Singing in Our Midst - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 7/6/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Jesus Christ, Our Worship Leader,” Part Four of Five 

This week, we explore the way Jesus exquisitely leads worship in our midst: he prays for us, declares the Father’s name to us, sings over us in love, and brings us bread and wine from God’s holy heavenly altar.  

Singing in Our Midst 

As our worship leader, Jesus prays and he declares. He also sings. “In the midst of the congregation I will sing a hymn to you,” concludes Heb. 2:12b. The same one who declares God’s name in blessing also leads the congregation in song.   

The writer is actually quoting Psalm 22:22, one in which David is recounting God’s miraculously delivering him from enemies who nearly killed him. The psalm starts out as a lament of abandonment, one of the darkest in all the Bible: “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” At the point of rescue, the psalm pivots and becomes a victory chant, celebrating among Jew and Gentile, poor and rich, already dead and not yet born, the righteous rule of God.  

It’s an extraordinary thing that the mightiest warrior of the Bible is also its most celebrated musician. He whose “hands are trained for war and fingers for battle” offers a new song to God: “Upon a harp of ten strings I will sing praises to you” (Ps 144:1,9). In his youth, David soothes Saul’s soul with his melodies. In his maturity, with harp in hand he confesses his sin, protests his innocence, humbles himself under God’s discipline, calls for help, composes “new songs” commemorating God’s fresh acts of deliverance.   

David passes on his legacy of song to members of the Levitical priestly line, to the likes of Chenaniah and Asaph (1 Chron. 15:22; 16:5). It is descendants of these Levites who would oversee Israel’s musical worship (see 2 Chron. 23:18; 35:15), even, at times, going before Israel’s army into battle (2 Chron. 20:14-25).  

But there is only one priestly order that could establish a permanently “new song,” only one director who could incorporate into a single choir people of every race and nation, tribe and tongue, bandwidth and skill-level, only one singer who could lead that menagerie into the fray against the powers and principalities: he who went all the way into the silence of sin-forsakenness and rose in victory to be God-incarnate singing over his people with love (Zeph. 3:17).  

The glory of song in worship is that we get to join our voices to his. His is the voice that counts, not ours.   

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Declaring the Father's Name - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 7/5/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Jesus Christ, Our Worship Leader,” Part Three of Five 

This week, we explore the way Jesus exquisitely leads worship in our midst: he prays for us, declares the Father’s name to us, sings over us in love, and brings us bread and wine from God’s holy heavenly altar.  

Declaring the Father’s Name 

On the one hand, as our worship leader Jesus goes to the Father in our name. On the other, he comes to us in the Father’s name. The complement to what the writer to the Hebrews says about Jesus remembering us to the Father is what he says earlier, in chapter 2. There, the Risen Jesus shouts to his Father: “I will declare your name to my brothers” (v. 12a).  

While Israel’s high priest wore God’s people’s name on his chest, he bore the personal name of the Redeemer God, Yahweh, on his forehead: “Holy is Yahweh” (Exod. 28:36-38). In Numbers 6:26-27, Moses summarizes what the high priest is to do with Yahweh’s name: declare it in blessing. Three times the priest pronounces Yahweh’s name, calling upon him to bless, keep, make his face shine upon, be gracious to, lift up his countenance upon, and give peace to his people.   

But Israel’s Yahweh had never been just hers, and her blessings had never been just for herself. Already back in Genesis 14, the mysterious figure Melchizedek had appeared out of nowhere. He is king of Salem (the city that is eventually to be Jerusalem) and priest of El-Elyon, that is “God Most High” — a pagan designation of the God above all gods. Representing all the nations then, Melchizedek blesses Abram: “Blessed be Abram of El-Elyon, Creator of heaven and earth” (Gen. 14:19). Melchizedek declares that the God who had just given Abram victory over his kin’s captors is not a local, petty tribal deity, but Lord of the whole earth. Melchizedek confirms to Abram Yahweh’s promise that all the nations of the earth will be blessed through Abram (Gen. 12:3; see 14:22).  

Jesus comes to declare God’s name to us in blessing — exactly as he said he was doing in the so-called “High Priestly Prayer” in John 17: “I have made your name known to them, and I will make it known” (v. 26). As “mediator of a new covenant” Jesus shows God to be a Father who desires his children’s presence (Heb. 9:15; 12:24). As “merciful and faithful high priest” and as victor over death and the devil, Jesus proves God to be a Father who will tolerate no bondage for his children (Heb. 2:14-17). As “pioneer and perfecter of our faith” Jesus shows God to be “the Father of spirits” who lovingly shapes his children to bear his character (12:1-11). As “apostle and high priest of our confession” Jesus shows the intent of “the God of all” to fill the cosmos with a “festal gathering” of “the just made perfect” (3:1-2; 12:18-24).  

