Seeing Everything Clearly - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 8/3/2021
Tuesday of the Tenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 13)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 78; 2 Samuel 7:18–29; Acts 18:12–28; Mark 8:22–33

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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Mark: “men like trees walking.” In yesterday’s Gospel reading, Jesus denounced the reformist and pietistic way of the Pharisees and the secularist and accommodationist way of the Herodians. Today, he begins to unveil his own way. Today begins the campaign to show that the way of the cross is the way of life. 

Today’s passage is the hinge on which Mark’s Gospel pivots to this theme.* Mark’s is the only gospel to tell the remarkable story of the blind man who, at Jesus’s first touch gains just enough sight to see blurred “men like trees walking,” and who thus needs a second touch from Jesus for his blindness to be completely cured and for him to “see everything clearly” (Mark 8:25). 

The account is a brilliant setup to Peter’s confession that Jesus is indeed the Christ (Peter “sees” the truth, but only with blurred vision—Mark 8:29). Peter’s confession requires Jesus’s further explanation that the mission of the Son of Man (i.e., the Christ) is to suffer, be rejected, die, and rise again (Peter and the other disciples must “see” this truth in order to “see everything clearly”—Mark 8:31–33). Twice more in chapters nine and ten, Jesus will have to outline his messianic mission (Mark 9:30-32; 10:32–34). He will round out the entire section with the healing of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46–52), a miracle that does not have to be repeated, coming as it does on the far side of the full explanation that, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). 

There is good reason for the BCP’s prayer: “Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace” (BCP, p. 99, 220, 272, 420). Life and peace come by means of the cross, not by self-fixes, and not by system-fixes. 

Acts: learning “the way of God.” The account of Apollos, Priscilla, and Aquila in Acts shows how “the way of the cross” turns out to be “the way of life and peace.” 

Apollos, a Jewish Christian from Alexandria, is a brilliant student both of Scripture and of contemporary rhetoric (Acts 18:24). He has been well instructed in the “the things of Jesus” (18:25), meaning apparently that he is well acquainted with the life and teachings of Jesus, and with the ways that Jesus fulfills Old Testament promises about the coming of the Messiah (Acts 18:25a). Moreover, he glows with the fire of the Spirit (zeōn tō pneumati). Curiously, however, his understanding of baptism only extends to John’s baptism of preparatory repentance (Acts 18:24–25). His experience is of a piece with the fluid relationship between faith, repentance, water-baptism, and Spirit-baptism in the book of Acts. However, there appears to be something he doesn’t quite understand about the faith.

Priscilla and Aquila nicely display “the way of the cross” by the way they minister to Apollos.

First, when they decide to address deficiencies in his presentations in Ephesus, they do so privately not publicly. Rather than calling him out in front of everybody else, they take him aside for “more accurate” instruction (Acts 18:26). 

Second, they sense the need to augment his accurate understanding of “the things of Jesus,” the facts about Jesus’s life, ministry, and Messiahship. These facts will be powerful weapons in Apollos’s arsenal to persuade people to become Christians. But Priscilla and Aquila know that there is more to “the things of Jesus” than just getting people’s intellectual assent about those facts. Potential believers will need, and thus Apollos will need, to understand “the way of God” (Acts 18:26). Apollos needs to understand that there is a way of living that follows from those facts. 

Apollos receives the Ephesian church’s blessing to cross the Aegean Sea to minister in Achaia (Greece), in the city of Corinth (Acts 18:27). There he is greatly helpful. Yet, as we will see in a few weeks when we read 1 Corinthians (Propers 19–24), misunderstandings emerge in Corinth. Having lived among the Corinthians themselves, Priscilla and Aquila understand the Corinthians’ susceptibility to impressive rhetoric and powerful spiritual display. They want Apollos to understand that “the way of God” is the way of humility and service. 

Apollos is an excellent example of the way that many of us must learn that our strengths can also be our weaknesses. Our strengths must be diligently and relentlessly yoked to Christ and his cross. Paul tells the Corinthians not to pit him and Apollos against each other: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6). The “way of God” is not about taking pride in who baptized you, or about how hyper-intellectual your faith is, or about how super-spiritual your experience of God is. The “way of God” is the way of the cross. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

*Slightly altered here, this and the following two paragraphs appeared in the DDD for Wednesday of this year’s Week 4 of Epiphany. 

Image: Adapted from: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Christ heals a blind man by placing clay on his eye. Stipple engraving by R.A. Artlett after J.D. Crittendon. By: John Denton Crittendonafter: Richard Austin ArtlettPublished: Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

On the Wrong Footing - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 8/2/2021
Monday of the Tenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 13) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 80; 2 Samuel 7:1–17; Acts 18:–11; Mark 8:11–21

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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There are so many ways we can put our relationship with God on the wrong footing. Mercifully, the Lord is not content to let us get away with it.

2 Samuel: getting straight on who is the gift-giver. After God allowed him tohave a fine cedar house, David wished to return the favor. Commentators suggest David would thereby make himself God’s benefactor rather than vice versa. At first, the prophet Nathan affirms David’s plan. But the Lord intervenes. He tells Nathan to inform David that he’s not the person to build God a “house.” Instead, God will do that “house” building. In God’s ongoing and relentless grace, David will build, not a physical building, but a royal house: a dynasty, a lineage that will always rule.

