In Christ, Faith Comes - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Sunday • 12/24/2023 •
Christmas Eve, Year Two  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Psalm 46; Baruch 4:36–5:9; Galatians 3:23–4:7; Matthew 1:18–25 

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 explore that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me this Christmas Eve in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary. Merry Christmas!  

At Christmas, “Faith” Came 

“…if only I could believe….” My heart broke to hear those words from a college classmate after we finished reading Dante’s Purgatorio together: “The architecture of thought in the Christian vision is so beautiful,” he said, “and the hope is so radiant … if only I could believe it is true.”  

Years of pastoral ministry have brought many iterations of that same thought: “The promise of free forgiveness is inviting, but I just can’t believe it’s really that free.” … “What I’ve done is so bad, so unforgivable, there’s no way I can believe God can accept me.” … “I’d love to believe in Christ … but I’d love to believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy too!”   

Personally, I’ve felt the pressure in sermon after sermon I’ve heard and theological treatise after theological treatise I’ve read to dig deep down inside myself for enough faith to feel certain about God’s love for and acceptance of me. How much faith must I have to know assurance of salvation? Sometimes that pressure has felt unbearable.  

But what about the prospect that the center of my faith—and the center of faith for all those who fear they just can’t believe, or believe enough, or believe accurately enough—lies outside us, not in us? What if it’s all a gift? What if it all comes from Jesus himself?  

“But now that faith has come…” (Galatians 3:25). These are some of the most extraordinary words Paul ever wrote. Behind them stands a mind-blowing proposition and a most amazing sequence of events. Paul is not saying that “faith” is a new thing with the New Testament, and that “faith” had not been exercised before the coming of Christ. The Old Testament is full of examples of faith. What Paul means is, “But now that Christ has come…” In this phrase, as New Testament theologian Richard Hays has argued, “faith” is a metonymy (another name for) Jesus.* 

Image: eastern wall, Stykkishólmskirkja, Stykkishólmur, Iceland 

Somewhere in the councils of eternity, the Second Person of the Trinity, God’s Eternal Son, entrusted himself to the plan whereby his coming would bring us redemption. He delivered himself to a process by which he would become embryo, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, and adult. He gave himself to the journey of learning obedience—not like us, from disobedience to obedience, but from one level of obedience to another (Hebrews 5:8). He believed that if he surrendered to his betrayer, to his torturers, and to the agony of the Cross, he would be vindicated and brought back from the grave. He trusted that by his death, he would become the firstborn of many brothers and sisters (Romans 8:29). He believed that his shame would give way to fame, his humiliation to glorification. In Christ, there is “faith” beyond anything that could ever be asked of you and me.  

I’m a lot like Paul, who, by his own admission, could not find this faith in himself. He found it in Jesus: “the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 1:14). And so, once again at Christmas, I find myself utterly astounded that a faith that I could not find within myself came for me—and for so, so many others who know how hard it is to believe. In Christ, faith comes. Through Christ, faith becomes a gift: “…and this is not your own doing,” says Paul, “it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).  

Thank you, Jesus, for believing for us what we could not believe for ourselves. Thank you for being the Incarnate manifestation of God’s own trustworthiness. Thank you for securing a salvation we could never dream up or make ourselves believe in. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being the assurance of our salvation.  

Merry Christmas,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

*Richard Hays, The Faith of Jesus, p. 159.  

Armor of Light - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 12/22/2023 •
Friday of the Third Week of Advent, Year Two  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 40; Psalm 54; Zechariah 7:8–8:17 (includes Saturday’s reading); Revelation 5:6–14; Matthew 25:14–30 

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 Third Week of Advent. This new Christian year finds us in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary. 

Advent’s keynote Collect keeps coming to mind, and I find myself praying it constantly this Advent season: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

Today’s passages prompt meditation on casting away works of darkness and putting on armor of light.  

Zechariah. In Israel, the world was supposed to see what bearing God’s image looks like. Surrounding nations were supposed to see what God’s heart looks like in the way that Israelites lived their lives: committed to truthfulness, showing kindness and mercy especially to the lowly and the lost (Zechariah 7:9–10). God’s complaint, via Zechariah, is that he had placed Israel among the nations to be light amid darkness, but that they had contributed as much to the darkness as anybody. In place of justice, Yahweh found oppression; instead of kindness and mercy, hearts filled with evil intent; instead of ears attuned to God’s law and hearts ready to obey, ears purposefully stopped up and hearts adamantly set against God’s ways (Zechariah 7:11–12). Lord, have mercy! 

Image: adaptation from "Armor by Helmschmied" by ellenm1 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

But God’s redemptive purposes for Israel and the world can be held back only so long: “Just as you have been a cursing among the nations, O house of Judah and house of Israel, so I will save you and you shall be a blessing” (Zechariah 8:13). Yahweh brings his children home and promises peace and prosperity so they can return to their basic mission in this world as a kingdom of priests and as God’s “peculiar possession”: “Speak the truth to one another, render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace” (Zechariah 8:16; and see Exodus 19:5,6).  

Judah’s and Israel’s return to the land is a call to cast away the works of darkness (deceit in the marketplace, in their courts, and in their worship; and oppression of the poor in their social life) and to put on the armor of light (truthfulness, peaceability kindness, and mercy). In doing so, Zechariah promises, they will receive his blessing: “For there shall be a sowing of peace; the vine shall yield its fruit, the ground shall give its produce, and the skies shall give their dew; and I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things” (Zechariah 8:12).  

