Living with Wonder and Delighted Optimism - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 1/21/2021
Friday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37; Genesis 11:27–12:8; Hebrews 7:1–17; John 4:16–26

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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Weeks before the end of her nearly 100 years of life, TV’s Gol

den Girls (and the Super Bowl’s Snickers Bar commercial) actress Betty White told people.com that her famously upbeat nature came from being born “a cockeyed optimist.”

Genesis 12: “cockeyed optimism.” The Bible as a whole is characterized by “cockeyed optimism,” and that is true of the book of Genesis in a special way. Biblical scholar Gerhard Von Rad says it well: 

The story about the Tower of Babel concludes with God’s judgment on mankind; there is no word of grace. The whole primeval history, therefore, seems to break off in shrill dissonance…: Is God’s relationship to the nations now finally broken; is God’s gracious forbearance now exhausted; has God rejected the nations in wrath forever? That is the burdensome question which no thoughtful reader of ch. 11 can avoid…. Only then is the reader properly prepared to take up the strangely new thing that now follows the comfortless story about the building of the tower: the election and blessing of Abraham. We stand here, therefore, at the point where primeval history and sacred history dovetail, and thus at one of the most important places in the entire Old Testament. *

It is “cockeyed optimism” that dares to hold out hope that despite the bleakness of the situation we are left with at the end of the story of the Tower of Babel, nonetheless “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3b). What makes the hope seem especially “cockeyed” is that this universal hope comes through one particular man and his posterity: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’” (Genesis 12:1). As only the Bible could image things, the reversal of the universal revolt against God’s rule begins with one man, without a word, doing what God says to do: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him…” (Genesis 12:4). 

Hebrews 7: Melchizedek’s “Easter egg.” Furthering the “cockeyed optimism” of the Bible, the writer to the Hebrews delivers one of the most delightful “Easter eggs” in the entire Bible. He recalls a moment in Abraham’s life when the patriarch points dramatically to the coming of Christ. Abraham has himself just played the role of deliverer, rescuing his nephew Lot in a great military victory over “the five kings.” Returning home from his victory, Abraham meets a mysterious priest and king named Melchizedek, who, according to the writer to the Hebrews, prefigures Christ. His name means “King of Righteousness” and he is king of a city named Salem, which means “Peace” (the future Jerusalem, “City of Peace”). So he is “King of Righteousness” and “King of Peace.” But he is also a priest of the “Most High God” (Hebrews 7:1). 

Because no father or mother or genealogy or birth date or death date is recorded of him, Melchizedek prefigures Christ’s eternality (Hebrews 7:3). Because he receives a tithe from Abraham, he represents a priesthood that is superior to the Levitical priesthood that will descend from Abraham (Hebrews 7:4–9). And because he is a Gentile, he stands as a testimony that the children of Abraham’s mission are also recipients  of God’s kind intentions for the whole world. Jesus’s own priesthood is emphatically patterned after Melchizedek’s—or in the “cockeyed” logic of typology (Old Testament shadow-prefigurements of New Testament realities), perhaps it’s better to say that Melchizedek’s is patterned after Christ’s!

John 4: God’s “cockeyed” grace. The true and living God whom the non-Jew Melchizedek serves as the “Most High God” will reveal himself to Moses as the great “I AM” in the burning bush of Exodus 3. In John 4, the great “I AM” makes the most explicit of his self-revelations: “The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I AM, the one who is speaking to you’” (John 4:25–26). Jesus makes this astounding revelation to this “fallen” woman of the Samaritan well, she whose illicit liaisons force her to come for water in the middle of the day. Here is God’s “cockeyed” grace—“grace upon grace” (John 1:16). 

Moreover, Jesus, as the great “I AM,” has come not just to bring reconciliation to the likes of this lost woman, he has come to heal the breaches in the fractured human race. Jews and Samaritans looked at one another across a No Man’s Land of religious loathing and disdain. But Jesus has come to heal tribal antipathies and reconcile brothers lost to each other in religious warfare: “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:23–24). 