What Yahweh will do for David is infinitely greater than anything David could do for Yahweh! “Thus says the Lord of Hosts, ‘I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel’” (2 Samuel 7:8). The leaders of Israel  acknowledged David as their shepherd: “The Lord said to you: It is you who shall be shepherd of my people Israel, you who shall be ruler over Israel” (1 Samuel 5:2). And Yahweh will do extraordinary things for his people through the shepherd-kings who follow David. He will plant them in their homeland, free them from evildoers, grant rest from their enemies, take up residence among them, and provide perpetuity to David’s line (2 Samuel 7:10–17). 

David is to understand — and it’s an invaluable lesson for you and me — that God’s gifts to us far outweigh our gifts to him. 

Mark: don’t try to replace God’s gift. God’s preeminent gift, we find in the New Testament, is David’s greater Son. Jesus comes as the Good Shepherd (John 10). In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has shown himself to be that great Davidic shepherd King. With compassion for “sheep without a shepherd” he has taught them (Mark 6:34). And by means of the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000, he has shown himself to be the ultimate shepherd who finds green pastures and sets a banquet for his flock (Mark 6:30–44; 8:1–9; see Psalm 23). King Jesus is simultaneously Good Shepherd and Bread from Heaven. 

Believing that Jesus is heaven’s gift and God’s provision for the deepest needs of our life is not an easy thing. Despite just witnessing these two powerful miracles in Mark, and despite listening to the accompanying extensive teaching in John, Jesus’s disciples still don’t get it. On a boat journey recounted for us in today’s reading, the disciples panic to realize they have forgotten to make adequate provision for themselves. They’ve only brought one loaf of bread. 

Jesus sees a teaching opportunity: “Watch out—beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod” (Mark 8:15). Jesus and Jesus alone is Bread of Life. On the one hand, Jesus warns those in the boat with him against a graceless piety like that of the Pharisees — those who attempt to climb a stairway to heaven by stiff-necked rule-keeping. On the other hand, Jesus warns his disciples against a secular worldliness like that of the Herodians — those who make peace with the earthly powers-that-be and live as lavish a life as possible. 

I pray we may look past the allures of anything else, whether the pride of hyper-spirituality or the sloth of materialism, and graciously receive God’s gift of himself in his Son. May we feed richly on the Bread of Life. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "Doh, I knew I forgot something!" by THX0477 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

David is Finally King as Promised - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 7/30/2021
Friday of the Ninth Week After Pentecost (Proper 12)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 69; 2 Samuel 5:1–12; Acts 17:1–15; Mark 7:24–37

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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2 Samuel and David’s elevation. At this his third anointing David (finally) becomes king over God’s united people. Samuel first anointed him in promise (1 Samuel 16). Judah anointed him as king in the south (2 Samuel 2). Now “all the tribes of Israel (the northern tribes) came to David … and said, … ‘The Lord said to you: It is you who shall be shepherd of my people Israel, you who shall be ruler over Israel’” (2 Samuel 5:1–2). The leaders of the northern tribes make a covenant with David, “and they anointed David king over Israel” (2 Samuel 5:3).

The next few chapters of 2 Samuel recount the measures by which David’s reign is secured. David wins Jerusalem as capital and center of worship (2 Samuel 5:6–6:23). Yahweh promises an everlasting dynasty (2 Samuel 7). And David suppresses attacks by Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Amalek, and Zobah (2 Samuel 8–10). 

It’s been a long and winding road, as Paul McCartney might have put it: from shepherding on the family homestead, to receiving Samuel’s promissory anointing, to taking out Goliath, to singing to soothe Saul’s soul, to bonding with Jonathan, to running from Saul, to receiving Judah’s anointing, to lamenting Saul’s demise, and now to being anointed by Israel as king over a united nation. David’s life takes on the cruciform shape the New Testament describes for the Lord’s anointed, his Messiah: “…it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead” (Acts 17:3; and see also Luke 24:26; 1 Peter 1:11). 

Today’s Psalm 69, “A psalm of David,” is a reminder of just how aware David himself was of the way Yahweh had called him to this pattern of life. This psalm is also a reminder to us of how David sang and worshiped and prayed his way through it all — and how, in worship, the Lord gave him glimpses of the greater Son who would follow (see verse 23, below)! 

1 Save me, O God, *
for the waters have risen up to my neck.
2 I am sinking in deep mire, *
and there is no firm ground for my feet.
3 I have come into deep waters, *
and the torrent washes over me.

13 Those who sit at the gate murmur against me, *
and the drunkards make songs about me.
14 But as for me, this is my prayer to you, *
at the time you have set, O Lord:
15 “In your great mercy, O God, *
answer me with your unfailing help.
16 Save me from the mire; do not let me sink; *
let me be rescued from those who hate me
and out of the deep waters….”