One of the great preachers of the 19th century was Boston’s Phillips Brooks. In our day, his hymn text “O Little Town of Bethlehem” keeps his memory alive. In his day, he was known for his preaching, as commemorated in a statue just outside the church he served in Boston, Trinity Church. The statue depicts Brooks standing next to a lectern that holds an open Bible, his hand lifted in blessing. Behind the lectern stands Jesus, his arm on Brooks’s shoulder.  

The statue reminds us that our job is to bless God’s people by declaring the Father’s name. When we do, we may, by the Holy Spirit, feel his Son’s kind, empowering hand on our shoulder. When we declare somebody else’s name — our own, our favorite team’s, our preferred political party’s — we may well feel a bit of a squeeze.    

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Prayers for the Rescued - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 7/4/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Jesus Christ, Our Worship Leader,” Part Two of Five 

This week, we explore the way Jesus exquisitely leads worship in our midst: he prays for us, declares the Father’s name to us, sings over us in love, and brings us bread and wine from God’s holy heavenly altar.  

Prayers for the Rescued 

Perhaps the first thing to notice about Jesus’s work as the church’s prime worship leader is what the writer says just before calling Jesus heaven’s Liturgist. “He holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:24-25). 

On his breastplate Israel’s high priest bore the names of the tribes of Israel, those whom Yahweh had redeemed and called into relationship with himself (Exod. 28:29). What’s different about Jesus’s priestly ministry of prayer is that our names aren’t carved on some sort of accessory. As Isaiah put it so tantalizingly: “I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Isa 49:16). Our names are written into Jesus’s flesh, into the very scars he bears for eternity in his side, his hands, his feet, and his brow.  

The writer to the Hebrews sums Jesus’s life up as one long series of “prayers and supplication, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him out of (note: the Greek is not “from” but “out of”) death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7). His life was one long lesson in obedient prayer, even in that dark moment when he implored that perhaps there was another way, “Let this cup pass.” Happily, in the Garden the Father said, “No!” to his Son in order that now in heaven the Father can say, “Yes!” to his Son in our behalf.  

I remember the first time I experienced incense in worship. Immediately, I recalled the word picture in Revelation: the prayers of the saints and the incense mixing and rising into God’s presence (Rev. 8:3-4). The sweetness of the smell brought to mind Christ’s “fragrant offering and sacrifice” that qualifies us to stand righteous and pure before God’s throne (Eph. 5:2). I imagined Christ bringing those incense-laced prayers into the heavenly courts and mingling them there with the Glory Cloud, the depiction of God’s presence in the Old Testament. What a profound picture of our union with God by the Spirit through Christ’s prayer with, for, and in us! 

Hours later, I was driving one of my kids to an event on the other side of town, and I kept sensing a certain smell. It was vaguely familiar but maddeningly elusive. Suddenly, I remembered that I had not changed clothes after church. The smell of the incense had penetrated my shirt and pants, clinging to me long after the service was over. Heaven smells of us, because Jesus is there bringing our needs and burdens always before the Father. None of us, I realized, makes it through a moment of this life by virtue of our looks, our brains, our skills, or our likability. We make it because we have a friend in a high place, who “always lives to make intercession.”  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

A New Kind of Priest - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 7/3/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Jesus Christ, Our Worship Leader,” Part One of Five 

The late Scottish theologian James Torrance often recounted his conversation with a man who had lost his faith and was facing his wife’s imminent death to cancer. “I’ve been trying to pray, but I can’t,” lamented the man, broken and ashamed.  

“I can’t tell you ‘how’ to pray, friend. But I can point you to the ‘who’ of prayer,” was the effect of Torrance’s reply. Torrance reminded the man that Jesus promised Peter he would pray for him even through Peter’s denial (Luke 22:31). In fact, Jesus returned from the dead to restore their relationship (John 21:15-24). Paul the apostle, Torrance explained, acknowledged that we don’t know how to pray, which is precisely why the Father set his risen Son at his own right hand to intercede for us, and placed his Holy Spirit within us to do the same (Rom. 8:26,34). Jesus, even now, said Torrance, “is praying for you … and with you and in you.”  

Soon after that conversation, Torrance had the opportunity to introduce both the man and his wife to what he calls the Trinity’s “grammar of grace”: Our “Father … has given us Christ and the Spirit to draw us to himself in prayer.” At the heart of that grammar is the priesthood of Jesus Christ: “our great high priest, touched with a feeling of our infirmities, interceding (to the Father) for us, opening our hearts by the Spirit.”  

As with prayer, so with worship: the “how” is not as important as the “who.” Torrance challenged a generation of theology students to repent of “Unitarian” worship and embrace “Trinitarian” worship. According to Torrance, you know your worship is Unitarian (even if you label it Christian) if your worship is about various techniques of experiencing God on your own. You know your worship is Trinitarian if your worship is about Jesus, your elder brother and great high priest, drawing you into the eternal communion of love that has always characterized God’s own life as Loving Father, Beloved Son, and Holy Spirit, who is love itself.  

