An Excarnate Life - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 9/23/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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“Self-stewarding in a Multiplicity World”

“Sir, do you realize you were going 26 in a 15-mile-an-hour school zone?” asked the police officer as he approached my car. Then, as he started to write my ticket, he added an almost gleeful, “Oh, and you can put your cell phone away.”

I knew the speed limit was 25, which is how fast I thought I was going. What I had missed—because I was more present to my phone call than to my driving—were the signs with the blinking yellow lights. Those lights changed the speed limit to 15 mph

when children were leaving school.

Lesson: You really can only think about one thing at a time. According to molecular biologist Dr. John Medina in Brain Rules, our brains are wired that way. Spiritual corollary: multitasking is a myth. Our new media can extend our reach, but they cannot “disincarnate” us.

Seduction and Captivity

At the turn of the 20th century, sociologist Max Weber worried that people in the modern world had trapped themselves in an “iron cage.” Christianity had taught them to be productive. Capitalism had made their work profitable. But Christian belief was gone—in his opinion, at least. People were left with nothing but the technology they had created and the standard of living it had taught them to crave. Trapped.

A hundred years later, we find ourselves stewards of an awesome new array of tools for connecting God’s people with one another and for aiding their adoration of the Lord of life. Lest we become trapped in a new iron cage, Christ’s followers need disciplines of the heart that make the new media our servants, rather than us theirs.

Embodying Faithful Ministry

I’ve been an “online minister” for two years now (Monday nights, 7:00 EDT @ northlandchurch.net). With all the busyness of the screen—the live streaming, the myriad “chats” going on, the scrolling avatars of logged-in worshipers, the world map with locations of worshipers—it’s astounding that worshipers can worship. But worship they do. I am grateful these brothers and sisters bring so much of themselves into our “virtual” worship space.

I’ve discovered, though, that to do my job of hosting people’s worship, I have to make a conscious decision not to “leave” the service to check email, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo sports, or nytimes.com.

What’s been helping me to avoid “disincarnation” is a new mediation of two ancient disciplines: fasting and Sabbath-keeping.

Hunger Is good.

Fasting makes you hungry. They say it makes you smarter. I know that an edge of hunger made my black lab, Lipton, unbelievably motivated in the obedience ring. But fasting doesn’t always have to be about food. I went out to dinner recently with a group of friends. I was fascinated to observe how many people in the restaurant—many obviously there on dates—were having a far more intimate relationship with their cell phone than with the person they were with. When I temporarily deprive myself of tools of connectivity and efficiency, I give my inner being an appetite for the relationships the tools are designed to enhance in the first place.

Rest Is good.

Some of our most creative thinking happens while we’re asleep. Really. That’s why we wake up sometimes with the perfect repartee for the conversation we had yesterday. We are hardwired to have a rhythm of work and rest. Rest restores. Sabbath recreates. So, I’ve been learning not to start the day checking email or my Facebook news feed, but with devotions. I’ve been schooling myself not to let my total existence be defined by the demand to respond to every call, text, chat, email at the moment it comes in, but by the enjoyment of a deep relationship with Jesus that requires seasons of rest. Naps. Meditation. Prayer. Simple conversation. Worship. Retreats. One day in seven for the important stuff besides work. Unplugged Sabbaths give me more to offer when I plug back in.

What Michael Keaton’s character Doug Kinney learns in the movie Multiplicity is true for all of us. There is only one of us. An excarnate life—a cloned presence elsewhere—is a losing proposition. So we have to steward ourselves as best we can in the one place we can be at any given moment.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Creativity, KOA & the Wilderness - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 9/22/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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“Creativity, KOA, & the Wilderness”

There’s no place for diversions and distractions when I have my creativity hat on. Well, there are exceptions—like when my wife says, “Full moon tonight. Let’s drive to the beach and take a walk!” Diversions are fun. Distractions, not so much. For me, creative moments are hard to come by, and it’s tough to overcome getting sidetracked.

Then again … diversions and distractions provide a different angle of vision. Often, it’s the odd and the unplanned that make for great stories and unanticipated insights.

KOA Diversions

Recently, Peter Furler, former frontman for the Newsboys, visited the staff of Z88.3, Orlando’s Christian FM radio station, during our weekly devotions. He reflected on life since leaving the Newsboys in 2008. He spent a lot of that time in an RV with his wife, logging some 110,000 miles, seeing the USA, spending nights in KOAs (that’s Kampgrounds of America, for non-campers). Furler talked about the way that being with a different crowd—for some reason, his celebrity had escaped the KOA community—helped him see through other people’s eyes and gave him a chance to, well, slow down.

The result? A closer marriage, a simpler lifestyle, and, in the end, a renewed sense of calling to the craft of songwriting and music-making. When he sings, as he does in his new project, it’s with a renewed sense of the power of familiar truths: “You hold the weight of the world, yet I don’t slip through your hands.”

From the Wild

It’s not just pleasant diversions that lead to creative insights. Consider David, the Bible’s best songwriter. Thirteen of David’s psalms bear superscriptions that place them in specific places in his life. Every tableau is painful, yet every psalm that results is a masterpiece.

David paid no small price for the title “Sweet Singer of Israel” (2 Sam 23:1). If our use of the psalms—whether as the basis for songwriting, prayer-composition, personal meditation, service-design—is to be more than “cherry picking,” we have to inhabit the stories from which they emerge.

It’s when he’s hiding from Saul in a cave in a foreboding wilderness that David finds refuge in the shadow of God’s wings (Ps 57:1; compare 1 Sam 24:3). It’s when he’s feigning slobber-mouthed insanity among the Philistines that David discovers God has put his tears in a bottle (Ps 56:8; compare 1 Sam 21:11-13). It’s as a result of being “outed” about his horrible sin against Bathsheba and Uriah that David turns to the One who alone can “wash … cleanse … purge … blot out” his sins and iniquities (Ps 51:2,8,10; compare 2 Sam 12-13). David’s “broken and contrite heart” can indeed make God “hide his face” from David’s sins (Ps 51:10, 18).

The Real Song

I’m sure David knew he had a gift. I can well imagine him sitting in his palace, surrounded by lots of wives, children, and advisors: “Will everyone please be quiet? Can’t you see I’m trying to write a psalm of praise to God?!” But God’s interest in David’s creativity was secondary, I think. What God wanted was David himself—his heart, his mind, his affections, his obedience. Getting David’s heart took a barren wilderness, enemies that sought his harm, a meddling prophet, difficult children. The distractions made David look fully into his Father’s face. The creativity was reflex.

When God calls us to a ministry in the arts, he seems to send us to strange places. Sometimes it’s to a KOA to make us slow down and consider another way of looking at things. Sometimes it’s into a wilderness so we can understand the desperation of our hearts, the hopelessness of life without our God. It’s in those strange places he draws from us what he seeks: our worship.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Creativity, KOA & the Wilderness - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 9/22/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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“Creativity, KOA, & the Wilderness”

There’s no place for diversions and distractions when I have my creativity hat on. Well, there are exceptions—like when my wife says, “Full moon tonight. Let’s drive to the beach and take a walk!” Diversions are fun. Distractions, not so much. For me, creative moments are hard to come by, and it’s tough to overcome getting sidetracked.

Then again … diversions and distractions provide a different angle of vision. Often, it’s the odd and the unplanned that make for great stories and unanticipated insights.

KOA Diversions

Recently, Peter Furler, former frontman for the Newsboys, visited the staff of Z88.3, Orlando’s Christian FM radio station, during our weekly devotions. He reflected on life since leaving the Newsboys in 2008. He spent a lot of that time in an RV with his wife, logging some 110,000 miles, seeing the USA, spending nights in KOAs (that’s Kampgrounds of America, for non-campers). Furler talked about the way that being with a different crowd—for some reason, his celebrity had escaped the KOA community—helped him see through other people’s eyes and gave him a chance to, well, slow down.

The result? A closer marriage, a simpler lifestyle, and, in the end, a renewed sense of calling to the craft of songwriting and music-making. When he sings, as he does in his new project, it’s with a renewed sense of the power of familiar truths: “You hold the weight of the world, yet I don’t slip through your hands.”

From the Wild

It’s not just pleasant diversions that lead to creative insights. Consider David, the Bible’s best songwriter. Thirteen of David’s psalms bear superscriptions that place them in specific places in his life. Every tableau is painful, yet every psalm that results is a masterpiece.

David paid no small price for the title “Sweet Singer of Israel” (2 Sam 23:1). If our use of the psalms—whether as the basis for songwriting, prayer-composition, personal meditation, service-design—is to be more than “cherry picking,” we have to inhabit the stories from which they emerge.

It’s when he’s hiding from Saul in a cave in a foreboding wilderness that David finds refuge in the shadow of God’s wings (Ps 57:1; compare 1 Sam 24:3). It’s when he’s feigning slobber-mouthed insanity among the Philistines that David discovers God has put his tears in a bottle (Ps 56:8; compare 1 Sam 21:11-13). It’s as a result of being “outed” about his horrible sin against Bathsheba and Uriah that David turns to the One who alone can “wash … cleanse … purge … blot out” his sins and iniquities (Ps 51:2,8,10; compare 2 Sam 12-13). David’s “broken and contrite heart” can indeed make God “hide his face” from David’s sins (Ps 51:10, 18).

The Real Song

I’m sure David knew he had a gift. I can well imagine him sitting in his palace, surrounded by lots of wives, children, and advisors: “Will everyone please be quiet? Can’t you see I’m trying to write a psalm of praise to God?!” But God’s interest in David’s creativity was secondary, I think. What God wanted was David himself—his heart, his mind, his affections, his obedience. Getting David’s heart took a barren wilderness, enemies that sought his harm, a meddling prophet, difficult children. The distractions made David look fully into his Father’s face. The creativity was reflex.

When God calls us to a ministry in the arts, he seems to send us to strange places. Sometimes it’s to a KOA to make us slow down and consider another way of looking at things. Sometimes it’s into a wilderness so we can understand the desperation of our hearts, the hopelessness of life without our God. It’s in those strange places he draws from us what he seeks: our worship.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Samurai Sanctification - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 9/21/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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Samurai Sanctification: The Seven Deadly Sins & the Beatitudes 

A few years ago I took up samurai swordsmanship. It has not been easy, because the sword is not just about cutting stuff. It’s as much about how you move your body. My body doesn’t do Japanese well. When my sensei shows me what I look like to him, he bounces like Tigger and sways like John Wayne. What my sensei is looking for, instead, is Obi-Wan Kenobi’s liquid smoothness. To learn fluidity of motion I have to force myself to take on a persona — almost an alternate me — when I’m on the floor of the dojo. I feel like a total phony, because I’m saying “No!” to everything that feels natural. But every once in a while when I glance at myself in the dojo mirrors, I see what my sensei is after. 

The “liturgy” of the dojo reshapes me so I can take on the other me that I must be if ever I wish my swordsmanship to be samurai. Christian worship does something like that for followers of Christ. Worship shapes us to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Worship invites us to take on a new persona: a persona so new it feels phony sometimes, even though it’s not. 

It’s simply the character of Jesus.

True Selves

In Matthew 5:3-12 Jesus announced that the Kingdom — and therefore life with and in him — belongs to the humble, the mournful, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the merciful and peaceful, the pure in heart, the courageous in suffering. Jesus prefaced each saying with, “Blessed are….”  He was not piling on guilt to prove we need a savior. He was describing himself, and issuing a promise — on the far side of his cross — of what he had come to make us into.  

In the first few centuries of the church, certain believers “followed” Jesus into the wildernesses of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, thinking the desert would be a place to free themselves from the dangers and distractions of the world so they could become more like their Lord. Unexpectedly, what many of those first monks (“monk” means “one who lives alone”) discovered was that they brought their problems with them. Thankfully, they provided a rich vocabulary of the obstacles to realizing the character of Jesus: the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, lust, and gluttony. 

The Deadlies

Worship reshapes me to take on the “other” me Christ says I am in him and to lose the “default” me the desert fathers describe in “the deadlies.” There are a thousand ways in which worship does this work in us. At the Table, in particular, to borrow an elegant phrase from C. S. Lewis, “a hand from a hidden country touches not only my soul but my body. … Here is big medicine and strong magic.” 

The Table is indeed “big medicine and strong magic” for life-transformation. I love the fact that in many churches the entire communion portion of worship is offered in prayer: “We give you thanks, Heavenly Father, that the Lord Jesus, on the night before he died, took bread, and after giving thanks to you, broke it, and gave it to his disciples….” Accordingly, I find myself coming to the Table praying that the Lord would impart more of that new other me for my default “deadlies.”

Humility

“Lord Jesus, you came in the humility of our humanity. You freely accepted a cruel and shameful death to take away our shame and guilt. Touch me now, please, in the simplicity of this bread and wine to break my pride and give me your humble heart.

Compassion

“Lord Jesus, you wept beside your friend’s tomb and showed compassion to the shepherd-less crowds. By the cup of your sorrow, teach me to mourn my neighbor’s hurts. Forgive my envy of those who have more, who seem to be in a better place than I. By the bread of your suffering, may I long for their well-being.

Forgiveness

“Lord Jesus, in the strength of your meekness, you broke the back of evil. Forgive my bitterness towards betrayers, my self-protective ire against reality that won’t bend to my will, my offense at the merest slight. As you have drunk to the last dregs the cup of judgment, tether my anger and show me the power of forgiving love. 

Involvement

“Lord Jesus, you ‘troubled yourself’ (John 11:33) to come to our aid. You gloriously rose from the dead to reign over us. Forgive the sloth of my spirit. Forgive my indifference to you — and to the good, the true, and the beautiful. As this bread and wine are a foretaste of a great wedding festival, may I rise from this Table and live as one who hungers and thirsts for all things to be made right.

Sacrifice

“Lord Jesus, your coming was but the overflow of the eternal self-giving communion between Father, Son, and Spirit. Forgive my greed and avarice. Forgive my obsession with gaining things and financial security. As you give yourself to me in this bread and cup, may I give myself to you, to all who share this feast, and to your good purposes in this world.

Restoration

“Lord Jesus, creator and restorer of all things beautiful, you came to us in our corruption. You loved — and love — with holy passion, clean hands, and pure heart. Forgive the countless ways I corrupt your beautiful gifts. By this bread and wine, offerings of your lovely creation, give me satisfaction in you, and use me to restore honor and beauty and nobility to the creation you love. 

Deliverance

“Lord Jesus, you said that it was your food and drink to do the will of him who sent you and to accomplish his work (John 4:34). You place me in a world of hunger, and all I think about is food for me. Forgive my blind eye to the way the righteous suffer and your prophets are persecuted. Fill me now with heavenly food and send me to fill others. Send me not to devour but to deliver. May this meal truly be one in which I become what I eat. May my life leave a trail of crumbs to lead others to you, life’s Living Bread.

“Amen.” 

As to the samurai me, I got a vision of the long-term payoff for working at samurai swordsmanship, when my sensei (who is Anglo, by the way) got promoted to some ridiculously high rank by his Japanese sensei. One of our more senior students whispered in my ear during the proceedings: “You know what this means, don’t you? Now they consider him Japanese.” 

May the Lord Jesus so feed us with his own self that we become more and more “Japanese.” 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

On Plato and Boxing - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 9/20/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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On Plato & Boxing: The Art of Living in Two Planes

In the “Heroes” episode of M*A*S*H’s 10th season, the show’s chaplain, Father Mulcahy, sits at the deathbed of one of his life-heroes, a retired boxer named “Gentleman” Joe Cavanaugh. As he comforts the dying boxer, Mulcahy recounts growing up as a scrawny, inner-city kid with big glasses who liked to read Plato. He loved Plato’s description of an “ideal plane,” which helped him imagine a better life: “rambling fields and trees. Sort of like the suburbs, only in the sky.”

One of Mulcahy’s challenges was that he was an easy target for the neighborhood bullies. It didn’t help that he never fought back—thinking fisticuffs were “not very … Platonic.”

Then one night when he was 12 his father took him to see “Gentleman” Joe in a boxing match. “Gentleman” Joe was punching his opponent at will. With the crowd yelling, “Put him away!” Joe had stopped punching and told the ref to stop the fight because the man had been hurt enough. 

And I realized for the first time that it was possible to defend myself and still maintain my principles. If Plato had been a boxer, I suspect he’d have fought like you. That was when I made up my mind to keep one foot in the ideal plane and the other foot in the real world. I thought you might like to know that. And I just wanted to thank you..

Uncommon Match

Francis Mulcahy became an effective priest because he embraced his humanity. Now, the M*A*S*H scriptwriters never really allowed Father Mulcahy to have one foot “in the ideal world.” But they did show the way his keeping one foot “in the real world” lent power to his ministry: from rescuing orphans to performing orderly duties when the rest of the camp was sick, even to performing an emergency tracheotomy while under fire. All the while, he struggled with how useful his life was. Even with the scriptwriters’ muzzle, it always seemed to me, Father Mulcahy’s foot in the real world became a pointer to another plane of existence.    

Recently, a slender, but elegant, art book brought Father Mulcahy to mind. It was Thomas S. Hibbs’ and Makoto Fujimura’s Rouault-Fujimura: Soliloquies. The book comprises three things that, like Mulcahy’s character, remind us of the two planes of existence. 

First, the book catalogs an exhibition of paintings by Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Fujimura (b. 1960) that appeared together in 2009 in New York City’s Dillon Gallery. 

Second, Baylor University professor Thomas Hibb compares the incarnational techniques and the Godward vision of Rouault and Fujimura. With his bold lines reminiscent of stained glass, Rouault firmly places God’s incarnate Son in this world of fallen Eves, sad clowns, imperious kings, and self-righteous judges. Fujimura has adapted a Japanese medieval technique of refracting light to take up forms and themes of modern abstract art, but with this twist: his refractions of light in abstract form are pointers to the Author of light.

Third, Fujimura offers a personal testimony about how Rouault’s art saved him from existentialism’s “no exit,” and opened to him “a portal that peeks into ages past, and then, magically, invites us into a journey toward our future.” 

This slim (63-page) art book resonated with me because a worship leader is a lot like an artist. Artists and worship leaders both seek to communicate truth in a largely intuitive way. I share with these two artists a vision of God’s transcendent glory, and I realize that in my own way I’m called to “paint” in “the real world.” What Fujimura seeks to do by bringing medieval colors to dance, I seek to do through well selected songs and well crafted prayers: “inviting the City of God into the hearts of the City of Man.”  

Dual Realities

By far, the hardest part of “leading worship” is doing those two things at once. “Leading” means staying in time, maintaining pitch, working at chops. “Worshiping” means leaving time and entering God’s eternal “now,” where “a joyful noise” may or may not be a technically excellent noise. “Leading” calls for paying attention to what’s happening among the worshipers. “Worshiping” calls for paying attention to no one except the worshiped. 

Sometimes I despair of doing both at once. But then hope comes as a heaven-sent gift. Regardless of how odd the form in which hope comes, I receive it. The television character Father Francis John Patrick Mulcahy, was one such gift.

Mulcahy, Rouault, and Fujimura—each in his own way—remind me it’s worth continuing to work at the craft of “leading” worship. It’s important to keep working at scales and charts. It’s important to look for tools that enhance the physicality of the worship experience for the people I serve. But I also need—and desperately so—whatever it takes to keep my worship foot and my leader foot in the right places. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Our worship Leader, Part 5 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 9/17/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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“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+

Our Worship Leader, Part 4 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 9/16/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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“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+

Our Worship Leader, Part 3 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 9/15/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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“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+

Our Worship Leader, Part 2 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 9/14/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, September 27.

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“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+

Our Worship Leader, Part 1 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 9/13/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a f

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“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+ 

Being Right vs. Being Made Right - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 9/10/2021
Friday of the Fifteenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 18)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 40; Psalm 54; 1 Kings 18:20–40; Philippians 3:1–16; Matthew 3:1–12

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

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Being right vs. being made right. Somewhere along the way when I was growing up, I picked up the notion that I always had to be right. I had to know the answers, and I had to be 100% right about them. I lost a spelling bee in the fifth grade, and to this day, every occasion for using that word is an occasion to relive that crushing moment. If I got a 98% on a quiz, I would argue with my teacher for that additional 2%. 

For other people, the issues may be different: being the prettiest, being the star jock, being the “baddest,” or coming off as the wealthiest. It is all so exhausting. No wonder so many just give up. 

I gave up, too, because just at the point of exhaustion Paul’s words from today’s passage met me: “…that I may be found in him, not having my own righteousness…” (Philippians 3:9). Just when it began to occur to me that I would never know enough to justify my existence by always being right, along came Paul with a better claim than mine (“as to righteousness under the law, blameless”—Philippians 3:6). He said it was all garbage (actually his term skubala means excrement). Skubala compared to “the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). And that, finally, was good enough for me, too. 

It was freeing to realize I didn’t have to justify my existence by being right all the time — which, ironically, gave me the freedom to pursue knowledge better. I had to trust the one who is right and who makes right: “…not having my own righteousness that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith (literally) of Christ…” (Philippians 3:9). 

This phrase “faith of Christ” for Paul is multivalent—it is deep and fraught with meaning. 

In the first place, Paul means that Christ exercised faith towards God, and faithfully represented God on this earth. He knew his heavenly Father, and he was thus the first human to get God right. He believed his mission—set in eternity—was, in the thought-frame of Isaiah 53, death unto life. It was, on the one hand, to pour himself out to death, to bear the sin of many, to make intercession for transgressors, and therefore, on the other hand, to make many righteous, to find satisfaction in his knowledge, to see his offspring, to prolong his days, to be allotted a portion with the great, and to divide the spoil with the strong (Isaiah 53:8–12). Here on the earth as a man, Jesus trusted God to the point of allowing himself to die a criminal’s death for a world of criminals. He knew his Father’s promise to vindicate him by raising him up, and through him, to grant resurrection life to all who took refuge in him. 

Which takes us to the other side of “faith”: our faith in him. Our trusting that his death is ours. His death pays for our sins,  sets a pattern for our giving up our own interests for the sake of others, and calls us to share in his sufferings. Faith is also our trusting that his resurrection likewise means our resurrection. It brings the birth of “the new man” within us, means the onboard presence of the living Christ in our lives, and promises that at the renewal of all things our very bodies will be made new like his. 

The bonus is that those who are “found in him” and who let go of everything else as so much skubala often find him giving much of it back. In him, those things are no longer worthless filth, but gifts that have been reclaimed, refurbished, redeemed, and ready to be used to his glory and for the welfare of others: whether smarts or looks or athletic prowess or moxie or resources. “For,” as Paul says elsewhere, “all things are yours, … the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 1:21b,22b,23). 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+