23 They gave me gall to eat, *
and when I was thirsty, they gave me vinegar to drink.

31 As for me, I am afflicted and in pain; *
your help, O God, will lift me up on high.
32 I will praise the Name of God in song; *
I will proclaim his greatness with thanksgiving.
33 This will please the Lord more than an offering of oxen, *
more than bullocks with horns and hoofs.
34 The afflicted shall see and be glad; *
you who seek God, your heart shall live.
35 For the Lord listens to the needy, *
and his prisoners he does not despise.
36 Let the heavens and the earth praise him, *
the seas and all that moves in them;
37 For God will save Zion and rebuild the cities of Judah; *
they shall live there and have it in possession.
38 The children of his servants will inherit it, *
and those who love his Name will dwell therein.

Each of us is offered our share in “the fellowship of his sufferings,” in promise of “the power of his resurrection” (Philippians 3:10). The privilege, in a word, is to join David  in being formed in the likeness of his greater Son, and in singing, praying, and worshiping our way through it all.  

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "King David Statue-4" by zeevveez is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

A Hygiene of the Heart - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 7/29/2021
Thursday of the Ninth Week After Pentecost (Proper 12)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 70; Psalm 71; 2 Samuel 4:1–12; Acts 16:25–40; Mark 7:1–23

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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“For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:21–23).

Jesus’s opponents—the scribes and the Pharisees—can be too easily dismissed, I think, as fools and dullards. When it comes to their scruples about cleanliness at mealtime, well, perhaps it took the late 19th and early 20th century discovery of the germ-origin of many diseases to make us appreciative enough of the importance of hygiene. Hand washing and food preparation do help people avoid disease, and even death.

Nonetheless, Jesus isn’t talking about physical hygiene, is he? He’s talking about a different sort of hygiene. A hygiene of the heart. Waste from food that comes into us simply exits as excrement. As Jesus notes: “…it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer” (Mark 7:19). What should concern us, he contends, is the filth that comes out of unclean hearts: “It is what comes out of a person that defiles” (Mark 7:20). Jesus finds it especially loathsome that we have the capacity to cover irreligion and unrighteousness with a veneer of religiosity and righteousness: “Sorry, Mom and Dad, we pledged so much to the church that we can’t help you make ends meet” (Mark 7:11, paraphrased, of course). 

Part of the gap between us and the contemporaries whom Jesus critiques is that they, at least, distinguish between clean and unclean, between holy and unholy. At least they recognize the categories. Misguided as they may be, at least they are trying. For various reasons, we don’t get it. Some of what separates us from that world is the rank secularism and disenchantment of life that modernity has brought with it. Aided and abetted, I would contend, by a hyper-Protestant, anti-sacramental insistence that “all things, not just some things, are holy.” The result is that we’ve encouraged a mindset that says playing golf or soccer on Sunday is as good as going to church; “bagels and coffee” at Starbucks is as sacred as “wafers and wine” in the assembly. If everything is holy, eventually nothing is holy. If there’s a difference between Jesus’s world and ours, that’s it. And they are closer to the truth than we are. 

Where Jesus’s contemporaries get it wrong is that the difference between holy and unholy isn’t “out there” — in food, or things, or people. The difference is within us. Our hearts manufacture excrement which we spew on everybody and everything around us. Or our hearts produce what the apostle Paul describes as the fruit of the Holy Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22b–23a). And those are the things — and they are holy — that come out of us onto everything and everyone whose lives we touch. 

There are probably worthy observations to be made from the ignoble examples of Ishbaal’s assassins, his lieutenants Rechab and Baanah (2 Samuel 4:5–12). And worthwhile observations as well from the noble example of the Philippian jailer whose question, “What must I do to be saved?” opens up to him a world he never could have imagined. 

But this morning, I can’t get past this astounding challenge from Jesus to look within: just what is it that flows out from the depths of my being? 

Collect for Proper 12. O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Justmee3001, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We Need Not Be Afraid - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 7/28/2021
Wednesday of the Ninth Week After Pentecost (Proper 12)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 72; 2 Samuel 3:22–39; Acts 16:16–24; Mark 6:47–56

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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2 Samuel: David is a complex figure. The Bible is unflinching in narrating David’s flaws, but its estimation of him is that he is “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14). His abiding passion is to promote love for Yahweh, a theme that courses through his psalms: “I love you, O Yahweh, my strength” (Psalm 18:1). And love for Yahweh is his guiding political philosophy as well. That love explains why, whether by sword or diplomacy, he is determined to bring all twelve tribes of the children of Jacob into a united kingdom. Beyond the unification of the kingdom, that love is why, as we shall see in coming days, he will aim to consolidate God’s people’s worship in the city of God. 

Because the commander Abner defects from the deceased Saul’s army, David sees the potential for ending civil war, for uniting the northern tribes (loyal to Saul) and the southern tribes (loyal to David). Sadly, Joab, David’s chief general, doesn’t share that objective. Joab assassinates Abner. This act, he believes, accomplishes two things. He avenges his brother’s death in battle at Abner’s hands (2 Samuel 2:18–23), and he eliminates a rival for power within David’s inner circle.

Bemoaning Abner’s death, even to the point of composing a lament for him (2 Samuel 3:33–34), David makes clear he had trusted and depended on Abner. In a bold, if unwise, political stroke, David retains Joab as general-in-chief. Nevertheless, David invokes a divine curse against him: “The Lord pay back the one who does wickedly in accordance with his wickedness!” (2 Samuel 3:39b). And on his deathbed, David will warn Solomon, his son and successor, that he would do well to dispose of Joab (which Solomon does—see 2 Kings 2). 