Revelation. The generation of Zechariah, Zerubbabel, and Joshua experience in a promissory way the wonderful reality of God’s people being a light in the darkness of human experience, of modeling redemptive life amid fallen darkness.  

In the New Testament we find the fulfillment of Zechariah’s vision in the appearance of Jesus Christ. As the Lion of Judah who is slaughtered as a Lamb, Jesus removes forever the stench and the stain of sin. He ransoms for God people from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9b). Fittingly, then, the heavenly courts sing to Jesus “a new song”: “you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth” (Revelation 5:9,10).  

Matthew. On behalf of this same Jesus, Matthew addresses Jesus’s Parable of the Tenants to the church. As a result of his atoning death, the resurrected Jesus has received “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18). If I may compress some of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew: with Emmanuel our King (“God with us”) living among and within us, we so manifest God’s life on this earth, whether by deed (“light of the world” … “salt of the earth” … “a city on a hill”) or by word (“making disciples … teaching … baptizing”), that at the end of time, people will have to acknowledge Jesus’s lordship (“… they will glorify your Father in heaven”—Matthew 5:13,14,16; 18:20; 28:20).  

The Parable of the Talents takes its place within the larger context of Jesus’s teaching in Matthew by showing us that each of us is given some place of authority and some empowerment within that great mission. How tragic it would be, according to the parable, if at the end of time we were to show ourselves contemptuous of the Lord who, like “a man going on a journey,” had so graciously entrusted us with a share of his estate. How magnificent it will be, by contrast, to find that our faithful use of what gifts and authority he has assigned us will doubly redound to his glory and to our own honor.  

It is a staggering prospect—enough to prompt the Advent prayer: help us, Lord, to “cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life…” Amen! 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Oil in Our Lamps - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 12/21/2023 •
Thursday of the Third Week of Advent, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 50; Zechariah 4:1–14; Revelation 4:9–5:5; Matthew 25:1–13 

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 on this Thursday of the Third Week of Advent. This new Christian year finds us in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary. 

Many of us know what it is to look over the landscape of our lives and see devastation. Whether it’s being abandoned by parents or a spouse, being under-appreciated at work, seeing our body succumb to disease, or losing our willpower to resist an addiction or an obsession. Sometimes, surveying the wreckage of our lives can be debilitating.  

For such a time, Yahweh gives Zechariah a vision of hope. In 520 B.C., Jerusalemites inhabited a desolate city. Where Solomon’s temple had once stood, they could see only rubble. Under the leadership of Joshua the priest and Zerubbabel the governor, a foundation had recently been laid for a new temple. But, still, the overall scene was bleak, like a movie depiction of post-apocalyptic destruction.  

Image: Bíblia de Cervera, Menorá de Zacarias from National Library of Portugal , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 

Through a fourth nighttime vision he gives to Zechariah, Yahweh invites his people to imagine the temple as though it had already been rebuilt and furnished. Yahweh highlights two furnishings: a golden lampstand and two olive trees (I’m not sure what olive trees are doing inside the temple—but dreams have their own logic!). Combining the symbolic elements of both furnishings, Yahweh urges them to understand that no matter how bad things look, there’s nothing he can’t accomplish by his Spirit.  

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). The oil of the lampstand and the oil which the olive trees produces are symbols of God’s life-giving, light-bearing, power-releasing Spirit. God’s fuel will keep the lights on in the temple. God’s strength will keep the workers working and the enemies and detractors at bay.  

“‘What are these two branches of the olive trees, which pour out the oil through the two golden pipes?’ He said to me, ‘Do you not know what these are?’ I said, ‘No, my lord. Then he said, ‘These are the two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth’” (Zechariah 4:12–14). In Zechariah’s day, two offices received an empowering anointing: Joshua the priest, and Zerubbabel the governor, one to pray and the other to govern. The glory of the new order that Jesus would institute six centuries later is the combining of these roles into one: a Priest-King, after an older order, that of Genesis 14’s Melchizedek, who is both “king of righteousness” and “priest of the Most High” (see the Epistle to the Hebrews in toto).   

“The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also complete it. … [W]hoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice…” (Zechariah 4:9–10). Who could have imagined what this “day of small things” would yield? Fast forward to the astounding vision in Revelation of the Lion of Judah stepping forward in answer to the question as to who has the moral right and the capacity to unfold the scroll of human history: “‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’ … ‘See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’” (Revelation 5:2b,5b).  

Refusing to wither in the face of adversity and of the enormity of the task set before them, Zechariah and Zerubbabel and Joshua gamely play their part in their “day of small things.” May God give us grace to do the same.  

Matthew: keeping oil in our lamps. Advent normalizes our waiting. Therein lies its poignance! Advent says that it’s OK to have a hard time holding onto hope when the horizon seems far off … and that it’s not OK to give up and quit hoping. That’s the entire point of Jesus’s parable about the bridesmaids. Through a long night watch, their one job is to be on the alert to welcome the groom. Half come prepared to do so and do stay on the alert. Half don’t come prepared, and finally must abandon their calling. As we’d put it colloquially, they run out of gas. Our job is to be among those who keep hoping and not run out of gas.  

Zechariah the prophet was given a glimpse of the great things that God was going to do to build his Kingdom; and his generation had no small part in keeping that hope alive. Joshua the priest and Zerubbabel the governor were called to envision a rebuilt temple and to work towards it, knowing all the while that it was “not by might, not by power,” but by God’s Spirit that the work would get done. But the true temple building awaited the appearing of Christ who united the work of Prophet, Priest, and Prince; brought the whole system of sacrifice to its perfect end; and ushered in God’s righteous rule.  