The words are not empty, nor are they naïve optimism. The Father’s “seeking” leads Jesus, as Athanasius puts it, to “stretch out his hands, that with the one he might draw the ancient people and with the other those from the Gentiles, and join both together in himself” (On the Incarnation 25). The results are as sure as Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, and they begin to take effect when apostles from Jerusalem return  to Samaria to witness the Spirit of Pentecost baptizing people there just as it had in Jerusalem (Acts 8:14–17). 

May you and I live with cockeyed wonder and delighted optimism at the saving power of God in Christ. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

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

* Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev., The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), p. 153.

A New Start for Humanity - Daily Devotions with the Dean

.Thursday • 1/20/2021
Thursday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37; Genesis 11:1–9; Hebrews 6:13–20; John 4:1–15

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

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The Tower of Babel: the nadir of primeval history. Throughout the story of human origins in Genesis 1–11, God’s severe judgments are accompanied by merciful grace. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden; but they are nonetheless graciously allowed to live, they are clothed, and are even promised that their seed will bruise their tempter’s head (Genesis 3:16). Cain is cursed for murdering his brother and is banished from Yahweh’s presence, becoming a “vagrant and wanderer on the earth.” And yet, surprisingly and graciously, Yahweh protects his life (Genesis 4:14–16). The washing away of wickedness in the flood in Noah’s day is followed by an olive leaf of hope, a rainbow of divine reconciliation, and the covenant of a new start for humanity (Genesis 6–9).  

Genesis 11’s story of the Tower of Babel marks the culmination of primordial history. This story ends on a decidedly bleak note: “Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). If there’s any grace here, it lies only in the fact that the divinely imposed confusion and scattering prevent humans from magnifying the error of their ways.

We receive this huge lesson from the Bible’s account of human origins: left to ourselves after the Fall, we would either destroy ourselves and each other (Cain versus Abel) or we would recapitulate the fundamental error of Adam and Eve in the Garden by coming together in a horrible conspiracy to try to make ourselves equal to God. That would be the universal human story … if Genesis 11 were the end of the story. 

But it’s not the end of the story. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s introduction of the singular family, Abram’s, through which God’s grace and mercy re-engage the human situation.  Through Abram, God promises to bring good out of evil, redemption out of captivity, unity out of enmity, clarity out of confusion, and beauty out of chaos—and all this, for all the world.  

In the end, the Bible’s world is a world of promise and of love—a promise of redemption for a broken humanity, and a love that reunifies a scattered humanity. 

Hebrews 6: hope as an anchor for the soul. The writer to the Hebrews presents the summit of God’s promises. Those promises go all the way back to Genesis: that the seed of the woman will bruise the head of the serpent, that never again will there be a world-destroying flood, and that all nations will be blessed by one obscure Ancient Near Eastern family (Genesis 3,9,12). 

For the writer to the Hebrews, the various promises of the Old Testament culminate in the coming of Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1–4). The grace that comes with his once-for-all sacrifice and with his ongoing heavenly ministry is so sure that the writer to the Hebrews says wavering souls can have a firm anchor: “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered…” (Hebrews 6:19–20a). We have God’s word on it, sealed by the blood of Jesus and by the certainty of his resurrection. I pray we can hold onto that surety through all the turbulence of our lives. 

John 4: let the regathering begin. Most of us are likely familiar with the gorgeous story of Jesus’s encounter with the woman at the well in Samaria. Jesus crosses multiple social barriers and violates various ethnic, moral, and cultural taboos to engage this “fallen” woman. She’s living with her fifth “husband,” to whom she’s not even married. It’s generally considered that her scandalous reputation (even among people who themselves are considered corrupt by faithful Jews!) is what has her at the village well alone in the heat of the day rather than in the company of the other women of the village in the cool of the morning. 

Jesus’s conversation with her begins with the ordinarily casual matter of a drink of water, but quickly goes to the “the deep end of the pool”: her morally impossible situation, and the God who seeks lost people just like her and her fellow heterodox Samaritans. 

The Tower of Babel narrative recounts the loss of the clear meaning of words as a punishing means of scattering people in confusion. Here in John 4, by contrast, Jesus employs misdirection (“give me a drink” … “bring me your husband”) and double entendre (“The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”) in a gloriously redemptive and salvific way. Here complexity of communication becomes a blessing not a curse, a means of evoking faith not of confounding. 

In Jesus’s hands, density of language and wordplay unite people instead of dividing them. “He told me everything I’ve ever done,” she tells fellow villagers, “He couldn’t be the Messiah could he?” And with such irony-rich words, this woman of questionable moral character and, as a Samaritan, a decidedly impure bloodline, becomes the first missionary in John’s Gospel. Grace has taken the field, putting the curse of the Tower of Babel into reverse. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Thomas Virnich: Turm zu Babel, 2002 in Mönchengladbach/Germany

Fotograf: Hans Peter Schaefer, Url: http://www.reserv-a-rt.de

The original uploader was Hps-poll at German Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

To Be Friend of the Bridegroom - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 1/19/2022
Wednesday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 38; Genesis 9:18–29; Hebrews 6:1–12; John 3:22–36

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

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Genesis 9: a hitch in the new beginning. “Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, …” — Genesis 9:20. The translation “Noah was the first to plant a vineyard” is misleading. The text would be better rendered as “Noah planted a vineyard for the first time.” Likely he is both an inexperienced vintner and an inexperienced drinker. Wise is biblical counsel to enjoy wine, but not to excess (see Psalm 104:15; Proverbs 23:29–35). 

“…and he lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father…” — Genesis 9:21a–22. The biblical language of “seeing the nakedness” of one’s father is delicate. While we don’t know the specific details of Ham’s sin against his father Noah, what he does is profoundly and inexcusably dishonoring. Yahweh covered Adam and Eve’s shame with clothes; Shem and Japheth do so with a garment for their father (Genesis 3:21; 9:23). Noah’s curse of Ham and his son Canaan accounts for the enmity throughout the Old Testament between Israelites (descendants of Shem) and the surrounding peoples: the Canaanites, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. 

The lines drawn here are not of race, but rather a matter of faith versus unfaith. Messiah will come from Israel, of the line of Shem. And through Messiah, all peoples will be blessed. That reality comes to fruition at Pentecost where all nations are represented at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and in the terms of the Great Commission, where the disciples are instructed to make disciples of all the nations. But the Old Testament, too, is replete with promises of the ultimate reconciliation of all people groups in the age of and through Israel’s Messiah: for example, “On that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians” (Isaiah 19:23), and “Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; Philistia too, and Tyre, with Ethiopia—'This one was born there,’ they say” (Psalm 87:4).

John 3: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” John the Baptist stands at the summit of the history of the prophetic ministry that had been pointing forward to the coming of Messiah. John the Baptist is the culmination of that ministry, for the “forward” to which he points happens to be “now” to him! “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” he had declared (John 1:29). While John’s Gospel deftly and discretely points to the arrest (and therefore to the subsequent martyrdom) of John the Baptist (John 3:24), this Gospel emphasizes John the Baptist’s realization of the monumental transition in the staging of God’s plan to redeem the world: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). 

Beautifully, gloriously, wonderfully, John the Baptist realizes that the Divine Bridegroom long anticipated and longed for in Scripture has come. The Bride, the church, has been prepared through the millennia of human history and Israel’s struggles. Now begins the celebration foreshadowed in Hosea’s ministry and Solomon’s Song of Songs, and even symbolized by Jesus’s “sign” at the Wedding of Cana (John 2). How can John be jealous that people are following Jesus, not him? The friend of the bridegroom is at the wedding to share in the bridegroom’s joy! 

There’s a good word here for all of us who participate in church life. Our job is not to point to ourselves, the splendor of our buildings, the beauty of our music, the refinement of our gifts, much less the cultivation of our brand or the measuring of our following. We exist to point, constantly and faithfully, to the Bridegroom, and to rejoice in the honor of being called “Friend of the Bridegroom.” 

Hebrews 6: Don’t even think about turning back. The congregation to whom the Epistle to the Hebrews is written is in danger of letting other things “increase” and Jesus “decrease.” The Greek of this epistle (or treatise) is the most complex in the New Testament, and its argumentation the most sophisticated. 

There’s probably good reason for the writer to chide his readers about how they ought to be teachers (Hebrews 5:12). They’ve let themselves get sidetracked and nearly derailed because their view of Jesus has become diminished. What’s become more important to them is preservation of their national heritage: saving the earthly Jerusalem, protecting the temple, renewing its sacrifices, and reverting to an eschatological expectation that has more to do with angelic powers than with Messiah’s rule. 

Here in Hebrews 6, the writer says he thinks “better things concerning you” when it comes to their grip on salvation (Hebrews 6:9). He nonetheless feels compelled to show them the absurd potential results of a drift into apostasy. It’s important for them firmly to hold onto truths they are in danger of forgetting. In Christ they have come to the heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:22). They are beyond the need of the physical temple that is on the verge of passing away (Hebrews 8:13). They need no sacrifices beyond the once for all sacrifice that Jesus has performed for them (Hebrews 10:10). And they are not to look forward to a day when angels will rule, because, in fact, when Christ comes back they will rule with him (Hebrews 2:5–13). 

I think the anonymous writer should be taken at his word: he genuinely thinks better of this congregation than that they would overthrow their faith in Christ for something less. Nonetheless, he wants them to see what an impossible position they would put themselves in if they turned their back on their once-crucified, now-risen-and-mediating, and one-day-returning Prophet, Priest, and King! 

I pray we never ever lose sight of what a wonderful gift it is that we have in Jesus, what an honor it is to be not just “Friend of the Bridegroom,” but his Bride. And what a joy it is, even as the Bride of the Bridegroom from Heaven, to say, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Image: iStock

God's Beautiful Rainbows - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 1/18/2022
Tuesday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 26; Psalm 28; Genesis 9:1–17; Hebrews 5:7–14; John 3:16–21

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (“A Song of Praise,” BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

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Genesis 9: “Double rainbow!” Sometimes when I get a bit down, I go to YouTube and pull up Yosemitebear’s video: “Double rainbow! What does it meeeeeean?” It makes me smile every time.

God’s beautiful rainbows, what, indeed do they mean? Why do they evoke awe, wonder, and joy? 

With the entrance of evil into the world, life on earth devolves into chaos. Adam and Eve listen to the serpent’s hiss. Cain kills Abel, and Genesis 4 through the first part of Genesis 6 depicts an unrelenting slide into violence and degradation. 

The Bible’s message, however, is that God is not content to let chaos win. He intervenes, to borrow a phrase from the writer to the Hebrews, “at many times and in various ways,” to reverse the tendency to pandemonium. 

The flood account in Genesis 6–9 is the Bible’s way of saying that after the inexorable, irresistible slide into darkness that ensues with Adam and Eve’s cosmic treason, God begins to make a new start, with a new humanity. A new humanity rescued from destruction by their association with the one righteous man, Noah (Genesis 6:9). A new humanity consisting of eight family members simply willing to get on the ark with him. 

When the flood subsides, God establishes with them (and through them with the whole earth) a covenant (Genesis 9:9). Their part in that covenant is a reprise of the instructions God originally gave to Adam and Eve: fill the earth, tend it, care for it, draw out its potential for order and life — this time, with the momentous responsibility of acting against evil instead of just watching things go from bad to worse (Genesis 9:1–7). 

God’s part in this covenant is to place his bow in the sky (the Hebrew term for “rainbow”  is the word for “bow and arrow”). Instead of having the “bow” pointed downward, aimed at us in judgment, with arrow notched, God points his “bow” upwards, no arrow, in peace. A sign that God is establishing peace and reconciliation between himself and the errant humanity he loves, among humans themselves, and between us and the animal kingdom we are called to steward. 

“Double rainbow! Awesome!!! What does it mean??!!” Here’s what it means: as part of God’s new creation, we take God’s side in resisting the rule of sin and death and decay. As long as there are rainbows in the sky, there’s work for you and me to do, from firefighters rescuing kittens, to teachers turning back illiteracy, to students sorting out their place in this world, to anybody in law trying to make things right (or at least a little less wrong). 

Whatever you are called to do to make this world a better place, you are commissioned by God’s covenant with Noah. 

John 3: God so loved… For each covenant God establishes with us he provides a “sign,” a visible, tangible promise from him and reminder to us that his relationship with us is real. Each “sign” carries with it a sacramental power, that is, it acts as something like a portal that brings God’s world of promise and provision and our world of desperate need together. 

To Noah God provides a rainbow, to Abraham circumcision, to Moses the Sabbath, to David, well, David himself—and in the New Covenant, God provides his own Son as the visible, tangible connection point between himself and us. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). God gives the Son who is himself the sign, seal, and sacrament of his commitment to us and of our corresponding obligation to him. Jesus is Bread from Heaven, and True Vine and Cup of Salvation (see John 6 and 15). 

Hebrews 5: “with loud cries and tears.” “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 out of death (Greek ek thanatou), and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him…” (Hebrews 5:7–9a, my rendering). What it takes for Jesus to bring God’s world and ours together, to restore communion between heaven and earth, is for him to walk a hard path. 

It’s a path of “learning obedience,” not (like us) from disobedience to obedience, but from one level of obedience to another as he undergoes the entire gamut of human experiences: from potty-training through adolescent desire to adult assumption of calling — all just like us, “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). It’s a path that has him praying as a human. Unlike any other human, however, he does so throughout his life with cries and tears and groans for the tragedy of others’ lives distorted and devastated and destroyed by the power of sin. All the while he also anticipates shouldering all of it on the Cross that lay before him from Day One of the Incarnation; and so, he prays to be delivered “out of death” for us. Today’s passage opens a precious window onto its cost to him, making his walk all the more treasurable to us. 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay

The Promise of New Creation - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 1/17/2022

Monday of 2 Epiphany, Year Two 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 25; Genesis 8:6–22; Hebrews 4:14–5:6; John 2:23–3:15

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

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The utter wonder of the life God has for us is on display in today’s images of Noah’s dove returning with an olive leaf, Moses’s serpent lifted in the wilderness, and the writer to the Hebrews’ vision of Jesus representing us in the heavenly courts. 

The dove returns bearing a leaf of an olive tree. 

The leaf of an olive tree. The leaf brings the promise of new creation. It signals a new start for humanity. Noah and his family are told to “Go out of the ark” (Genesis 8:16a). Having passed through waters of judgment, they emerge into a world made new. They release the animals to “be fruitful and multiply on the earth,” echoing Genesis 1 (compare Genesis 1:20–25,28–30 with 8:17b). The dove and the olive leaf mark the re-inauguration of the project of “being fruitful and multiplying, of filling the earth and subduing it” that was aborted in the Garden of Eden (see Genesis 1:28).

Anointing oil. Oil from olive trees becomes a symbol in Scripture of God’s anointing. In the Old Testament, Yahweh anoints prophets to bring his Word, priests to cover sin through sacrifice, and kings to establish justice and equity. Finally, God anoints his own Son to be the great Prophet, Priest, and King. It is Jesus who definitively and perfectly, as the BCP’s Eucharistic Prayer B, puts it, brings us “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”  

The dove of peace. From the earliest interpreters on, the dove has symbolized peace. Along with the rainbow (tomorrow’s DDD), the dove of peace signals that Yahweh’s warfare against sinful humanity has ended. He has saved a remnant made righteous by their union with their family head, Noah. 

Noah’s response is to worship: “Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor…” (Genesis 8:20–21a). By virtue of the sacrificial worship that Noah institutes, Yahweh sustains a relationship of grace and favor with the fallen creatures while he prepares for their ultimate deliverance from sin’s destructive grasp, the work of Jesus Christ  

Today’s New Testament readings provide profound pictures of the way the atoning and fellowship aspects of the sacrificial system culminate in Jesus.

John: a serpent lifted up. In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus references a foreshadowing of his own being lifted up on the Cross. “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15). Sinful people in the wilderness are succumbing to poisonous snakes until Moses commands that a serpent of bronze be lifted up on a pole. Whoever looks upon the serpent hanging from the pole is healed (Numbers 21). 

Jesus’s message for Nicodemus (and for us) is that our sin-sickness means we need new birth (“You must be born again/from above” — John 3:3). That sin-sickness which is a walking spiritual death, will be healed when, and only when, God’s dear Son is lifted up on the Cross. Hanging from the Cross, Jesus draws all the venom of human sin into himself, and away from every person who looks upon him in faith. Jesus invites Nicodemus, and every one of us who is aware of the terminal disease of our spiritual condition, to look up at the Cross. What a powerful picture of Christ’s atoning work!

Hebrews: Jesus escorts us to the throne of grace. What a correspondingly powerful picture of Christ’s work to restore us to fellowship with God! Jesus didn’t come just to offer a sacrifice to clear us of the guilt of sin (though he did do that! — see Hebrews 10:10,14). He rose from the dead and “passed through the heavens” (Hebrews 4:14) so he can represent us in the heavenly courts. He is there, as Hebrews 7:25 says, to intercede for us. Because Jesus is there, it’s as if we were there ourselves. From there, having endured everything we endure living in a fallen, frustrating world, Jesus offers help “in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16b). 

When we need consolation in a time of loss, he is there for us. When guilt and shame threaten to overwhelm us, he is there to say, “Father, remind them I’ve cleansed their conscience, and they are mine!” (see Hebrews 8–10). When the cares and concerns of the day keep us awake at night, he is there for us. When we seem to have lost our “voice” and nobody seems to “see” us, he is there to hear and see us. When we need an “attaboy,” he is there for us. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay

Fly, Kessie, Fly! - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 1/14/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. 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 from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

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“Fly, Kessie, Fly!”

One measure of leadership is whether people are following you.

A better measure is whether you are helping people “take wing.” 

That’s a lesson Rabbit has to learn in the award-winning episode “Find Her, Keep Her,” in Disney’s The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. 

Rabbit rescues a female baby bird named Kessie during a snowstorm in the Hundred Acre Wood. For months, Rabbit nurses and cares for Kessie. Unfortunately, he becomes overly protective when she wants to learn to fly. Rabbit understands Kessie will eventually want to “fly south.” He will be left alone once more. 

Yet flying south is what birds do. And helping others take wing is what responsible caregivers do. 

As all Pooh stories do, this one ends the way it should. Rabbit learns, even though reluctantly, to let go.

Hitting Home

My wife recalls this story when our children make changes that reveal they are taking a new step towards independence, and away from us and from our influence. She finds letting go is not easy. And so, at these times, she still mutters to me under her breath, “Fly, Kessie, fly!” She understands what it is to forgo her own interests for the benefit of someone else.

Leadership in God’s family is not much different.  

Kevin is a new senior pastor, with little background in worship ministry. He calls his old friend Ryan, an experienced worship pastor, and asks: “There’s been a lot of conflict over worship here, and I’ve inherited a pretty fragmented worship team. Would you work for me for a season and help me bring stability and unity, and earn my wings with this congregation in worship?”

Over several months, a new-old team comes together, worship stops being a battle zone, and fans of “tradition” and fans of “freshness” begin deferring to one another. 

Great Idea

At a meeting in the spring, Ryan, the worship pastor, offers: “Maundy Thursday is coming up. It is a night the church historically remembers the ‘new commandment’ to love one another as Christ has loved us, and often celebrates that love with a foot washing service. We’ve seen a lot of cooperating and healing in this church. Why don’t we offer a foot washing service to affirm the love, unity, and healing this body has been experiencing?” 

Kevin, the senior pastor, responds, “That’d be a new thing for me, but it sounds like a great idea.”

“The foot washing services I’ve led have provided powerful moments for brothers and sisters to experience the priesthood of all believers as they minister Christ’s love to one another,” Ryan adds.

“Yeah, OK,” answers Kevin, “But what I think we need here is for the people in church to get the message that the leaders really love them. So I want only the pastors and the elders to do the washing of the congregation’s feet. I’ll tell the elders about my idea at our next meeting.”

Suddenly, Ryan feels like he’s in the middle of a Dilbert comic strip. The pointy-haired boss is hijacking his idea, taking credit for it, and, in the process, ruining the whole concept. Ryan visualizes a thought bubble above his own head:  “Excuse me, but whose idea is this anyway!? You’ve never even seen a congregational foot washing, much less led one….”

Then Ryan remembers there’s the Dilbert way of seeing things, and there’s the Jesus way of seeing things. He envisions a new thought bubble: “Hold on a minute! Where did that attitude come from? If washing feet is about kneeling to serve, about putting my brother’s interests ahead of my own, maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do in this case.”

The words that manage to come out of Ryan’s mouth are, “Sounds like a plan! Let’s do it!!”