I’ve led worship long enough to know the lure of technique-obsessed, Unitarian worship. I’ve seen it practiced over and over again. Along the way, I have learned to look for a different way, and to know the surprise and delight of the Trinity’s “grammar of grace,” where Jesus is our true worship leader.  

A New Kind of Priest 

We are not the first generation to have to figure out how to move from Unitarian to Trinitarian worship. The anonymous writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews helped a first-century Jewish congregation see how monumental the shift is from an old way of worship to a new, where the Son is worthy of worship alongside the Father (Heb. 1:3,8,10-12; 13:8), as is the Holy Spirit (Heb. 6:4; 10:29).  

Of particular concern to the writer to the Hebrews, though, is the special nature of Jesus’s role as priest in representing us to the Father and the Father to us. Jesus is the unique God-Man priest “in the order of Melchizedek,” whose priesthood is eternal and whose once-for-all self-offering brought a redemption and forgiveness that is complete and needs no augmentation. Jesus is a priest whose work is done, in one sense. He sits at the right hand of the Father because he does not have to make any further offerings. By his sacrifice, Jesus has assured God’s satisfaction in us, and has cleansed our consciences. We don’t have to worry about guilt or death any longer.  

But in another sense, Jesus’s priesthood goes into overdrive when his sacrificial work is completed. Now he serves as “Liturgist (Gk: leitourgos) in the sanctuary and the true tent which is set up not by man but by the Lord” (Heb. 8:2).  

Throughout his brilliant letter, the writer carefully unpacks different elements of Jesus’s ongoing liturgical leadership. They couldn’t be more relevant to what we do when we worship.  

Through the rest of this week, we explore the way Jesus exquisitely leads worship in our midst: he prays for us, declares the Father’s name to us, sings over us in love, and brings us bread and wine from God’s holy heavenly altar. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+  

A Campaign Only Love Can Win - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 6/30/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“A Campaign Only Love Can Win” 

“Music is a universal phenomenon but not a universal language,” maintains ethnomusicologist Robin Harris. So true. Jake and Elwood Blues (The Blues Brothers, 1980) might not have made it out of Bob’s Country Bunker alive if they had not figured out the local language was “Theme from Rawhide,” not “Gimme Some Lovin’.”  

Image: Cover art, Blues Brothers DVD 

Sometimes it’s not that easy. Once, some friends and I never got past a group’s stony silence with our songs. Another friend had asked us to come and lead worship. He thought our stuff was cool and he thought his group would think so too. Wrong! Unfortunately, unlike the Blues Brothers, we didn’t have a wide enough repertoire to adjust to the situation. It was a night to remember.   

What does it take to learn somebody’s “heart language” of music? It takes learning their heart. It takes the singular language of love that Christ’s followers learn from the one they follow.    

Singing Is Not the Only Worship 

The Christian faith was born in the Middle East — born unwelcomed, born in controversy. It established itself largely through its irrepressible love. “Look … how they love one another!” complained unbelievers about Christ’s followers, according to the North African theologian Tertullian around A.D. 197/198. That love, observed modern historian E. R. Dodds, was “a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity.”  

Nearly 2,000 years later, nothing’s changed.  

A friend of mine — call her Margie — ministers frequently in Tertullian’s part of the world. Hers is not a ministry of music, but she has a lot to teach those of us who think worship is just about the music. On a recent trip she had been asked to bring a teaching for women in ministry: 

I really struggled with what I should share with the women.  I had prepared two messages, but neither seemed appropriate.  During my restless night before my scheduled time to speak it seemed that Jesus clearly spoke to me saying, ”Wash their feet.” But where would I find the basins and towels?  I shared my desire with a servant leader and within a few hours everything appeared in our “upper room.” 

I modeled the process with a dear sister who serves in a highly restrictive country. In humbleness I knelt before her and while washing her feet I quoted verses of encouragement and prayed for her as I finished. We traded places. The Spirit’s presence was very evident as we clung to one another in love and tears. Other ladies came and filled the chairs and washed each other’s feet. There were many tears, but much joy.   

One missionary wanted to wash others’ feet but did not allow someone to wash hers. That night when she shared with her husband, he knelt down and washed her feet. Another wanted to have her feet washed for her team member who was not at the conference. When she returned to her country of service, she washed her feet. One of the gifts we had taken for the ladies were bedroom slippers — not knowing that we would be washing their feet.  

When the ladies shared their experience with their husbands the vision caught and spread. In fact, when the elders from that country visited the church leaders in yet another restrictive country — one where there is military conflict and where the gospel is just struggling to regain a foothold — they knelt and washed their brothers’ feet. Once again, the humbling, healing service was blessed.  

It was as though the Lord were anointing an army of footwashers, to wage a campaign only love can win.  