Mark: Jesus’s mastery. When David’s greater son, Jesus, comes on the scene, he demonstrates his own mastery over forces that overwhelm and engulf us. Walking on the water, he shows he is Lord of creation — and more, that he is with us in the storm of life so that we need not “be afraid.” In a most intriguing side note, Mark says the disciples’ astonishment at all this is due to the fact that “they did not understand the loaves, but their hearts were hardened” (Mark 6:51–52). If I may offer a considered opinion: I believe that this remark is Mark’s way of referencing the teaching that Jesus had offered about his being “the Bread of Life” that John’s Gospel had narrated following that day’s miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000 (compare Mark 6:30–44 with John 6:1–71). It is assumed by some students of the New Testament that John fabricated this explanatory material and put it into Jesus’s mouth long, long after the events. In my view, Mark’s “they did not understand the loaves” makes better sense as a comment on the disciples’ initial failure to grasp Jesus’s “Bread of Life” discourse. 

Acts: release from captivity. And when David’s greater Son rises from the dead, he commissions servants like Paul to go to the nations: “to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:18). In Philippi, Paul’s gospel about the crucified and risen Jesus releases a young girl from the dual bondage of Satanic possession and predatory exploitation of her “gift” of divination at the hands of her owners.  As a result, the girl’s owners have Paul and Silas flogged and thrown into prison.  Tomorrow we will see how ineffective those measures are against the power of Jesus to release people from all kinds of captivity—including jail. 

God himself has stepped into the ambiguity and confusion of our lives. He has used complex and fallen people in service of designs larger than themselves. He comes to comfort the disheartened, and those near to being drowned in the storms of life. He sets free the used and abused. I pray that each of us can learn to trust him and to follow him. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Adapted from Ivan Aivazovsky, Jesus Walking on Water 1890

Europe Would Be Forever Changed - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 7/27/2021
Tuesday of the Ninth Week After Pentecost (Proper 12)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 61; Psalm 62; 2 Samuel 3:6–21; Acts 16:6–15; Mark 6:30–46

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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2 Samuel. There are not nice, neat Sunday school applications to be drawn from today’s passage in 2 Samuel. It’s a world of civil war, concubinage, broken promises, busted up marriages. Unworthy motives and less than honorable means toward a worthy goal: the establishment of a united kingdom under Yahweh’s anointed. 

It’s important to remember that the Bible isn’t always being prescriptive (telling us what we ought to do). A passage like this one is more descriptive (telling us what happened). The Bible is realistic about the fallenness of the creatures through whom God is working his plan. To my mind, it’s part of what gives the Bible the ring of truth. Some actions are recorded not to inspire emulation, but to evoke from us, “Lord, have mercy. Give us grace to see your hand at work in the world around us, because bringing good out of evil is what you do. Praise be.”

In the wake of King Saul’s death, war breaks out between the house of Saul and the house of David. Abner, Saul’s former general, offers to go over to David’s side after Saul’s son Ishbaal accuses him of “going in” to Saul’s concubine. (Apparently, Ishbaal suspects Abner of making his own play to become Saul’s successor.) David accepts the offer under the condition that Abner bring him Michal, Saul’s daughter whom Saul had betrothed to David but had given her instead to a different husband. Weeping, Michal’s husband, Paltiel, accompanies Michal and Abner until he is told to go home.

Today’s passage ends with the solidification of the pact between Abner and David, chiefly marked by Abner’s promise that he will convince all the generals from  Israel (the northern tribes) to join David, thus uniting all Judah and Israel under David, just as Samuel had predicted. 

Mark. Thankfully, among the things the Bible describes are the unique acts by which God invades his fallen world to bring redemption and rescue. All four gospels celebrate one of those redemptive acts: the feeding of the 5,000. Here, anticipating the offering of himself in the Eucharistic feast, Jesus “takes … blesses … breaks … and gives” the bread and the fish (Mark 6:41). By God’s grace, what should feed only a handful of people nourishes a multitude. God comes to replace scarcity with plenty, and hunger with satisfaction. 

Acts. As though to illustrate the dynamic of multiplication that Jesus’s Eucharistic act enacts, today’s reading in Acts shows breakthroughs in the gospel’s progress — the invasion of light into darkness. 

Unwilling to force God’s hand (the Spirit has said “No” to their attempts to evangelize western and northern Asia Minor [“Asia” and “Bithynia”]), Paul and his itinerary wait in Troas on the western shore of Asia Minor. (It may be noted that Troas is the site of ancient Troy, the staging area for the Persian king Cyrus’s attempt to invade Greece and Europe centuries earlier.) 

Paul has a nighttime vision of a man from across the Aegean Sea: “Come over to Macedonia (northern Greece) and help us” (Acts 16:9). Paul and his group decide that the Lord is calling them to take the gospel to Greece. The long-lasting effects of this incursion of God’s tiny army of evangelists from Asia to Europe will prove to be far more significant than Cyrus’s failed invasion. Europe will be forever changed by this boatload of gospel-bearers. 

(Incidentally, Luke, the narrator of Acts for the first time includes himself in the account: “…we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them” — Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1–28:16). Most commentators think this is a significant note. Some suggest the man from Macedonia was Luke himself, and that he himself came over to Troas from Greece and appeared before Paul that night. Alternatively, the “vision” may have been a true “vision.” The Greek Luke may have already been a part of the traveling band, and who now begins to write himself into the story as the gospel begins its foray into his homeland.) 

In Philippi, the first named convert is a woman named Lydia, a merchant in expensive purple cloth. The Lord opens her heart to believe (one of several notes indicating Luke’s understanding that faith itself is God’s gift — see Acts 16:14; and also 13:48; 18:27). She becomes host and patron to Paul and his company. These are profound breakthroughs for the gospel — reminiscent of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes — from Asia to Europe, with the anchoring of ministry in the home of a woman. 

Collect for Proper 12. O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: San Jose, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A Hot Mess in Need of Fixing- Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 7/26/2021
Monday of the Ninth Week After Pentecost (Proper 12) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 56; Psalm 57; Psalm 58; 2 Samuel 2:1–11; Acts 15:36–16:5; Mark 6:14–29

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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I made the mistake this morning of checking the news services before beginning my devotions. Evil and folly have such a grip on our world! I’d list examples, but you can fill in the blanks. Tomorrow’s examples will be different. Except they won’t be. They’ll be different expressions of the same old same old. 

Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake. The world I found when I finally read today’s biblical texts is like ours: a hot mess badly in need of fixing. Abner, former commander of recently deceased king Saul’s army, refuses to accept David’s rule. Paul and Barnabas split up because they disagree about John Mark’s reliability. Herod Antipas beheads John the Baptist. Their world and ours are aptly described in the words of the Eucharistic prayer: “When we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death….” 

Always, though, always, the God of the Bible is working to reclaim a world and people he created and that he has never stopped loving. 

2 Samuel: the messy unification of the kingdom. This week’s readings in 2 Samuel begin with David’s anointing as king of Judah (in the south), and they will conclude on Friday with his anointing as king of Israel (in the north). Amidst a great deal of intrigue, betrayal, and Realpolitik, a united kingdom is coming together under the Lord’s Anointed. Despite our fallenness (including the fallenness of our heroes), God is advancing his plan ultimately to redeem the world through his one true King of one united People. 

Acts: when even the good guys can’t get along. The power of evil and folly emerges within the apostolic band — Paul and Barnabas and John Mark are made of the same stuff as we. For unspecified reasons, the young John Mark abandoned the mission during the first missionary journey after success on Cyprus (Acts 13:13). He is cousin to Barnabas, and he may be upset by a reorganization of a mission that began as “Barnabas and Saul” but is now “Paul and Barnabas.” Regardless of the reason, when it’s time to begin a second missionary journey, Paul is unwilling to have on the team someone whose loyalty or dependability he can’t count on. Barnabas lobbies Paul unsuccessfully for John Mark’s inclusion. These two gospel-allies are at an impasse. 

This story could have taken any number of destructive turns, but it doesn’t. Rather than seek some sort of severe sanction against each other, they separate, and continue ministering the gospel. Barnabas takes John Mark back to Cyprus. Paul makes Silas his number two (Silas likely, years later, becomes the amanuensis for Peter) and heads into mainland Asia Minor, where he adds Timothy as young protégé. Through division, the ministry expands. What’s more, evidence from three of Paul’s later letters (Colossians, Philemon, and 2 Timothy) indicates that over the course of more than a decade of ministry, the breach between Paul and Barnabas over John Mark is healed. On the eve of his martyrdom very nearly the last words Paul pens are these: “Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is a great help to me in ministry” (2 Timothy 3:11). 

Our best intentions, it turns out, are themselves in need of redemption. The Bible knows that. I’m so glad for that.  

Mark: when fools are “large and in charge.” Somehow, buffoons wind up at the head table. Reckless fools are given power over life and death. It’s that way now. It was that way then. “King Herod” is case in point. Note the quotation marks. Mark is thoroughly tongue-in-cheek when he refers to Herod Antipas this way. Antipas’s father King Herod “the Great” (would-be assassin of baby Jesus) divided his kingdom into fourths, so that each of his sons was a “tetrarch” (ruler of a fourth), not a king.  That first Herod’s ego was so “great” it would not allow any son to become greater than he. 

Antipas fancied himself “king,” but he wasn’t. His promise to Salome (early historian Josephus names the story’s dancer) of up to half his “kingdom” is the empty bluster of a blowhard. He has no “kingdom” up to half of which to give! Moreover, his aspiration to become a king will cost him everything. He has tried to dominate his brother Philip by stealing away Herodias, Philip’s wife (and Antipas’s own niece). To do so, Antipas has divorced his first wife, whose aggrieved father, a few years later, will defeat Antipas in war. Antipas is then  permanently and shamefully banished. . Antipas is a king in braggadocio only. 

Alas, while they’re at the head table, buffoons entertain their audience. As long as they have  power over life and death, they do much harm — witness the fate of John the Baptist. But in the end, they lose. In the end, John the Baptist’s promise of being followed by one greater than he comes true. In the end, the baptism of Holy Spirit and fire comes. In the end, the Baptist will rise, showing buffoonery and reckless foolishness to be exactly the sham that they are. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "Good news bad news" by PORTOBESENO is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A Chosen Journey - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 7/23/2021

It’s summer, and it’s the first week of the last year of my sixth decade. Another break from the Daily Office seems to be in order. I’m offering, this week, yet more worship themes I’ve developed with my friends at Worship Leader Magazine. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, July 26.

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Dante’s Song: From Exile to Pilgrimage

A “new song” celebrates God’s deliverance from exile. Sometimes the song is the deliverance. Singing transforms experiences and changes perspectives. 

Such is the case with Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Divine Comedy.

Many of us came across at least part of the Comedy somewhere in school. Perhaps we’ve read the Inferno, where, in the chilling words of C. S. Lewis, God says to the sinner, “Thy will be done.” Perhaps we took a course that included the Purgatorio, where those whose sins have been covered and who are guaranteed a place in heaven experience cleansing from the pollution of their sins. Fewer of us, probably, have tasted of the Paradiso, where dance and song become more and more prominent as the soul rises to God. 

The Origin

Less known is the fact that the Divine Comedy is itself a product of exile. For Dante, homelessness became a permanent feature “in the middle of his life.” At about age 35 and at the height of a promising calling as poet and politician, Dante experienced a dramatic and devastating reversal of fortune at the hands of political enemies. He then spent the last 20 or so years of his life — when he did most of the writing for the Divine Comedy — away from home, “knowing the salty taste of others’ bread” (bread in his native Florence was made without salt) and “going up and down stairs” as a guest in homes not his own. 

Separated from his family, and with his career in ruins, Dante awakes “alone” (literally) “in a dark wood” (metaphorically). From this vantage point, he looks anew at himself, at the human condition, and at the Christian story. 

He writes about an imagined meeting with two people. In the Inferno he comes across a fellow poet-statesman, Pier delle Vigne, who found himself — like Dante — betrayed and suddenly out of favor (Inferno XIII). This soul’s response was suicide. Delle Vigne gave up on living and sought grim satisfaction through his suicide against those who had wronged him. 

In the Paradiso, on the other hand, Dante meets his own great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida (Paradiso XV-XVIII). Cacciaguida recounts pilgrimage to the Holy Land and his battles for truth as a Crusader. Then he forecasts in some detail his great-great-grandson’s exile, but promises that Dante’s fame will shine all the brighter “for having become a party of your own.” Cacciaguida challenges Dante to take advantage of his poetic gifts to become a pilgrim and crusader in his own right: to journey deeper into the Christian story and tell the truth about what’s wrong with us and with the church.  

Chosen Journey

It was writing this extraordinary song of 14,000 lines that turned Dante’s exile into a pilgrimage. Dante sang his lament, and his forced exit from home became a chosen journey into the heart of God’s redeeming story. Not only that, but his personal loneliness drove him to realize that his true community was vast and personal, comprised of every soul for whom Christ died and who will attain resurrection life. And by writing his “new song” in the people’s Italian rather than the church’s Latin, Dante invites every one of us into his party.  

Many of us have experienced exiles not unlike Dante’s. Not everybody who shows up on a Sunday morning has had a great week. Many are in marriages than make them feel they’d be less lonely single. Some will have heard from a boss that week, “We’re moving in a different direction…” Nearly all are acutely aware they are not the person they wish they were. 

What can we offer? Well, we can make sure not to skirt the painful and difficult parts of the Bible’s story in worship. We can make sure the psalms of lament are read and sung. We can use art that tells the truth about the Christian life as journey. We can offer generous opportunity for the most basic of Christian prayers: “Lord, have mercy.”

Perhaps the most important thing we as worship leaders can offer is ourselves as “living epistles” of what it is to live in pilgrimage rather than exile. Perhaps there are artists or poets who draw profound emotions or deep thoughts from you, who point you to Christ’s suffering and glory and your place in them. “Alone and in a dark wood” not long ago myself, I found in Dante a soul-mate and a guide through the dark wood. Maybe he could be the same for you, or — perhaps you have your own song to write. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Portrait of Dante, After Sandro Botticelli , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A More Powerful Singer - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 7/22/2021

It’s summer, and it’s the first week of the last year of my sixth decade. Another break from the Daily Office seems to be in order. I’m offering, this week, yet more worship themes I’ve developed with my friends at Worship Leader Magazine. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, July 26.

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The 1st Theologian of “New Song”

Occasionally, an ancient writer hits you with a jaw-droppingly fresh insight. The first theologian to discover the power of the idea of Jesus as God’s “New Song” was Clement of Alexandria in the early 200’s: “I have called Him a New Song.” 

This is the promise He (Jesus) made to the Father: “I will declare your name to My brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I sing praises to You” (Heb 2:12). 

Clement then asks Christ:

… to sing praises, and declare to me God Your Father. Your story will save, Your song will instruct me.

Clement ministered in a city that had been founded 500 years earlier by Alexander the Great as the portal for bringing Greek “reason” and “culture” to the “unenlightened” and “uncultured” East. In addition, Alexandria had long been home to many Jews in permanent exile. Alexandria was the place where the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Alexandria was also the center of an intellectual approach to Judaism that had come close to reducing Israel’s story of redemption to a mere philosophy of moral improvement. 

The genius of Clement lies in his ability to take an Old Testament motif of a New Song (see Isaiah 42:10; Psalm 33:3) that is fulfilled in the New Testament (Revelation 5:9; 14:3) and apply it creatively and redemptively in a non-Christian world that already had its own thoughts about music.  

Magic of Music

Ancient Greece was fascinated with music, imagining the cosmos itself to reverberate to various musical modes. Personifying the magic of music was the Greek hero Orpheus. His music was supposed to have tamed beasts and moved inanimate objects. In classical Greece, great contests of song — of Olympian proportion — honored Orpheus’s memory. By the time of the emergence of Christianity, however, buffoons like Nero (who rigged musical contests to make himself the winner) made a mockery of this memory. Still, the games went on — an unending run of American Idol, despite a talent drain. 

Everlasting New Song

There is a “harmony” to the universe, grants Clement in his extended tract Exhortation to the Greeks. But that “harmony” has nothing to do with speculation about musical modes, and everything to do with the “symphony” of Being that has constituted the Trinity from eternity. 

With the fatherly purpose of God … and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man too, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument of the universe He (the Word of God) makes music to God. 

This eternal “harmony” and “symphony” between Father, Word, and Spirit became concrete when the Word became a human being. Christ came to make us like himself and to draw us into the eternal relationship — the eternal “harmony” and “symphony” — that has always existed within the godhead. 

Jesus the New Song

Thus, Clement proclaims: “Because the Word lately took a name — the name consecrated of old and worthy of power, the Christ, I have called him a New Song.” And while ancient Greeks mythologize and fantasize about a revered hero of the past taming beasts through song, Christians know a more powerful Singer:

He is the only one who ever tamed the most intractable of all wild beasts — human beings. For he tamed birds, that is, people who are flighty; reptiles, that is, those who are crafty; lions, that is, the passionate; swine, that is, those who are pleasure-loving; wolves, that is, the rapacious. … All these most savage beasts, … the heavenly song of itself transformed into gentle people. …

See how mighty is the New Song! It has made … humans out of wild beasts. They who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the real and true life, revived when they heard the song.

Those who awake to God’s song of redemption 

will dance with angels around the unbegotten and only imperishable and only true God, the Word of God joining us in our hymn of praise. 

What an amazing thought! Clement compellingly contextualized biblical imagery to speak to a culture of disbelief at the beginning of the 3rd century. May we at the beginning of the 3rd millennium be as faithfully creative. Because the story Jesus tells still saves, and the song He sings still instructs.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

From Scrolls to Scrolling - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 7/21/2021

It’s summer, and it’s the first week of the last year of my sixth decade. Another break from the Daily Office seems to be in order. I’m offering, this week, yet more worship themes I’ve developed with my friends at Worship Leader Magazine. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, July 26.

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Wisdom for Worship in a Wiki-world 

Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. …
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock,” I

When the present information revolution was still in the womb, T. S. Eliot worried about losing wisdom in the quest for knowledge, and abandoning knowledge out of lust for information. Imagine how he’d felt if he’d had Wikipedia. Imagine if he could have seen the days when his own poems could be hypertexted out of rather than be patiently labored through. Imagine if he had to drive on roads with people who were literally risking Life because they were busy texting, “lost in their living”? 

The ancient church offers wisdom for a time like ours. 

From Scrolls to Scrolling

“In the beginning was the scroll,” quips University of Pennsylvania Professor Robert A. Kraft, a pioneer in the digitizing and coding of ancient texts. Prior to Christianity, scrolls were the tenured medium for literature, both among pagans and Jews. Scrolls were revered, but they were cumbersome. Scrolls unrolled (literally!) texts at their own pace, but they virtually forced you to “read through” a text.

An extraordinary technological innovation took place during the first four centuries of the church’s existence. About A.D. 331, the emperor Constantine commissioned the publication of fifty Bibles. In terms of content, his act signaled the consensus that had emerged about what the boundaries of Christian Scripture are. In terms of form, his act put the capstone on Christians’ adoption of the “book” over the “scroll.” In fact, the term “Bible” means literally “book.” “The Book” was compact and portable. “The Book” allowed us to embody the singular story that runs from Genesis to Revelation as an accessible, coherent whole. “The Book” allowed cross-referencing and the comparing of one passage with another. Judging “the Book” to be better suited to teaching and to furthering the mission, we adopted it as a better medium for our message. 

Quite Controversial

The shift from scroll to book was not without risk. When literature is in book- rather than scroll-form, it’s easier to stand over a text rather than come under it. Once you can cross-reference, you can also skip around. If you don’t have to “read through” a text and submit yourself to its agenda, you can also merely access a text and look for support for what you already believe. 

