull up Yosemitebear’s video: “Double rainbow! What does it meeeeeean?” It makes me smile every time.

God’s beautiful rainbows, what, indeed do they mean? Why do they evoke awe, wonder, and joy? 

With the entrance of evil into the world, life on earth devolves into chaos. Adam and Eve listen to the serpent’s hiss. Cain kills Abel, and Genesis 4 through the first part of Genesis 6 depicts an unrelenting slide into violence and degradation. 

The Bible’s message, however, is that God is not content to let chaos win. He intervenes, to borrow a phrase from the writer to the Hebrews, “at many times and in various ways,” to reverse the tendency to pandemonium. 

The flood account in Genesis 6–9 is the Bible’s way of saying that after the inexorable, irresistible slide into darkness that ensues with Adam and Eve’s cosmic treason, God begins to make a new start, with a new humanity. A new humanity rescued from destruction by their association with the one righteous man, Noah (Genesis 6:9). A new humanity consisting of eight family members simply willing to get on the ark with him. 

When the flood subsides, God establishes with them (and through them with the whole earth) a covenant (Genesis 9:9). Their part in that covenant is a reprise of the instructions God originally gave to Adam and Eve: fill the earth, tend it, care for it, draw out its potential for order and life — this time, with the momentous responsibility of acting against evil instead of just watching things go from bad to worse (Genesis 9:1–7). 

God’s part in this covenant is to place his bow in the sky (the Hebrew term for “rainbow”  is the word for “bow and arrow”). Instead of having the “bow” pointed downward, aimed at us in judgment, with arrow notched, God points his “bow” upwards, no arrow, in peace. A sign that God is establishing peace and reconciliation between himself and the errant humanity he loves, among humans themselves, and between us and the animal kingdom we are called to steward. 

“Double rainbow! Awesome!!! What does it mean??!!” Here’s what it means: as part of God’s new creation, we take God’s side in resisting the rule of sin and death and decay. As long as there are rainbows in the sky, there’s work for you and me to do, from firefighters rescuing kittens, to teachers turning back illiteracy, to students sorting out their place in this world, to anybody in law trying to make things right (or at least a little less wrong). 

Whatever you are called to do to make this world a better place, you are commissioned by God’s covenant with Noah. 

John 3: God so loved… For each covenant God establishes with us he provides a “sign,” a visible, tangible promise from him and reminder to us that his relationship with us is real. Each “sign” carries with it a sacramental power, that is, it acts as something like a portal that brings God’s world of promise and provision and our world of desperate need together. 

To Noah God provides a rainbow, to Abraham circumcision, to Moses the Sabbath, to David, well, David himself—and in the New Covenant, God provides his own Son as the visible, tangible connection point between himself and us. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). God gives the Son who is himself the sign, seal, and sacrament of his commitment to us and of our corresponding obligation to him. Jesus is Bread from Heaven, and True Vine and Cup of Salvation (see John 6 and 15). 

Hebrews 5: “with loud cries and tears.” “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him out of death (Greek ek thanatou), and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him…” (Hebrews 5:7–9a, my rendering). What it takes for Jesus to bring God’s world and ours together, to restore communion between heaven and earth, is for him to walk a hard path. 

It’s a path of “learning obedience,” not (like us) from disobedience to obedience, but from one level of obedience to another as he undergoes the entire gamut of human experiences: from potty-training through adolescent desire to adult assumption of calling — all just like us, “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). It’s a path that has him praying as a human. Unlike any other human, however, he does so throughout his life with cries and tears and groans for the tragedy of others’ lives distorted and devastated and destroyed by the power of sin. All the while he also anticipates shouldering all of it on the Cross that lay before him from Day One of the Incarnation; and so, he prays to be delivered “out of death” for us. Today’s passage opens a precious window onto its cost to him, making his walk all the more treasurable to us. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay

The Promise of New Creation - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 1/17/2022

Monday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 25; Genesis 8:6–22; Hebrews 4:14–5:6; John 2:23–3:15

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)

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The utter wonder of the life God has for us is on display in today’s images of Noah’s dove returning with an olive leaf, Moses’s serpent lifted in the wilderness, and the writer to the Hebrews’ vision of Jesus representing us in the heavenly courts. 

The dove returns bearing a leaf of an olive tree. 

The leaf of an olive tree. The leaf brings the promise of new creation. It signals a new start for humanity. Noah and his family are told to “Go out of the ark” (Genesis 8:16a). Having passed through waters of judgment, they emerge into a world made new. They release the animals to “be fruitful and multiply on the earth,” echoing Genesis 1 (compare Genesis 1:20–25,28–30 with 8:17b). The dove and the olive leaf mark the re-inauguration of the project of “being fruitful and multiplying, of filling the earth and subduing it” that was aborted in the Garden of Eden (see Genesis 1:28).