God’s Kingdom has been inaugurated in all the events that flow out of Christ’s birth at Christmas. God’s Kingdom will be consummated at the end of time when Christ returns in triumph and power. In the meantime, God’s Kingdom continues among us in our Advent lives, as we learn to find hope in the ashes of our lives.* At Advent, we renew our commitment to count on the promise that God burns only to refine, that he wastes none of the tears of his loved ones, and that he makes every instance of suffering a “fellowship in the sufferings of Christ” himself (see Philippians 3:10).  

Richest Advent blessings to you this day,  

Reggie Kidd+  

*Thanks to my friend Richard Pratt for his pithy way of putting the three-phase coming of God’s Kingdom: inauguration, continuation, and consummation.  

A Fourth Vision of Hope - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday •12/20/2023 •
Wednesday of the Third Week of Advent 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:49–72; Zechariah 3:1–10; Revelation 4:1–8; Matthew 24:45–51 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we ask how God might direct our lives from that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Wednesday of the Third Week of Advent. This new Christian year finds us in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary. 

Zechariah receives a fourth nighttime vision of hope. “Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan, ‘The Lord rebuke you, O Satan!’” (Zechariah 3:1). Satan the accuser’s accusations mean nothing when the Lord steps in. Despite the complicity of the priesthood in Israel’s guilt, Yahweh intends to bring purity back into worship.  

Symbolic of the guilt of past priests, Joshua the high priest appears at first with filthy garments. The LORD removes them and replaces them: “See, I have taken your guilt away from you, and I will clothe you with festal apparel” (Zechariah 3:5).  

Yahweh knows that this can be but a partial measure because every priest, including this Joshua, is a sinner, and can offer only tainted offerings. Thus, Yahweh promises a better Priest. He informs Joshua that he and his colleagues “are an omen of things to come; I am going to bring my servant the Branch” (Zechariah 3:8b). Through that branch, Yahweh promises to “remove the guilt of this land in a single day” (Zechariah 3:9b).  

 In Jesus Christ, that Branch has come. In his obedient life and in his sacrifice on the cross, Jesus Christ has removed the guilt of the whole earth “in a single day.” Praise be! 

Image: "O Radix Iesse" by Lawrence OP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0  

Revelation 4 (again)! A few weeks ago, the Daily Office Lectionary took us up to the Sunday of Christ the King (the culmination of the Christian Year) by telling us the destiny of two women, the Harlot of Babylon and the Bride of Christ (Revelation 12–22). History concludes with the separate destinies of these two. As part of the preface for that narrative, the Lectionary took us back to Revelation 4 and its throne room scene.  

Here in Advent at the beginning of a new Christian Year, the Lectionary has taken us through Revelation’s letters to the seven churches (Revelation 2–3). These letters are portals into the various travails and victories of the church—the Bride in Waiting— through the ages. Appropriately, after inviting us to read those letters, the Lectionary revisits the throne room scene. We need to be reminded of the glory that stands above us in the midst of our struggles here below.  

Things said a month ago are worth saying again:  

Now, with Chapter 4, the Lord begins to pull back the curtain that, for now at least, separates earth and heaven. He shows John (and us) what’s going on behind the scenes: “…and there in heaven a door stood open!” (Revelation 4:11b). In his vision, John is taken, in the first place, to the throne room, where the Creator of heaven and earth still governs. Here, God the Father sits on a throne in a setting redolent with colors of the rainbow—his symbol that he is both creator and preserver of his good creation (Revelation 4:3).  

Worship ascends to the Father from all of creation: from wild animal life (the lion), from domesticated creatures (the ox), from the birds of the air (the eagle), and from humanity (the human face—Revelation 4:6b). Twenty-four elders (Israel’s twelve tribes and Jesus’s twelve disciples) represent the full sweep of the biblical story, humanity’s true history and destiny. Each of the twenty-four has his own throne and crown. In humble adoration, each lays his crown at the feet of God.  

Week after week, the struggling church here below accepts the liturgy’s invitation to join this heavenly chorus in their unending song, “Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8b). Their song is our song as well. For when we sing, with them, of the worth of our Lord and God, we re-center our lives around the fact that reality is thicker than what we can perceive with our senses. 

Matthew: how should we then live? I borrow this sub-heading from a book that Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop co-wrote in the mid-1970s, surveying the challenge that believers face in advocating for life in a death culture. Jesus intends his sobering parable about an abusive household steward, I think, to make us draw back in horror, and say “May it never be!”  

We have been so loved that Christ gave his life as a sacrifice for our sins (Matthew 26:28—the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise to remove Joshua the high priest’s filthy clothes!). Christ has promised us his very presence each and every day (Matthew 18:20; 28:20). Christ has promised us a place in the coming renewal of all things: “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28).  

The very thought that we who are beneficiaries of such great gifts and have been entrusted with such a high calling should live abusive and self-indulgent lives — a horrific thought! How should we then live, indeed? Well, that’s largely what Matthew’s glorious gospel is all about, beginning with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and running all the way through, “Teaching them all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 5:3; 28:20). That is who we are!  

And that is why our keynote prayer in Advent is: Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+  

“Most Freaking Awesome!” - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 12/19/2023 •
Tuesday of the Third Week of Advent, Year Two  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Zechariah 2:1–13; Revelation 3:14–22; Matthew 24:12–44 

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)  

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we draw insights from that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Tuesday of the Third Week of Advent. This new Christian year finds us in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Laodicea: a warning, a knock, a promise 

A sobering warning. “I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:15). The Book of Revelation’s Laodicea was a thriving city in east central Asia Minor, noted for its banking, medical school, and clothing industry. Christians there fit right in, thinking of themselves as wealthy and healthy; and they dressed the part. The angel of the Lord would have them understand otherwise: “[Y]ou say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17).  

Laodicea happened to be situated in a valley within eyesight of two other cities: Hierapolis, up on a nearby bluff, and Colosse (really more a small town) down in the same valley as Laodicea. Hierapolis was home to medicinal hot springs, from which Laodicea’s water was piped in. Naturally, by the time that water got to Laodicea, it was tepid in temperature. It no longer had the medicinal value attributed to it at its source. Nor was it refreshingly cool like the spring that supplied water to nearby Colosse. Laodicea’s water either had to be reheated for some purposes or allowed to cool for other purposes. As it was, it was good for nothing. “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot.  So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:15–16). Be healingly hot or appetizingly cold, writes the angel, but not uselessly neither/nor!  

Image: iStock photo 

A gracious and persistent knock on the door. “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me” (Revelation 3:20). The sobering thing about this verse is that it is addressed to people already inside the church. Somehow, the Laodicean Christians, with all their wealth and sense of well-being, had managed to lock him out! Yikes!! 

I recall the sense of moral superiority that my Reformed teachers had in pointing out that evangelists who used this passage to appeal to non-Christians were taking it out of context. John, they rightly pointed out, doesn’t have a vision of Christ almost pathetically pleading with the unbeliever to let him in.  

But, I repeat, Yikes! In context, the vision is even more ominous than that. It’s a picture of Christ having been shut out of his own house, and now trying to get back in! That concerns me week after week as I show up at church to lead worship. Dear Lord, don’t let us lock the door on you! May we never let ourselves slide into a smug sense of superiority, so that we cannot feel the warmth of your passion for the lost or lose the wonder of the freshness of your presence. May we never become so content with our possessions, our sense of well-being, our being so well put together, that you become a mere chaplain to our religion of self.  

Until today’s wrestling with this passage, I had never thought to keep reading. I guess I was so struck by the strong warnings that I failed to see the promise that follows.  

An astounding promise. “To the one who conquers (Greek, nikān, from which comes the name of the company Nike) I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne” (Revelation 3:21). Here’s the very One who, at the beginning of the letter to the Laodiceans, names himself “the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the very Origin of God’s creation.” Here he is saying to those of us who can stir our hearts out of lukewarmness, who will come to him for riches, who will humble ourselves to wear white robes of his gifting, and who will admit that our blindness must be healed by the oil of his anointing (Revelation 3:18)—he is saying that if we do these things, he will consider us overcomers, victors, and conquerors. We won’t be wearing the Nike swoosh on our tee shirts. We ourselves will be walking and talking Nike swoosh.  

Not only that, but to us who have overcome, he will say, “Here, sit next to me. Share my rule and reign!” Un-freaking-believable. In fact, the early church coined a word for something like this: phrikodestatēs, or, in the vernacular, “most freakin’ awesome!”  

So, this Advent season, I pray that you and I refuse to succumb to the laze of lukewarmness, and that we determine not to lock the door on the overtures of our Savior. But, rather, that we dare to believe that the extraordinary goal of his incarnation is to raise us up to royalty, and not just any royalty, but a share in his own!  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Words of Comfort, Visions of Hope - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 12/18/2023 •

Monday of the Third Week of Advent, Year Two  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 41; Psalm 52; Zechariah 1:7–17; Revelation 3:7–13; Matthew 24:15–31 

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) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we explore that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me this Monday of the Third Week of Advent. This new Christian year finds us in Year 2 of the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Zechariah: words of comfort and visions of hope 

A student discovers she is going to have to retake a course because, well, things didn’t go swimmingly the first time around. Her teacher says, “I’m proud of your resilience. I know you’ll get it this time.” A church worker is fired, and he is deep in a “slough of despond.” A friend shows up at his home and says, “I’m sorry nobody was there to speak up for you, but I’m here for you now. And, you know what? You’re going to be OK.”  

After a dark night of the soul, words of comfort and a vision of hope—they mean the world.  

The happy task of the prophet Zechariah (whose name means “Yah remembers”) is to speak words of comfort and to offer visions of hope to dejected, disheartened, and drained returnees from the 70 year long Babylonian Captivity. The task before them is monumental: to rebuild Jerusalem and its fallen temple, to restore vibrant and sacrificial worship, and to renew Israel’s calling to model for the world how justice, mercy, truth, and love can govern life.  

In the course of one night in 520 B.C. some five months after Jerusalemites have begun to rebuild their city wall, Zechariah receives eight visions of hope for his discouraged fellow countrymen.  

Today’s reading in Zechariah recounts the first of those visions. Angels on horseback appear to him, offering a message of hope from God: “Then the LORD replied with gracious and comforting words to the angel who talked with me” (Zechariah 1:13). Yahweh wants his people to know three things.  

Yahweh is still the God of mercy. Despite allowing his people to endure the consequences of their covenant-violations, Yahweh has never stopped being who he essentially is: the God of mercy and compassion. I’m reminded of the words of the Prayer of Humble Access: “But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy….” Jerusalemites of Zechariah’s day could count on that fact, So can you and I! So can the student taking her course a second time. So can the dismissed church worker.  