The ancient church could take the risk because of the way they worshiped. In the first place, the great creeds — crisp summaries of the faith — come from this era. And these weren’t just abstract, theoretical documents. They served worship. They were the means by which the worshiping church said, in response to the Word: “Amen. So we believe. So we will live.” The concise Apostles Creed came to mark worship during baptism and the more complete Nicene Creed worship during communion. 

In the second place, it looks like ancient churches aspired to be reading the same parts of the biblical story, together. They have left to us lectionaries (prescribed scriptural readings for public worship), testimonies of the desire to get full coverage of the Bible’s story line over time. The lectionaries themselves came to be tied to a calendar, shaped not around the pagan Roman calendar, but around the sacred events of Jesus’ life (from Advent and Christmas through Holy Week, Pentecost, and Ascension). In worship, “the Book” served the telling of a singular, lucid story: Jesus’ story. 

Baby and Bathwater

C. S. Lewis once advised reading one old book for every new, or at least one old one for every three new ones. My own corollary: one ancient practice for every new. To our google- and wiki-world, with its profound “decentralization of information,” the wisdom of the creeds can speak with perhaps even greater force than they did when they were formulated. Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Creed and Alexander Schmemann’s I Believe have helped me appreciate the oneness of voice with which the church has always sought — and must continue to seek — to speak. In the midst of the nearly anarchic approaches to preaching in the evangelical world — expository, topical, purpose-driven, gospel-centered, whatever — the lectionary for corporate reading and the “daily office” for personal reading deserve a second look. They offer a way of centering our corporate and personal reading around the life and work of the Bible’s point — Jesus. They also put us in fellowship with a vast number of fellow journeyers around the world and across time. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Praying Baptism's Story - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 7/20/2021

It’s summer, and it’s the first week of the last year of my sixth decade. Another break from the Daily Office seems to be in order. I’m offering, this week, yet more worship themes I’ve developed with my friends at Worship Leader Magazine. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, July 26.

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Praying Baptism’s Story 

We stood around a large, water-filled salad bowl that served as a makeshift baptismal  font. We had gathered to renew our baptismal vows. Each of us responded to the water as we saw fit. One dropped a nail into it: “Thank you, Jesus, for taking away my sins.” Another dipped his hands into the water and touched his forehead, his eyes, his ears, his lips: “Lord, be in my doing, my thinking, my seeing, my hearing, my speaking.”

Several told the story of their baptism: 

“I wore my best dress the day of my baptism because I knew that I would rise from that water a new person.”

“At my baptism, the minister totally messed up my name. It reminded me that God and nobody else gave me my new name.”

One plunged her hands into the water and then touched the hands of each person in the group: “These waters so often divide us. But today, may they make us one. May it be with us, ‘One Lord, one faith, one baptism.’”

Baptism is where our vastly different stories become one story—indeed, where they become God’s story.

Changing Plotlines

The early church understood that baptism marked the place where believers stepped out of one story and into another. That is one of the things their liturgies and their catechisms shout to us across the centuries. I have learned to punctuate worship services (baptismal and otherwise) with elements of the baptismal prayers of the ancient church:

We give you thanks, eternal God,
for you nourish and sustain all living things
by the gift of water.

In the beginning of time,
your Spirit moved over the watery chaos,
calling forth order and life.

The watery rhythms of life bear the kiss of God: from precipitation to condensation to evaporation, from Central Florida’s gorgeous thunderclouds to Iceland’s majestic glaciers, from rivers that flow to tides that wax and wane. Here is a God who is wildly alive. Here is a God to celebrate.

In the time of Noah,
you destroyed evil by the waters of the flood,
giving righteousness a new beginning.

Finish Line

God’s storyline will end with evil vanquished, and with good and right in charge. Some days this very hope is all that gets me out of bed.

You led Israel out of slavery,
through the waters of the sea,
into the freedom of the Promised Land.

We do not have to live in chains of guilt or shame or impotence, but can walk in the open spaces of forgiveness and peace and power and virtue. In addition, to work for the freedom of others is not futile. That is mighty good news!

In the waters of Jordan
Jesus was baptized by John
and anointed with your Spirit.

By the baptism of his own death and resurrection,
Christ set us free from sin and death,
and opened the way to eternal life.

Redemption

God permanently strapped our humanity to himself. Jesus walked in perfect fellowship with his Father. Like “early rain” that promises an abundant growing season, Jesus’ dominion over sickness and death and evil prefigured humanity’s own calling and destiny. He poured out an offering that covers all our disobedience. It is wondrously beyond comprehension. It staggers the imagination. It … redeems the imagination.

We thank you, O God, for the water of baptism.
In it we were buried with Christ in his death.
From it we were raised to share in his resurrection,
Through it we were reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit.

By some divine mystery—known only to faith, revealed only by the Spirit, and touched only when we step into the waters with Jesus—his death and life become ours.

In joyful obedience to your Son,
we celebrate our fellowship in him in faith.
We pray that all who have passed through the
water of baptism, Father God, may continue forever
in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

Baptism’s story gives me a stake in the well-being of everyone with whom I share its water. Baptism’s bond trumps all others. Sharing baptism’s heritage and prospect overshadows all other loyalties, all other claims, all other affections. Baptism tells a story of water that is thicker than blood.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Baptismal Font, Stykkisholmskirkja, Stykkishomur, Iceland