Anointing oil. Oil from olive trees becomes a symbol in Scripture of God’s anointing. In the Old Testament, Yahweh anoints prophets to bring his Word, priests to cover sin through sacrifice, and kings to establish justice and equity. Finally, God anoints his own Son to be the great Prophet, Priest, and King. It is Jesus who definitively and perfectly, as the BCP’s Eucharistic Prayer B, puts it, brings us “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”  

The dove of peace. From the earliest interpreters on, the dove has symbolized peace. Along with the rainbow (tomorrow’s DDD), the dove of peace signals that Yahweh’s warfare against sinful humanity has ended. He has saved a remnant made righteous by their union with their family head, Noah. 

Noah’s response is to worship: “Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor…” (Genesis 8:20–21a). By virtue of the sacrificial worship that Noah institutes, Yahweh sustains a relationship of grace and favor with the fallen creatures while he prepares for their ultimate deliverance from sin’s destructive grasp, the work of Jesus Christ  

Today’s New Testament readings provide profound pictures of the way the atoning and fellowship aspects of the sacrificial system culminate in Jesus.

John: a serpent lifted up. In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus references a foreshadowing of his own being lifted up on the Cross. “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). Sinful people in the wilderness are succumbing to poisonous snakes until Moses commands that a serpent of bronze be lifted up on a pole. Whoever looks upon the serpent hanging from the pole is healed (Numbers 21). 

Jesus’s message for Nicodemus (and for us) is that our sin-sickness means we need new birth (“You must be born again/from above” — John 3:3). That sin-sickness which is a walking spiritual death, will be healed when, and only when, God’s dear Son is lifted up on the Cross. Hanging from the Cross, Jesus draws all the venom of human sin into himself, and away from every person who looks upon him in faith. Jesus invites Nicodemus, and every one of us who is aware of the terminal disease of our spiritual condition, to look up at the Cross. What a powerful picture of Christ’s atoning work!

Hebrews: Jesus escorts us to the throne of grace. What a correspondingly powerful picture of Christ’s work to restore us to fellowship with God! Jesus didn’t come just to offer a sacrifice to clear us of the guilt of sin (though he did do that! — see Hebrews 10:10,14). He rose from the dead and “passed through the heavens” (Hebrews 4:14) so he can represent us in the heavenly courts. He is there, as Hebrews 7:25 says, to intercede for us. Because Jesus is there, it’s as if we were there ourselves. From there, having endured everything we endure living in a fallen, frustrating world, Jesus offers help “in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16b). 

When we need consolation in a time of loss, he is there for us. When guilt and shame threaten to overwhelm us, he is there to say, “Father, remind them I’ve cleansed their conscience, and they are mine!” (see Hebrews 8–10). When the cares and concerns of the day keep us awake at night, he is there for us. When we seem to have lost our “voice” and nobody seems to “see” us, he is there to hear and see us. When we need an “attaboy,” he is there for us. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay

Fly, Kessie, Fly! - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 1/14/2022

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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“Fly, Kessie, Fly!”

One measure of leadership is whether people are following you.

A better measure is whether you are helping people “take wing.” 

That’s a lesson Rabbit has to learn in the award-winning episode “Find Her, Keep Her,” in Disney’s The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. 

Rabbit rescues a female baby bird named Kessie during a snowstorm in the Hundred Acre Wood. For months, Rabbit nurses and cares for Kessie. Unfortunately, he becomes overly protective when she wants to learn to fly. Rabbit understands Kessie will eventually want to “fly south.” He will be left alone once more. 

Yet flying south is what birds do. And helping others take wing is what responsible caregivers do. 

As all Pooh stories do, this one ends the way it should. Rabbit learns, even though reluctantly, to let go.

Hitting Home

My wife recalls this story when our children make changes that reveal they are taking a new step towards independence, and away from us and from our influence. She finds letting go is not easy. And so, at these times, she still mutters to me under her breath, “Fly, Kessie, fly!” She understands what it is to forgo her own interests for the benefit of someone else.

Leadership in God’s family is not much different.  

Kevin is a new senior pastor, with little background in worship ministry. He calls his old friend Ryan, an experienced worship pastor, and asks: “There’s been a lot of conflict over worship here, and I’ve inherited a pretty fragmented worship team. Would you work for me for a season and help me bring stability and unity, and earn my wings with this congregation in worship?”

Over several months, a new-old team comes together, worship stops being a battle zone, and fans of “tradition” and fans of “freshness” begin deferring to one another. 

Great Idea

At a meeting in the spring, Ryan, the worship pastor, offers: “Maundy Thursday is coming up. It is a night the church historically remembers the ‘new commandment’ to love one another as Christ has loved us, and often celebrates that love with a foot washing service. We’ve seen a lot of cooperating and healing in this church. Why don’t we offer a foot washing service to affirm the love, unity, and healing this body has been experiencing?” 

Kevin, the senior pastor, responds, “That’d be a new thing for me, but it sounds like a great idea.”

“The foot washing services I’ve led have provided powerful moments for brothers and sisters to experience the priesthood of all believers as they minister Christ’s love to one another,” Ryan adds.

“Yeah, OK,” answers Kevin, “But what I think we need here is for the people in church to get the message that the leaders really love them. So I want only the pastors and the elders to do the washing of the congregation’s feet. I’ll tell the elders about my idea at our next meeting.”