Sink or Soar

During the Maundy Thursday service four weeks later, Ryan, despite his best intentions, is still having internal thought-bubble conversations. The logistics that Kevin the senior pastor has insisted on require the worship team to lead music throughout communion and the foot washing. They will not get to receive communion or participate in the foot washing itself.

Ryan’s thought bubble begins to complain, “It figures. I should have insisted on more control….” 

Ryan stops himself and looks around. Many in the congregation, profoundly moved by seeing pastors and elders taking the posture of servants, have eyes brimming with tears.  Ryan notices, too, a glistening in Kevin’s eyes as he imitates Jesus’ leadership example.

And so a better thought bubble has the final say: “Pay attention, Ryan. A most awesome service is unfolding right in front of you. Jesus is in this house. And look at Kevin – you can almost see him growing softer and kinder with every foot he washes. He’s finding his wings.”

After the service, it is discovered that Jesus has provided, by some happy accident, a small amount of bread and wine backstage. Ryan and his team share an intimate and amazing communion together before going home – and, of course, they wash each other’s feet.

Best of all, Ryan realizes he has already been privileged to do a bit of foot washing – just not the way he had at first envisioned. Foot washing takes many forms. 

The strongest kind of leadership is the kind that helps others take wing: “Fly, Kessie, fly!” 

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Mykie Thomas’ Art: “no reblog posts from me here, though I don't mind if you reblog my art.”  Winnie the Pooh © Disney and A.A. Milne

Innovative Wisdom- Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 1/13/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. 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 from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

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Holy Restlessness (Part Three of Three)

In the first two installments of this three part series on “Holy Restlessness,” we have looked at the life of the medieval peasant monk who became Abbot of the Cathedral of St. Denis near Paris. We’ve noted the way his discovery of a “theology of light” gave him a holy discontentment with the dark and gloomy spaces in which Christians worshiped up until his day. We saw the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up reimagining how churches could be refashioned in such a way as to bathe worship in light. 

In today’s final episode, we learn valuable lessons from Suger about the creative use of available resources and about how to exercise innovative wisdom.

Use of “The Available”

Part of Abbot Suger’s remarkable success lay in the fact that he did not so much scrap the Romanesque architecture that the Western churches had been using for nearly a thousand years before him, as much as he creatively adapted it. Moreover, to the extent he could, he used materials he found at hand. He did so fabulously. At first he thought he would have to import stone for the building. However, as he was later to write:

Through a gift of God a new quarry, yielding very strong stone, was discovered such as in quality and quantity had never been found in these regions. There arrived a skillful crowd of masons, stonecutters, sculptors and other workmen, so that – thus and otherwise – Divinity relieved us of our fears. 

Searching the local woods for building materials, he believed God personally led him to the exact timbers he needed to support the church building’s ceiling.  He saw God’s provision locally at every step of the construction process.

As Gothic architecture spread across Europe, it had a number of common features. But each region gave it its own signature, depending on local materials and tastes. French used fine white limestone because it was available, English used coarse limestone and red sandstone for the same reason; Germans and Dutch and Belgians and Poles built from brick because stone was unavailable locally.  Taking advantage of resources at hand made cathedral building realistic and achievable far beyond Suger’s monastery north of Paris. 

Innovative Wisdom

Innovation happens when you inhabit a world that gives you a holy restlessness that sparks an audacious imagination. Innovation happens when you have the authority to effect a change, and the discernment to recognize what you can actually pull off. And finally, innovation happens when you creatively use the resources that are available to you. 

It is not innovative to force round pegs into square holes. It is not innovative to throw out an entire repertoire and bring in something that will feel like “strange fire.” It is innovative to ask: “At this moment, what is missing that people would appreciate as ‘value added’?” And, more importantly, what do we have the resources to do well?” 

An ancient voice persuaded Abbot Suger that worship could be enhanced, and more, reflect the character of God, if the worship happened in a place filled with light and lofty space. Suger’s ideas permanently changed the way worship spaces are created. Even if not “Gothic cathedral” in style, church designs continue to echo those concepts.