The way of love is the way of immersion. It’s the way of observation. It’s the way of listening. It’s a way that Margie had learned over time. If she had been a musician, she wouldn’t have needed beer bottles flying through chicken wire à la The Blues Brothers to get her attention. Nor would she have encountered stony silence from people who found her music alien.  

She loved — she simply loved. Then when she finally made her offering, its recipients made it their own and found a way to multiply it.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

There’s a God With a Plan - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 6/29/2023

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Redemption Songs: Plainsong Style”
 

As the credits roll in the movie I Am Legend, Bob Marley sings:  

Won’t you help to sing  
These songs of freedom? 
‘Cause all I ever have:  
Redemption songs, 
Redemption songs, 
Redemption songs.  

An artful choice. Marley’s reggae music provides the movie’s central character, Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) a slender line of hope. He’s reluctant to believe that in his post-apocalyptic world there’s a God with a plan, reluctant to believe even that any other non-zombie humans exist. Marley’s voice from a healthier world helps him fend off despair. 

Many of us know what it is to feel cut off — to have no sense that there’s a master plan. The driver from hell nearly runs you off the road. Cash flow is negative. A relationship unravels. Evil reigns in the world, good is thwarted at every turn. And you go: “Am I left alone?”

Image: "I Am Legend" by Buou is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Will Smith had Bob Marley’s reggae. I have the book of Psalms — and I have them in the ancient church’s plainsong.  

The Psalms invite me to tell God’s people’s story as my own: Give thanks to the Lord …; make known his deeds among the peoples (Ps 105:1). Warnings made to others become warnings I send to my own unbelieving heart: … they did not wait for his counsel (Ps 106:13). Betrayals of David, then of my Redeemer, and now, to my astonishment, of me — I find I share — I mean really share — by virtue of taking David’s and Jesus’ words as my very own: Even my best friend, whom I trusted, … has turned against me (Ps 41:9). Promises made to others, I take for myself — Taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps 34:8) — as though they were intended for me in the first place. Wisdom aimed at people three millennia ago I sing as though I had thought it up myself: … my feet had nearly slipped … because I envied the proud (Ps 73:2a,3a).  

The power lies not just in the Psalms’ words, though. It lies also in their music. “He who reads the Torah without chant, of him can it be said as it is written, ‘the laws that I gave you were not good,’” says the Mishnah’s Rabbi Johanan. How much more true of the psalms. Ancient Israel chanted the psalms. The ancient church chanted them as well. “A soul rightly ordered by chanting the sacred words forgets its own afflictions and contemplates with joy the things of Christ alone,” maintained Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century. 

Fact is, when truth becomes song, you know it at a deeper level.  

I have began chanting psalms in my daily devotions. I’m do so using the eight ancient plainsong chant tones that have their origins in the Gregorian musical revolution of the middle of the 1st millennium, as recovered and restored in the late 19th century. James Litton has adapted them for church and individual singing in his handsome volume, The Plainsong Psalter (Church Publishing Inc., 1988; ISBN: 978-0809691627 — hardback, quarto-sized, $40).  

A couple of friends on the other side of the country have bonded with me in an arrangement of spirit. We’re simply following the course laid out in the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer (which serves as the text base for The Plainsong Psalter). It takes seven weeks to chant through the psalms, a pace of about three psalms per day. It’s a tempo that works for me. 

The great thing about chant is that you don’t have to force the text into an artificial meter. Chanting allows the text to take its own meter and rhythm. In a given line, singers stay on a chanting tone all the way up to the last note (or two or three) of a phrase.  

The plainsong music is lovely. Tone 1 is the basis for the tune most of us know as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” And if you’ve admired Allegri’s Miserere, you’ll recognize Tone 2 to be the cantor’s melody.   

In the early hours of the morning I enjoy the fellowship across 1500 years or so with folks who have shared these psalms in similar fashion. I love the bold aspiration of the original Gregorians: to create a music that all believers could sing and that was trying to be indigenously Christian, but that was in positive dialogue with the best music theory of its day. 

In this world that is beyond crazy I enjoy having my “soul rightly ordered” as I sing redemption songs, plainsong-style. 

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

The Clown Was Me - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 6/28/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“The ‘Clown’ Was Me” 

Just as I was ordering my Big Mac, a woman came into McDonald’s yanking on the arm of a young child. Ugliness leaped from this slovenly woman. Dragging on a cigarette butt, she yelled at her kid: “Shut up and tell me what you want to eat, or I’m going to kick you from here to Kingdom come!”  

But then I noticed this distinctive shape to her face ... 

Suddenly, I realized this face was identical to that of one of the prostitutes French artist Georges Rouault had once painted. This woman could have served as his model.  

Though he lived from 1871 to 1958, Rouault’s most notable working years spanned WWI and WWII. Many artists of his day heard in the turmoil of their times the death-knell of Christendom and of the Christian faith. For Rouault, though, the times were proof of our need for Christ.  