Suddenly, Ryan feels like he’s in the middle of a Dilbert comic strip. The pointy-haired boss is hijacking his idea, taking credit for it, and, in the process, ruining the whole concept. Ryan visualizes a thought bubble above his own head:  “Excuse me, but whose idea is this anyway!? You’ve never even seen a congregational foot washing, much less led one….”

Then Ryan remembers there’s the Dilbert way of seeing things, and there’s the Jesus way of seeing things. He envisions a new thought bubble: “Hold on a minute! Where did that attitude come from? If washing feet is about kneeling to serve, about putting my brother’s interests ahead of my own, maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do in this case.”

The words that manage to come out of Ryan’s mouth are, “Sounds like a plan! Let’s do it!!”

Sink or Soar

During the Maundy Thursday service four weeks later, Ryan, despite his best intentions, is still having internal thought-bubble conversations. The logistics that Kevin the senior pastor has insisted on require the worship team to lead music throughout communion and the foot washing. They will not get to receive communion or participate in the foot washing itself.

Ryan’s thought bubble begins to complain, “It figures. I should have insisted on more control….” 

Ryan stops himself and looks around. Many in the congregation, profoundly moved by seeing pastors and elders taking the posture of servants, have eyes brimming with tears.  Ryan notices, too, a glistening in Kevin’s eyes as he imitates Jesus’ leadership example.

And so a better thought bubble has the final say: “Pay attention, Ryan. A most awesome service is unfolding right in front of you. Jesus is in this house. And look at Kevin – you can almost see him growing softer and kinder with every foot he washes. He’s finding his wings.”

After the service, it is discovered that Jesus has provided, by some happy accident, a small amount of bread and wine backstage. Ryan and his team share an intimate and amazing communion together before going home – and, of course, they wash each other’s feet.

Best of all, Ryan realizes he has already been privileged to do a bit of foot washing – just not the way he had at first envisioned. Foot washing takes many forms. 

The strongest kind of leadership is the kind that helps others take wing: “Fly, Kessie, fly!” 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Mykie Thomas’ Art: “no reblog posts from me here, though I don't mind if you reblog my art.”  Winnie the Pooh © Disney and A.A. Milne

Innovative Wisdom- Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 1/13/2022

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 Three of Three)

In the first two installments of this three part series on “Holy Restlessness,” we have looked at the life of the medieval peasant monk who became Abbot of the Cathedral of St. Denis near Paris. We’ve noted the way his discovery of a “theology of light” gave him a holy discontentment with the dark and gloomy spaces in which Christians worshiped up until his day. We saw the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up reimagining how churches could be refashioned in such a way as to bathe worship in light. 

In today’s final episode, we learn valuable lessons from Suger about the creative use of available resources and about how to exercise innovative wisdom.

Use of “The Available”

Part of Abbot Suger’s remarkable success lay in the fact that he did not so much scrap the Romanesque architecture that the Western churches had been using for nearly a thousand years before him, as much as he creatively adapted it. Moreover, to the extent he could, he used materials he found at hand. He did so fabulously. At first he thought he would have to import stone for the building. However, as he was later to write:

Through a gift of God a new quarry, yielding very strong stone, was discovered such as in quality and quantity had never been found in these regions. There arrived a skillful crowd of masons, stonecutters, sculptors and other workmen, so that – thus and otherwise – Divinity relieved us of our fears. 

Searching the local woods for building materials, he believed God personally led him to the exact timbers he needed to support the church building’s ceiling.  He saw God’s provision locally at every step of the construction process.

As Gothic architecture spread across Europe, it had a number of common features. But each region gave it its own signature, depending on local materials and tastes. French used fine white limestone because it was available, English used coarse limestone and red sandstone for the same reason; Germans and Dutch and Belgians and Poles built from brick because stone was unavailable locally.  Taking advantage of resources at hand made cathedral building realistic and achievable far beyond Suger’s monastery north of Paris. 

Innovative Wisdom

Innovation happens when you inhabit a world that gives you a holy restlessness that sparks an audacious imagination. Innovation happens when you have the authority to effect a change, and the discernment to recognize what you can actually pull off. And finally, innovation happens when you creatively use the resources that are available to you. 

It is not innovative to force round pegs into square holes. It is not innovative to throw out an entire repertoire and bring in something that will feel like “strange fire.” It is innovative to ask: “At this moment, what is missing that people would appreciate as ‘value added’?” And, more importantly, what do we have the resources to do well?” 

An ancient voice persuaded Abbot Suger that worship could be enhanced, and more, reflect the character of God, if the worship happened in a place filled with light and lofty space. Suger’s ideas permanently changed the way worship spaces are created. Even if not “Gothic cathedral” in style, church designs continue to echo those concepts.

As we sense in ourselves a “holy restlessness” we may discover that it is not the latest, newest thing that will add value to our ministry, but something older. It might be as simple as introducing an ancient practice, like chanting; or it may be as profound as taking an idea, like “God is light”, and transforming forever the worshiping world.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay License