Bread & Wine - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 6/21/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

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

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

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

Bread & Wine 

In Christ the King Catholic Church in Mt. Pleasant, SC, there is a beautifully colored stained glass depiction of a man who is obviously from the biblical era. The picture includes a number of clues as to the figure’s identity: he bears a crown on his head and priestly vestments on his shoulders; he stands behind scales of justice and an olive branch of peace. What gives him away, though, is the cup and loaf he holds in his hands. It’s Melchizedek. The stained glass picks up on a detail in Genesis 14’s portrayal of Melchizedek that is easy to pass over, until you’ve really “seen” it. Melchizedek brings to Abram, according to Genesis 14:18, “bread and wine.”  

This verse is the first convergence of “bread and wine” in the Bible. Accordingly, ancient commentators and Christian artists through the centuries have found in that detail an irresistible invitation to ponder the Eucharist, the gift of bread and wine the New Testament’s greater Melchizedek provides his brothers and sisters.  

The entire redemptive project envisions, as Robert Stamps’s lovely hymn puts it, “God and man at table are sat down.” As a foretaste of Israel’s ultimate journey, seventy of her elders “eat and drink” in God’s presence on Mt. Sinai (Exod. 24:11). The Bible virtually ends with a wedding feast shared by Christ the Bridegroom and his church, the bride (Rev. 19:5-10).  

In the meantime, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “we have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat” (13:10), but from which we do have the right to eat. Every time Jesus’s people gather he is there, and one of his delights is to set the Table and feed us: “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven. The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”  

One of Jesus’s most shocking statements is also one that most vividly portrays the genius of Trinitarian worship. Jesus says that the master who returns to find his servants laboring “will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them” (Luke 12:38). Of course, in one sense, the master has yet to return, and will do so only at the end of time. But in another, he has already returned, having already defeated death and sin and Satan. He is among us to serve us at Table.   

When we receive “bread and wine” from the greater Melchizedek, worship gets transformed. It takes on that mysterious “grammar of grace” to which Torrance referred. Recall that after giving bread and wine and after blessing Abram, Melchizedek received from Abram a tithe (Gen 14:20; Heb. 7:4-10). Accordingly, after indicating we have the right to food from a better altar, the writer to the Hebrews says “through Jesus” we can offer better offerings — not mere tithes, but “a sacrifice of praise to God, that is the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name,” and the doing of good and the sharing of what we have, “for such sacrifices are pleasing to God” (13:15-16). 

Our task as worship leaders? Simple, if not easy. Give the platform to the real worship leader. Let him pray effectual prayers. Let him declare the Father’s blessing. Let him sing over his people in love. Let him set the most lavish of tables.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Singing in Our Midst - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 6/20/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

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

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

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

Singing in Our Midst 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Declaring the Father's Name - Daily Devotions with the Dean (Copy)

Wednesday • 6/19/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

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

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

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

Declaring the Father’s Name 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Prayers for the Rescued - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 6/18/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

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

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

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

Prayers for the Rescued 

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

A New Kind of Priest - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 6/17/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings last week and this week. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Kind of Priest 

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+  

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

Friday • 6/14/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

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

“A Campaign Only Love Can Win” 

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

Image: Cover art, Blues Brothers DVD 

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

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

Singing Is Not the Only Worship 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

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

Thursday • 6/13/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

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

“Redemption Songs: Plainsong Style”
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

The Clown Was Me - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 6/12/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

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

“The ‘Clown’ Was Me” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Worship Renewal - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 6/11/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’re thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago.  

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

“Bigger Voices” 

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

“Why the flaps?” I asked a nurse. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Entrapment in the Present 

“Ancient Future” Resources for Worship Renewal 

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual Church - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 6/10/2024 •

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

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings this week and next. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts (sometimes lightly edited) from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  

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

“Virtual Church — Really?” 

“Maybe we should offer church online.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

A Listening Faith - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 6/7/2024 •

Friday of the Second Week After Pentecost (Proper 4)  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 40; Psalm 54; Ecclesiastes 5:1-7; Galatians 3:15-22; Matthew 14:22-36

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)

Today is the Wednesday following Trinity Sunday. This week, we are contemplating passages from Proper 4 — I want to give some attention to the early chapters of the Book of Ecclesiastes and of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

Sometimes the Lord takes the props away. For our Cathedral family during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, it was the beautiful building, the physical bread and wine, the hugs at the peace, the voices blended in praise. Sometimes other things get removed from people—a secure income, good health, close friends, a fulfilling job, a feeling of God’s presence. Your mother – or father – or spouse – or child dies. Your dog (or cat) dies. It’s awful. Sometimes all the supports disappear, and it’s just you — and the emptiness, the “vanity.” Or — it’s you — and God. 

Whatever has been the process, the Lord, in his kindness, has brought Solomon to such a place. Over the course of this week’s readings in Ecclesiastes, we have observed Solomon’s increasingly unhappy depictions of the limited satisfactions of pleasure and power, of ambition and wisdom — of life itself. He’s come to the end of himself. And he realizes it’s either him and the void (“Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.”). Or it’s him and God.

Wisely, he chooses God. But even here (Ecclesiastes being a book all about dead ends) a narrow window opens to him showing how even the choice of “religion” can be a dead end. There’s a way to try to relate to God that is itself vanity. 

Image: Philipp Otto Runge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, unfinished altarpiece that was originally commissioned to furnish the chapel in Vitt on Rügen, circa 1806-1807

A listening faith. “…to draw near to listen is better than the sacrifice offered by fools…nor let your heart be quick to utter a word before God…It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not fulfill it.” — Ecclesiastes 5:1,2,5. There is an approach to God himself that is a “sacrifice offered by fools.” Effusive religious enthusiasm and over-promising devotion to God lead to one more dead end. 

Paul amplifies the point. The zealot-turned-apostle explains that the giving of the law of Moses was designed from the beginning to make Israel attentive—to listen to the retelling of God’s promise. The law never overrode that promise. The law illuminated our tendency to be lured by sin, to lean into sin — to love sin. The law was intended to lead us to listen for the “why” of the ongoing provision for sacrifice to cover sin. To listen, and hear anew, the promise that God had already made to Abraham of an offspring who would eventually mediate the broken relationship between God and us: “… so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe” (Galatians 3:22). 

Jesus proves the point. Today’s passage in Matthew shows Jesus, who is Emmanuel (God-with-us) walking on water. One of his more spectacular gifts, right? What is worthy of note is the prelude: “…he went up to the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone… And early in the morning he came walking down…” (Matthew 14:23,25). In other words, he has been up there all night with his Father. Do we imagine the prayers of Jesus that night were one-sided? That Jesus did all the talking, all night long? The One who taught,“When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:7-8). The book of Hebrews states that “in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission” (Hebrews 5:7-8). It’s not hard to believe that over the course of his night of prayer, there was a good measure of listening to the Father and communing deeply with him.  With all his superpowers (to apply a modern anachronism), Jesus presents himself among us to show us how to avoid the religiosity that is, in reality, just blather or bloviating vow-making. (A study of today’s Psalm, Psalm 40, reveals a form of honest prayer, displaying expressions of thanksgiving; distress; supplication; and praise.) 

By the way, I’m pretty sure that some features of today’s passage in Matthew are unique to the moment it narrates. I have friends who are skeptical about whether Jesus ever literally walked on water. I’m not. But his walking on the water looks like a “one off” phenomenon designed to make a point. The point was: trust me. Peter’s temporarily-enabled walking on water looks like it provided the teaching moment: Keep your eyes on me, and you’ll be OK. Pay attention to the storm around you, and you’ll sink. The things that transpired physically outside the boat that night appear to be unique to those moments. Their significance for life — let the reader discern. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+