His art became the means of bringing together God’s story and our pain.  

As a teen, Rouault had apprenticed as a stained glass artisan. He learned to tell a story through simplicity of line and color. In his early adult years he studied the realistic technique of Rembrandt, in quest of that master’s psychological depth. Rouault’s early work, not surprisingly, reveals an artist who has not yet found his voice.  

Then, around 1903 when Rouault was in his early 30’s, he had a happenstance encounter with an off-duty clown. Everything changed. It is the moment, as he puts it, “that marked the beginnings of poetry in my life.”  

Rouault comes upon this old clown “mending his glittering and colorful costume.” He sees the jarring contrast of “brilliant, scintillating things, made to amuse us,” on the one hand, and the infinite sadness in the man’s unguarded face, on the other.  

I clearly saw that the “Clown” was me, it was us. ... This rich and spangled costume is given to us by life, we are all clowns more or less, we all wear a “spangled costume,” but if we are caught unawares, as I surprised the old clown, oh! Then who would dare to say that he is not moved to the bottom of his being by immeasurable pity. 

Rouault begins to paint pictures that tell us the truth about ourselves: sorrowful clowns (“Who does not paint himself a face?”), imperious kings (“We think we are kings...”), self-absorbed bourgeoisie (“The well-bred lady thinks she has a reserved seat in heaven.”)  

He drops his realistic technique for the look of the stained glass of his youth: thick, simple lines. Vivid colors. Simple but penetrating truths about ourselves.  

Stained glass is above all the church’s art. Here’s where Rouault’s art becomes poetry. He uses his stained glass effect because, in pity, he would point us to Jesus, to him who had become “like us in all things, save sin” so he could redeem and heal us. In Rouault’s hands, one portrait of Christ looks as ugly as the sinners with whom he identifies, while another portrait is iconically transcendent, a promise of peace and resurrection.   

Standing at that McDonalds counter, I realized that despite all that made us different, this woman and I were the same. Same ugliness. Same dignity and beauty for which we were created, but from which we have fallen so hopelessly and seemingly irrevocably.  

Then came the epiphany, unbidden. In a flash, I recalled Rouault’s famous Head of Christ. I think it was the shape of the jaw. In my imagination, the woman’s face morphed, first, to that of Rouault’s sad, angry prostitute, then second, to his sadder, compassionate Christ.  

Art of any sort — from painting to music to worship design — has this extraordinary power: it can bring a whispered promise or a shouted call from another realm. The incarnation itself brings, after all, God’s permanent residence in our reality.   

Rouault’s portrait of the prostitute said: “Doesn’t she look a lot like you and me?” His portrait of Christ said: “Didn’t he come for the likes of her and you and me?”  

I should have talked to this “Fallen Eve” (a term Rouault sometimes used). But the words wouldn’t come. All I knew to do in that moment was pray: “Lord, have mercy. On her. On me. On this sad world you love. In your own time and in your own way, show yourself to this dear child of yours, and save her. And Lord, forgive my blindness to what, or rather Who, makes us one.” I pray for her still.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Worship Renewal - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 6/27/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Bigger Voices” 

My father was a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. It was hard to watch this once vibrantly inquisitive retired college professor lose his ability to remember. Along with his ability to remember, he lost his capacity for learning as well. For a brief stint, my dad stayed in a facility for the “pleasantly confused.” As we were moving him in to is new home in the memory care unit, I noticed flaps over the elevator controls. 

“Why the flaps?” I asked a nurse. 

“It’s how we keep residents from leaving their floor and wandering off.” 

“I don’t get it. How does that work?” 

“A person like your father doesn’t just have memory issues. Although he can’t remember old things, he can’t learn new things either. So no matter how many times he might see someone lift the flap and press the button underneath, he can’t learn it for himself.” 

In that moment, I realized the phrase “pleasantly confused” was a nice way of describing something quite sad: being trapped in the present. 

Image: "330_capo" by Lamerie is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0  

We are in the midst of one of the realignments — writer Phyllis Tickle calls them “rummage sales” — the faith goes through every 500 years or so. Around A.D. 500 there was a Great Consolidation, around A.D. 1000 a Great Schism, around A.D. 1500 a Great Reformation. Now we are experiencing, she maintains, a Great Emergence. 

Just what it is that will emerge is unclear. Everything seems to be up for grabs — how to worship, whom to worship, why worship in the first place. One thing that is clear, at least to me, is this: privileged — or consigned — to live in such a time, we need wisdom greater than our own. When David Crowder sings, “I need a voice bigger than mine,” I feel him. Our capacity to contribute to the future hinges on our access to “bigger voices” that free us from entrapment in the present. 

When I first started designing worship services, my main goal was to pick songs that complemented the sermon and that did not require changing the capo setting on my guitar. I was using a screw-on capo that took about a minute to adjust. So the ideal set of worship music consisted of songs that could be played, say, at “capo 3” (like Eb, Bb, or F) or in “open capo” (like C, G, or D). It was pretty confining. 

Eventually, not only did I figure out other capos existed, more importantly I started teaching worship in a school that valued the theology of the Great Reformation. From those “bigger voices” of a half millennium ago, I learned the value of creeds and confessions in worship. 

Recent years have taken me further back, to those “bigger voices” that gave us the Great Consolidation in the middle of the first millennium. 

The 4th century theologian Athanasius of Alexandria argued that worship itself hangs on celebrating the Word’s taking on flesh to redeem all creation. If Christ is God, all is won. If not, nothing is. 

The anonymous 2nd century singers of the so-called Odes of Solomon modeled worship as a participation in Jesus’s own song: “lifting his voice to the Most High and offering to him those who have become sons through him.” 

In the late 6th century, Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome, launched a quest for a common pattern of chant for the Western church. From 1,500 years away, he gently rebukes our capitulation to niche marketing and musical apartheid. 

From Jerusalem to Syria to Rome, churches’ reflection on Scripture led to a common pattern of gathering in praise, attending to the Word, communing at the Table, and joyfully charging back out into the world to minister Christ there. 

Here’s the great thing about rummage sales. They give you a chance to unload some things that haven’t done you much good in a long time. They also give you a chance to rediscover things you’d forgotten you even had, but now can’t believe you’ve been able to live without. There is much the ancient church has to teach us about God, and about the how and why of worship. 

My father’s disease left him living only in the present. He had no access to the past, nor to the future. Perhaps it’s our very access to worship’s past that holds the greatest promise for worship’s renewal in the future. 

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Entrapment in the Present 

“Ancient Future” Resources for Worship Renewal 

Robert Webber, Ancient Future Worship (Baker Books, 2008) 

Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation (St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1993), with an introduction by C. S. Lewis. Text, minus Lewis introduction at http://ccel.org. 

The Odes of Solomon Project, 2CD set (http://www.theodesproject.com/index.cfm). 

Hippolytus, On the Apostolic Tradition (SVS Press, 2001) 

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, On the Sacraments (SVS Press, 1995, 2017) 

Virtual Church - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 6/26/2023 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. 

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. 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 (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

They come from a season in my life when I was on a journey from more generic free-form worship to worship shaped by the classic liturgy. I hope these observations help you in your own quest to love God and your neighbor.  

“Virtual Church — Really?” 

“Maybe we should offer church online.” 

“Really? You mean ‘virtual’ church? ‘Almost’ church?” 

Image: Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, online service image 

Several years ago, when my church began to think about offering a real-time and interactive, online way of attending its services, I had doubts. How, I wondered, could worship be authentic if we’re not all actually in the same room? Would “online church” be “narcissistic,” where people hide their actual selves behind a self-inflated electronic persona? Would “online church” be “excarnate,” where we lose person-to-person relationships and diminish the “embodiedness” of Jesus’s existence? 

To the contrary, in some respects my experience of online church can leave me feeling more “connected” than sometimes when I’m in the same room with a lot of people I don’t know. 

From Central FL, I exchange the Peace of Christ with former students in Argentina and Sweden. I meet a Ukrainian national our church has supported for years — and we talk about my maybe coming to Ukraine some time. Sue in western PA is surprised to find her parents in eastern PA worshiping online at the same time. Brad in MO has logged on for the first time, and is blown away when the worship leader welcomes him by name from the platform. Naomi in AL has a question, and Terri in LA responds before the “online minister” can chime in. Bob in NYC is crushingly lonely, and he tells everybody how important being “with them” this morning is to him – he’s blitzed with encouraging remarks and promises of prayer.  

At a given service, we might have 2,000 in the building and 600 online. A few “onliners” worship anonymously, but most give their names and locations, and provide a picture. While the service is being webcast in real time, you can “chat” with anybody who’s logged in, as well as post comments to the whole group. An “online minister” presides, part greeter, part confidant, part prayer request gatherer, part answer-man, part “hall monitor.” And the interaction is non-stop.  

Week after week, people login from home, from an out-of-town Starbucks, from the mission field, or from an overseas military base. Cheerily, they put up with dropped connections or the occasional “off task” remark or rant by a fellow online worshiper. Some folks sing along. Some don’t. Most simply take in the service, but many “chatter” throughout: “Amen-ing” the songs or the message, asking for prayer, offering prayer and encouragement, posing and answering questions, suggesting improvements to the interface.   

Almost as if in answer to my fears about the loss of personal relationships, a committed team of “online ministers” has emerged — of whom I, to my surprise, have recently become a part. We recognize it wasn’t enough for Paul to write to the Romans; he was going to do everything he could to come to them (Rom 1:10-13). So, two of my ministry partners drove hundreds of miles just to be with a fellow who came to faith in Christ through the online ministry. This team works hard to provide a personal touch. They stay in touch by email and phone, following up questions and prayer requests, encouraging clusters among fellow “onliners” who live near each other.  

Almost as if in answer to my concern about people hiding their genuine selves behind “virtual selves,” one of our church members undertook a 10,000 mile odyssey in her van to visit “onliner” individuals, families, and clusters around the country. The images and stories she brought back were of vibrant faithfulness and obedience — of the desire to be anything but merely a virtual self. She met folks grateful to be included as “living stones” in a great house God is building by the Spirit (1 Pet 2:4-5).  

They are a part of the Story of Jesus. He came in bodily form, died and rose that we might one day have perfected bodies. He promised to return bodily, and in the meantime called us to be communities that continue his incarnate life in the world. So, while Jesus no longer, for now, occupies a single physical space on earth, we gather to celebrate a Presence that’s not confined to our gathering.  

Bob Webber used to say that while modern technology created the broadcasting church, postmodern technology was going to lead to an interactive church. Maybe he was right. If there weren’t a massive hunger for connectedness in our world, there would be no Facebook, no Twitter. If there weren’t an urgent quest for immediate, at-your-fingertips information, there would be no Wikipedia community. Wherever believers are, we find the same longings. Because it offers flexibility of expression and immediacy of fellowship (where it’s not weird if you ask people for prayer the moment you show up), perhaps “virtual” church will help “normal” church become more “real” church.  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Darkness and Aloneness - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 6/23/2023 
Friday of the Third Week After Pentecost (Proper 6) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 88; 1 Samuel 3:1–21; Acts 2:37–47; Luke 21:5–19 

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) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we bring to our lives that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Friday of the 3rd Week After Pentecost. We are in Proper 6 of Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.  

To me, Psalm 88 is the “Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again” psalm. Every time I read it, I come under the spell of Simon and Garfunkel’s ode to loneliness and existential worry, “I am a rock, I am an island.” I am grateful that, in Psalm 88, our Bible includes a similarly raw statement of angst.  

The psalmist teeters on the brink of unwelcomed death: “[M]y life is at the brink of the grave. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit” (Psalm 88:3b,4a). He feels abandoned by God, and fears eternal separation: “Lost among the dead … Your anger weighs upon me heavily … Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave?” (Psalm 88:5a,8a,12a). The psalmist is utterly alone in his misery: “You have put my friends far from me; you have made me to be abhorred by them … My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me, and darkness is my only companion” (Psalm 88:9ab,19).  

Image: "Wretched" by pcgn7 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

What redeems the grit and honesty of this psalm is the fact that it is, after all, a prayer. It isn’t hurled into sheer and empty darkness. The psalmist opens: “O Yahweh, my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you. Let my prayer enter into your presence; incline your ear to my lamentation” (Psalm 88:1). The psalmist addresses God by his personal name, Yahweh, the name he gave when he came to redeem (see Exodus 3–4). It’s “my God” and “my Savior.” And the addressee is not “darkness, my old friend.” It’s a living presence whom the psalmist seeks: “Let my prayer enter into your presence; incline your ear….” There’s a stubbornness about biblical faith—it cries out to the light in the deepest of darkness.  

Still, if you and I don’t sense the darkness and the aloneness of Psalm 88, either we haven’t lived long enough or we’re not paying close enough attention. Nor are we able to appreciate the wonder that fills people who dare to believe in the Bible’s promise of rescue and redemption.  

Today’s other passages affirm both the raw honesty and the vibrant hope.  

1 Samuel: good news and bad news. In a day in which word from Yahweh was rare and visions were not widespread, Eli learns that change is in the offing. Eli recognizes that the voice awakening his ward Samuel from his slumbers is Yahweh’s. Israel’s God is on the move again, advancing his program of redemption and restoration. That good news comes with a downside. The consequences of Eli’s negligence and lack of spiritual leadership over his sons are painful. Nonetheless, his trust in Yahweh gives him acceptance: “He is Yahweh; let him do what he thinks good” (1 Samuel 3:18 JB).   

In Luke, Jesus prepares his disciples for cataclysmic change ahead. The stone and mortar temple that had (in one form or another) been at the center of God’s relationship with his people for 1,000 years had reached the end of its “shelf life.” Christ’s sacrifice will have proven to be the final goal of that building’s existence. In advance of a day in which God’s house would be composed of “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5), Jesus says of the recently and exquisitely refurbished Second Temple, “[N]ot one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down” (Luke 21:6).  

In Acts, Peter begins to reap the benefits of that cataclysmic change. Tongues of fire have descended from heaven, dissolving barriers to communication. God begins to build his new house with converts from all around the Mediterranean Basin whom providence had brought to Jerusalem for the Jewish “Pentecost,” a celebration of the first fruits and of the giving of the Law.  

Little did they know the new power the term Pentecost would hereafter take on. They themselves become the first fruits of a new humanity, “ground zero” for the Holy Spirit’s new regime of life. Hearts change, as do ways of living. New believers share meals as well as possessions. They absorb the apostles’ teaching about how God has fulfilled ancient promises through Jesus his Son. They marvel at God’s marvelous works, and in prayer and praise, they experience worship in a new way. In their growing numbers and in their “favor with all the people,” they taste the blessing that God’s in-breaking means for the whole world.  

When the night is dark, when the ceiling seems impenetrable, and when nobody seems to listen or to care, may you and I nonetheless penetrate the dark with our cry, “O Yawheh, my God, my Savior.” As we immerse ourselves in God’s story of redemption and find our place at the table of fellowship in his Son, may we find the Spirit bringing comfort and courage to our hearts.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Lord of Heaven and Earth - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 6/22/2023 
Thursday of the Third Week After Pentecost (Proper 6) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 34; 1 Samuel 2:27–36; Acts 2:22–36; Luke 20:41–21:4 

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) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we consider some aspect of that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. We are in the 3rd Week After Pentecost, and our readings come from Proper 6 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Anyone who has had a taste of power, prestige, and wealth knows the dangers these things can present. The feeling can be one of entitlement. The powerful may feel that the weak are weak because they deserve to be weak. Important people may feel their own importance is self-evident, as is the unimportance of the unimportant. The “haves” may feel that they have, because they ought to have and, and likewise, that the “have nots” have not, because they ought not to have. It’s a seductive logic.  

Pride and pretense in 1 Samuel. It’s a logic to which Eli and his sons have succumbed. In the auspicious line of the original Hebrew priest Aaron, they are principal overseers of worship at Shiloh, the center of the Israelites’ religious life at the end of the period of the Judges. The arrogant sons, Hophni and Phinehas, overreach their legitimate prerogative of receiving support from the people’s offerings. So they put on a good show. They vest in sacred garments, ascend the altar, and offer incense (2 Samuel 2:28). Their glory entitles them, they feel, to demand more than their due. They blatantly transgress sexual boundaries, because, well, because they can. Eli, the father, fails to rein his sons in because he, too, profits from their profligacy: “[You] honor your sons more than me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel” (2 Samuel 2:29).  

Image: Stained glass, Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida. 

Pride and pretense in Luke. A thousand years later in the time of Christ’s earthly ministry, nothing has changed. The Sadducean aristocracy oversees a spectacular theatre of worship in Herod’s shrine to his own ego. Denying the idea of resurrection, they accommodate the faith to their earthly satisfactions. Scribes parade their piety: “walk[ing] around in long robes, and lov[ing] to be greeted with respect in the marketplace, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers” (Luke 20:46–47). Meanwhile, rich people make a show of the generosity with which they underwrite all the pageantry.   

God upsets the apple cart. But it’s all an illusion, insists the Bible—as proof of which God inserts himself to upset the apple cart. What Eli and sons cannot snuff out is the reality of the God of the temple, who in his own time and his own way will reclaim his sacred space. Eli’s line will end (see 1 Samuel 4:11,18; 22:18–19), except for one descendant who will carry the sad tale of his family’s religious treachery (see the account of Abiathar in 1 Kings 1–2). What the Sadducees cannot eliminate from Scripture in their desire to flatten it to an exclusively this-worldly faith is the mystery of God’s Messiah (and David’s son) having an eternal and divine existence. How indeed, Jesus asks, can David’s son be David’s Lord, as Psalm 110 says he is—unless, David’s son be more than man, but God?! And unless Scripture’s promises be about more than life and prosperity and success in this life?  

The “little people” who see things aright in Acts and Luke. And so, the “little people” have their say: in Acts, the uneducated Galilean fisherman Peter astounds the Jerusalem residents and pilgrims. God has established Jesus as the Lord and Messiah David had prophesied. Peter explains that the rejection of Jesus was, ironically, part of the proof that Jesus was predestined to suffer, and then rise to take his rightful place as Lord of heaven and earth. And Luke’s poor widow models the kind of generosity that matters to God: a generosity of open heart and open hand: “…she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on” (Luke 21:4).  

Today’s readings stand as a bold affirmation of David’s prayer in today’s Psalm: 

The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, * 
    and his ears are open to their cry. 
The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, * 
    to root out the remembrance of them from the earth. 
The righteous cry, and the Lord hears them * 
    and delivers them from all their troubles. 
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted * 
    and will save those whose spirits are crushed. … 
The Lord ransoms the life of his servants, * 
    and none will be punished who trust in him (Psalm 34:15–18,22 BCP). 

Living beyond the illusion of power, prestige, and wealth, and living in the reality of God’s vindication, protection, and provision in Christ, may you be blessed this day. 

Reggie Kidd+