Wrongs against God’s people have not gone unnoticed. “I am extremely angry with the nations that are at ease; for while I was only a little angry, they made the disaster worse” (Zechariah 1:15). It is a curious twist in biblical historiography that God weaves nonbelievers into his redemptive designs. Abram and Melchizedek are interlaced in order to demonstrate God’s grace. Even Egypt is a refuge for Israelites from famine, until the imposition of slavery. The Persian king Cyrus is Judah’s “Savior,” because he proclaims release from captivity in Babylonian.  

But God had also employed the mighty, destructive, and terrifying armies of Assyria and Babylon to execute the curses of covenant-violation. However, the violence that Assyria and Babylon unleashed against God’s wayward people far exceeded what God’s justice called for. Yahweh wants his people to know that their innocent and undeserved tears have not gone unnoticed. In his own time and in his own way, Yahweh will balance things out.  

They don’t have to take matters into their own hands. They don’t have to wallow in self-doubt or surrender their souls to self-destructive bitterness. They can leave recompense in the hands of the Divine Enforcer. That truth is as good in our day as it was in the day of the prophet whose name means “Yah remembers.” He remembered then, and he remembers still.  

Prosperity lies in his people’s future. “Thus says the Lord of hosts: My cities shall again overflow with prosperity; the Lord will again comfort Zion and again choose Jerusalem” (Zechariah 1:17). Looking beyond Zechariah, the season of Advent reminds us that we have read to the end of the story, and we know its happy outcome.  

To that end, John records the letter to the beleaguered church in Philadelphia (1st century Asia Minor): “Because you have kept my word of patient endurance, I will keep you from the hour of trial that is coming on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. I am coming soon; hold fast to what you have, so that no one may seize your crown. If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name” (Revelation 3:10–12).  

What awaits the members of God’s city is a rich and wonderful future, one that more than offsets the trials, the failures, and the disappointments of this age. May you and I rest in the confidence of that great truth this Advent season, all the while living boldly and without regret, second-guessing, or bitterness.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Reading with the Ancients - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 12/15/2023 •

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office on Monday. 

Reading with the Ancients 

How do we take the Bible as God’s Word and make it the text for our lives when we come across words like these? “O Daughter of Babylon, you devastator! … Happy shall be they who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:8–9).  

We can just ignore them. We can denounce them, allowing that they may reflect a sense of right and wrong that seemed appropriate at one time, but surely shouldn’t have found its way into the Bible. We can equivocate them, writing them off as words of a (bogus) “Old Testament God of Wrath” that have (thankfully) been countered by those of the (real) “New Testament God of Love” (After all, back then, it was “an eye for an eye,” but now aren’t we supposed to love our enemies?).   

Or … we can ask if the presence of hard words demands we slow down and seek a deeper wisdom, maybe even make a lifeline call to ancient readers who had a more nuanced take on Scripture and its levels of meaning.  

Our forebears in the faith read at two levels: the literary and the spiritual. They did so because they understood the Bible to have two dimensions: the perspective of its human authors who wrote the words, and the perspective of its divine Author the Holy Spirit who, in the imagery of 2 Timothy 3:16, “breathed” the words. 

Our forebears in the faith believed that, at one level, a challenging Old Testament passage like this one from Psalm 137 has its place in Israel’s unfolding story of covenant-formation, covenant-breaking, covenant-keeping, and covenant-renewal. They understood that at another level, as Peter says, every passage has its place in anticipating “sufferings destined for Christ and his subsequent glory” (1 Peter 1:11), and, as Paul says, was “written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages has come” (1 Corinthians 10:11).  

In a brilliant little essay entitled “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” church historian David Steinmetz explains the mindset of Christians from antiquity like the fifth century monk John Cassian (A.D. 360–435), who wrote of a fourfold sense of Scripture. The sum of that approach is:  

What, in the first place, is the plain sense, the simple course of literary and historical exposition? In the second place, though, especially when there are challenging points where we may be tempted to ignore, denounce, or equivocate:  

What might a passage teach us about faith—that is, about the coming Christ and his church? 

What might a passage teach us about hope—that is, about renewal for the world and resurrection for the individual? 

What might a passage teach us about love—that is, about the redeemed person’s duty to love God and neighbor?  

Thus, for an early Christian like John Cassian, Psalm 137 reads, first, as a bemoaning of captivity in Babylon and a longing for a return to Jerusalem and for a punishment of God’s enemies. But a second pass at the passage takes into view the fact that Christ’s sufferings and resurrection have begun the restoration of all things. As Steinmetz summarizes: 

The Psalm became a lament of those who long for the establishment of God's future kingdom and who are trapped in this disordered and troubled world, which with all its delights is still not their home. They seek an abiding city elsewhere. The imprecations against the Edomites and the Babylonians are transmuted into condemnations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If you grant the fourfold sense of Scripture, argues Steinmetz, David sings like a Christian. 

Thus, ancient readers wrestling with Psalm 137 recognize that their own exile is in not in a physical Babylon, but in the “not yet” of still having to struggle with sin, and that in Christ’s church—in Word and Sacrament and fellowship—they already anticipate the ultimate homecoming of the heavenly Jerusalem. As a result, they find themselves praying not for the crushing of babies, but for the destruction of the soul’s enemies, and accordingly, praying for the rescue of the souls of others similarly afflicted.  

Rather than ignore obscurities, with the help of the ancients we can embrace the truth that all Scripture was written for our instruction, and we can commit to wrestling with challenging passages. 

Rather than denounce difficult words, with the help of the ancients we can name the true enemies or vexing life-issues God wants us to address. 

Rather than equivocate when it’s hard to reconcile what seem to be competing truths, with the help of the ancients we can push hard to see how things like justice and mercy meet at Christ’s cross.  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Creating Cathedrals of Meaning - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 12/14/2023 •

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office this next Monday. 

Creating Cathedrals of Meaning 

If, as Liza sings to Alexander in the musical Hamilton, people can create “cathedrals of words,” in worship we create cathedrals of meaning.  

When my son was about 3 years old, one day he and I were in the family room rolling a ball back and forth. A television with a looping news show was on in the background. As the top of the hour rolled around, I decided to take a break for the news. I said, “Charlie, let’s catch the news.” Charlie toddled over to the TV, and spread out his arms to “catch” the news—just the way he had been catching the ball I had been rolling to him. I suddenly realized that over the course of his young life, I had been creating for him a world in which the word “catch” meant one thing.  

That was the moment I began to rethink what I was doing as a worship leader—a moment of realization that worship creates a climate for perceiving who God is, and what he has done and is doing. I began wondering if I had been inadvertently creating misperceptions.  

Commenting on the first line of the Apostles Creed (I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things), Dorothy L. Sayers notes: “…the great fundamental quality that makes God, and us with him, what we are is creative activity.” Bearing his image, we can’t help it: we constantly create, whether we know it or not. That’s especially worth underscoring for us who lead worship.  

In the church I was serving at the time, for fear that communion would become rote and meaningless, we had been including it in worship infrequently. I began wondering if we were creating a sense that the Bread of Heaven was an immaterial idea rather than a living person—something you related to only through abstract nouns like “justification” and “sanctification” rather than a person who comes to you in the messiness and earthiness of life’s wilderness journey.  

I also began wondering if the tone of our communion was somehow “off.” It usually felt tacked on, teachy, and funereal, even scary. It was always made clear that nothing magic was going on (we weren’t Catholics, after all); despite that fact, I wondered if our pedantic over-warning about coming to the Table “in an unworthy fashion” was making strugglers fear that their faith was inauthentic.  

Feeling like every prayer needed to come directly from the heart, we only prayed impromptu. I began wondering if we were creating a climate that presumed the God of Garden-of-Eden-to-New-Jerusalem–redemption could inspire only in the moment and not ahead of time.  

Corporate readings as well as corporate prayers had been out of bounds for us because some members said those things felt too “churchy,” even if a prayer like the Lord’s Prayer came from Jesus himself, and even if the readings were straight Scripture or the Apostles Creed’s crystallization of scriptural truth. I began wondering if we were unwittingly contributing to a prideful individualism that made each person the arbiter of their own truth.  

On the other side of the reflection about worship that began the day my son tried to “catch” the news, I have landed in a worship world that is shaped by the rich resources in the Book of Common Prayer. That worship manual speaks to the joyful hope that comes with knowing Christ, to his comfort in pain, and to his provision of nourishment for the soul.  

…in these last days you sent him to be…the Savior and Redeemer of the world. In him, you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you. In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life. … 

…Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name. Risen Lord, be known to us in the breaking of the Bread.  

We are all called to different settings—each setting to be respected and loved. We all have different levels of authority and influence—all of it under the kind and firm hand of Jesus. But it’s always worth considering the kind of cathedral of meaning we create, whatever the setting and whatever the contribution we make.  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Singing Is Believing - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 12/13/2023 •

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office this next Monday. 

Singing Is Believing 

The different ways worshiping communities organize their songs says a lot about how they believe. A Presbyterian hymnal may organize songs around systematic theology categories: God, Christ, Holy Spirit, Church, Salvation, Christian Living. People in those worship settings care a lot about theological coherence and logic: how they sing is how they believe. An Episcopal hymnal will organize songs around the Christian year, and thus, the life of Christ, from Advent to Epiphany to Lent to Holy Week and Easter to Pentecost. Liturgical folks want to see themselves folded into Christ’s story: how they sing is how they believe.  

At one church in which I led worship, I needed to think about upbeat songs, on the one hand, and contemplative songs, on the other. How we sang is how we believed: there, we valued a “praise and worship” flow. In another setting, an important principle was capo settings for guitar: open capo songs (in D, G, C, A, E), capo 3 songs (in F, Bb, Eb), capo 4 songs (in F# or B). Smooth musical transitions and sonic consonance were crucial, because how we sang is how we believed.  

It was the same for the people who gave us the Book of Psalms. Returning from captivity in Babylon, the generation of Ezra and Nehemiah undertook reforms to re-establish their identity and reorder their life under God: rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall and then the Temple, re-emphasizing the reading and expounding of God’s Word, and restoring biblical marriage and Sabbath laws. This also happened to be the generation that gave the Book of Psalms its final shape. No record exists explaining just how, but they made that process a part of the re-establishment of identity and reordering of life under God.  

The very organization of the Book of Psalms tells the story this generation wanted to tell about who they are, who their God is, and what he is up to in the world. Thus, the final edition of the Psalms includes five superscriptions spread out over the course of the Psalter, dividing the Psalter into five “Books.” In addition, each “Book” begins with a psalm or psalms announcing its theme, and then closes with a psalm or psalms rounding out its theme, followed by a doxology.  

“Book One” (Psalms 1-41) recounts the obstacles God overcame in bringing David to the throne, and this psalm-cluster features psalms from a troubled David. “Book One” begins with an astounding triad: Psalm 1 commends the Law; Psalm 2 announces God’s prophetic plan to establish his Kingdom under his royal Messiah; and Psalm 3 portrays David in one of his most desperate situations, leaving Jerusalem in shame after Absalom’s rebellion. “Book One” ends with David celebrating one of his many deliverances: “By this I know that you are pleased with me; because my enemy has not triumphed over me” (Psalm 41:11).  

“Book Two” (Psalms 42-72) reminds us of the transfer of rule from David (“waiting” for God in Psalm 42) to Solomon (ruling on God’s behalf in Psalm 72), and it marks the high point in Israel’s history (Psalms 42-72).  

“Book Three” (Psalms 73-89), though, shows God’s people crying out from the Babylonian captivity (Psalm 73), clinging to the presence of God in the face of the failure of David’s dynasty (Psalm 89). 

In “Book Four” (Psalms 90-106), a people who have returned to their land but who no longer have an earthly king remind themselves (and us) that even during the pilgrimage under Moses (Psalm 90), long before there was a King David, God was already their King and will always be their King (Psalm 106). 

“Book Five” (Psalms 107-150) celebrates anew the God of rescue (Psalm 107), and refocuses the hopes that “a horn of David” (Psalm 132:17) will emerge, a “new song” of deliverance will break out (Psalm 144:9), and all of creation will sing “Hallelujah” (Psalms 146-150).  

We may not be organizing Scripture or compiling a denominational hymnal, but on some level, we gather our songs around some organizing principle to bring coherence and reality to our worship. From time to time it can be good to step back and assess who we are and what is important to us. Truth? Story? Emotional flow? Sonic flow? The thing is intentionality, because singing is believing.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Praise and Certainty - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 12/12/2023 •

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office this next Monday. 

Praise and Certainty 

I remember the exact moment the Christian faith became plausible to me. It was during a song, and it was a humbling moment. Humbling not just because I was coming to understand that the Christian faith attacks pride, and that I was a prideful person. No, it was humbling because the believability of the faith was coming in humble garb.  

I was a guest at a college Christian fellowship, and a fellow student was singing a solo. The song was from the Billy Graham movie, The Restless Ones—the movie had seemed to me so not deep and so not cool! The song had a chord progression as rudimentary as “Heart and Soul,” and lyrics as catchy as, well, here’s the title: “He’s Everything to Me.” That’s all it finally took for the whole thing to seem believable to me? Yep.  

I had been on an intellectual quest for God. For months I had been doing heady reading to sort through philosophical arguments for the faith. Abruptly, in a span of two minutes the simplest of songs wooed me into conceiving the possiblity that God’s Kingdom is real.  

Years later, I took consolation in Catholic sociologist Werner Stark’s observation that “hymns are much more convincing, so far as live faith is concerned, than even [the] best arguments.” Stark was writing about Thomas Aquinas’s hymns, asserting that Thomas’s songs were more persuasive than his best arguments. In fact, I can read Thomas’s causal argument (for there to be “being,” there must first be “Being”) or his teleological argument (patterning in nature points to an Architect of nature) and nod my head in assent—that assent comes with its own wonder, and is its own worship. But I can sit at the piano and plink out Thomas’s “Humbly I Adore Thee,” and I melt into tears. The arguments help me look at the faith appreciatively, the hymns take me inside the faith viscerally.   

Generation after generation, Israelites rehearse the fact that their forebears “walked on dry land through the midst of the sea” (Exodus 15:19 NRSV). What keeps if real for Israel is the song: “Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:1 NRSV). What keeps the fact of the “passing over” from being perceived as a freak of nature that can be shrugged off or a questionable claim to be investigated out of existence, is the doxology that was born on the night of the deliverance:  

Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? 
Who is like you, majestic in holiness, 
awesome in splendor, doing wonders? (Exodus 15:11-12 NRSV) 

Early in the Christian era, that same wonder overcame believers in Christ’s “passing over” from death to life in the wee hours of Easter morning. And so our forebears taught us to sing the “Exsultet”: 

This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land. 

This is the night, when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life. 

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave. 

How wonderful and beyond our knowing, O God, is your mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you gave a Son. 

How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings peace and concord. 

How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 287) 

Praise brings its own certainty. As U2’s Bono once said, “Music is Worship; whether it’s worship of women or their designer, the world or its destroyer, …whether the prayers are on fire with a dumb rage or dove-like desire…the smoke goes upwards…to God or something you replace God with…usually yourself.”  

Even in a world that seems, to use another phrase from Werner Stark, “religiously deaf,” music does much in our day. It connects you to an identity (Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”) or moves a narrative along (Bear McCreary’s soundtracks for Battlestar Galactia and The Walking Dead) or even carries the narrative (Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton). But I think God’s primary intent for music is to keep the smoke going upwards, whether by connecting us with identity in Christ as simply as “He’s Everything to Me,” or by taking us into the narrative as profoundly as “The Exsultet.”  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Color Added - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 2/29/2023 •

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office this next Monday. 

“COLOR ADDED” 

Some of us serve in a building that is an unadorned, multimedia-accommodating “box” that we are able to treat as a canvas for telling God’s story. We can fill it with lights and sights and sounds any way we wish, any time we wish. I have spent many of my ministry years in such a setting. It’s a delight to play with visual and aural textures, and to take on the challenge of imagining anew the Christian story week after week.  

Some of us serve in a building that is clearly and intentionally designed for “church.” I am spending the present phase of my ministry in this sort of setting: a cathedral of Gothic Revival design. Stained glass panels encompass the worship space with a rehearsal of the biblical story. An altar is both the visual and liturgical focal point of the room. Pulpit to the side, but elevated and extending out toward the congregation. Pipe organ. Pews with kneelers. A lingering scent of incense. I am learning that fixed features can bring their own delight.  

Permanence… 

The New Testament portrays the Church as something that is both dynamic and changing, on the one hand, and solid and immovable, on the other. To be sure, the Church is made up of “living stones,” and is constantly growing (1Peter 2:5; Ephesians 2:21). At the same time, Christ’s Church is also “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1Timothy 3:16). It’s as though we need “wings to fly” and “feet firmly planted.” Opposites? No, not really.  

I am appreciating the way the building I’m in communicates the solidity of our faith. Twelve massive pillars – each bearing the shield of one of the 12 apostles – surround us as we worship. Stained glass panels depict Jesus’ life and ministry on the lower level, and Old and New Testaments saints on the upper level. It’s marvelous to be surrounded by such a great “cloud of witnesses.”  

… But Not Perfection 

No other entity on earth will last beyond the Lord’s return – no government, no economy, no relationship – only Christ and his Bride, the Church. Nor, even in this age, it seems to me, is there any more compelling an argument to be made for the truth of the faith than the existence of the Church itself. As Cardinal Ratzinger (before becoming Pope Benedict XVI) offered: “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” 

What speaks so profoundly about the Church’s existence is that we are a community of people who are forgiven and know it. Flawed and owning it. Loved in spite of ourselves, thus under compulsion to love in response.  

A Mystery 

Early in my days at the cathedral after a worship service, I was surveying the Old and New Testament figures portrayed in the stained glass panels around the top of the building. It was no small help that the names of the saints were part of each panel. But there was one panel that nearly stumped me. It was a panel of Moses, but from my vantage point below, it looked like the name “Moses” was upside down and backwards, and indeed it was. 

A number of people I asked had the impression it had been done that way on purpose to “remind generations that only God is perfect.” Anne Michels, the Cathedral Archivist, had heard that account for years, and called Willet Studios in Philadelphia to confirm the story. (They created our stained glass … as well as the stained glass in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.) According to Willet Studios, when the Moses stained glass was installed in the late 1980s, the panel with his name was inserted upside down by accident. The letters (as you can see) are stylized. Nobody seemed to notice the mistake until the work was finished. At that point, they were left alone. And as such, they stood as a reminder that only God is perfect, or in Anne Michels’s words, “they are for us a message of the futility of works. If we try to work our way to perfection, we’ll never get there.” 

The mistake was allowed to stand until we had it corrected in 2020. Whenever I look up at Moses, I am reminded, as a friend put it to me, that “the most beautiful of our creations this side of glory are still fallen creations. We are forgiven people, living in hope.” People who talk that way let me know I am where I need to be. Those are the kind of lives that commend the faith. This is the kind of art that grows – by a combination of inspired purpose and providential accident – in the womb of the church.  

Symbolic East …  

Early Christians were known for praying facing the east. That’s because, notes Gregory of Nyssa (central Asia Minor, 4th century), East is the birthplace of humankind and the earthly garden of paradise. As Thomas Aquinas (Italy, 13th century) was later to observe: East is the place of our Lord – his life and death, and the direction from which he will come on judgment day.  

Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection is the dawn of new creation. That’s what John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, anticipated when he sang about “the rising Sun” visiting us (Luke 1:78 NJB – the term is anatolē, lit., “east,” a term that was understood either to refer to the morning star, Venus, or to the rising sun itself). That’s what early Christians recalled when they noticed that the Greek Old Testament had translated the messianic promise of a “Branch” (Heb. tsemaḥ) as “Dawn” (NET – again, anatolē; Zechariah 3:8; 6:12; Jeremiah 23:5). 

Accordingly, when Christians began building church buildings, they put them on an east-west axis when they could – the door of entry to the west, and the pulpit and Table to the east. We came from Paradise … then lost Paradise through a bad exchange and are being reoriented to Paradise through our Second Adam’s mission of love to regain his Bride. That cosmology – that symbolic shaping of our world – alone gives us our bearings in a world that has no bearings.  

To reinforce that symbolic reshaping of space, my church is laid out on an east-west axis – except for this: it’s backwards. So the architectural plans show literal east as “Symbolic West” and literal west as “Symbolic East.” I love that! Getting true directionality is clearly not about literalism. That means it doesn’t especially matter whether you have stained glass or screens, pews or cafeteria chairs, an organ or a band, you can point “east,” as long as you know what you are looking for. 

… With “Color Added” 

I’ve served urban and suburban churches, and churches in university towns and in beach towns. I’ve appreciated the way each has acknowledged and embraced the place of its setting. Orlando, Florida, was a small town in the 1920s when the cathedral was built. Back then Central Florida was awash in citrus groves, not tourist attractions. To honor its city’s roots and to help to tell its “story,” the cathedral frames one of the stained glass panels – one that places Jesus among his disciples – with stained glass oranges. In letters barely large enough to see, one of the oranges bears the characteristic citrus industry stamp: “COLOR ADDED.”  

“There are no unsacred places,” offers Wendell Berry, “there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” The Lord has given each of us a place to sanctify. Whether with technology that is dazzling and electronic or that is simple and acoustic, whether across a canvas that constantly evolves or within a fixed environment that stolidly invites you to discover its nuances, may we embrace, enhance, and redeem local “color.” 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+