As we sense in ourselves a “holy restlessness” we may discover that it is not the latest, newest thing that will add value to our ministry, but something older. It might be as simple as introducing an ancient practice, like chanting; or it may be as profound as taking an idea, like “God is light”, and transforming forever the worshiping world.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pixabay License

Holy Restlessness Part 2 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 1/12/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. 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 from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

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Holy Restlessness (Part Two of Three)

Yesterday, we considered the way the French medieval peasant monk Suger discovered a theology of light. Today, we explore the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day. 

Audacious Imagination

Sometimes it helps to be an amateur. Because Abbot Suger had not had the blinders of formal architectural training, he was innocent of the principles that dictated thick walls and small windows. 

Happily, Suger lived in a time of much experimentation with church architecture. However, no one before him imagined bringing as many innovations together in one building, because no one had yet become so driven to implement a fresh vision of height and light to worship. 

He imagined displacing weight from the walls themselves onto faux walls that would run perpendicular to the actual walls –what we now call “flying buttresses.” Working with bold and brilliant masons, Suger combined several fresh architectural features that allowed a tall skeletal structure to support wide windows: the flying buttresses, a revolutionary arch system, and clustered columns. 

Suger’s chief contribution was the concept of a ribbed vault, or arch system, using slender diagonal ribs of stone, to support the ceiling and roof. This configuration allowed modification in the construction of walls. Instead of the earlier massive and unyielding masonry, the walls of the chapels that surrounded Suger’s chancel area consisted of sixteen wide/large stained-glass windows that told redemption’s story and beamed multi-colored light onto a polished mosaic floor. It was dazzlingly beautiful, as Suger himself noted: “The entire sanctuary is thus pervaded by a wonderful and continuous light entering through the most sacred windows.” 

Abbot Suger’s building project at Saint-Denis marked a decisive beginning for a whole new movement in architecture,  eventually named “Gothic.” Historian Daniel Boorstin summarizes: “The new luminous skeleton of stone proclaimed a Church no longer on the defensive, but reaching prayerfully up to God and triumphantly to the world in an architecture of light.” 

Free to Fail

Innovations can fail to occur for one of two reasons. Would-be innovators try things they don’t have the authority to do. Non-innovators fail to try things they could have accomplished if only they’d had the courage. 

Many years ago, a wise pastor told me: “Reggie, when it comes to authority, people mess up in one of two ways. Either they try to use authority they mistakenly think they have – for which they eventually get themselves fired. Or they don’t understand how much authority they actually do have, and they play it way too safe. They don’t have the audacity to try anything that could get them fired, so they just wither, even if they keep their job. Your temptation will be to play it safe and wither. I want you to try things that could get you fired.”  That pastor encouraged freedom and flexibility, opportunity and openness, for the staff at his church. Risk-taking in an environment with this kind of permission was an awesome and unforgettable experience.

Abbot Suger’s story provides a worthwhile study in understanding what is possible to achieve in one’s own setting. It was Suger’s happy providence to have attended the same school in the monastery of Saint-Denis alongside the future king Louis VI of France. Later, he served the King well on a number of diplomatic missions, and he received free rein to think boldly about what he could accomplish, and he had access to any resources he needed. 

That’s just not going to be the case for most of us. Few of us have access to unlimited funds, or a personal relationship with someone as powerful as an earthly king. But we all have some measure of authority and relationship with a heavenly King. And therefore, discernment is an essential element in the employment of that authority in the service of “kingdom” innovation.

Go … or Let Go?

In basketball, one of the most difficult things for a player to acquire is the intuition to know when to pass the ball and when to take the shot, when to make an attempt and when to let it go. How do you know if something is a good idea or a bad idea? Go or no-go?

Scripture redounds with wisdom for discerning what innovations you ought to attempt. For example, Saul did not have the authority to offer sacrifice, but David did have the authority to eat the showbread. Simon Magus did not have the authority to use the Spirit to turn a quick buck, but Jesus did heal on the Sabbath. 

The Gentile gift for the (Jewish) Jerusalem church, conceived by the Apostle Paul in a difficult year of consensus-building, was perhaps the single most innovative project of the entire New Testament: a concrete symbol of Gentile and Jewish oneness in the gospel. Even then, Paul knew he was taking a calculated risk, and that things might not come off smoothly (see Acts 21:10-14; Romans 15:30-33). It was a good thing that Paul factored in the possibility of “failure”: he was arrested in Jerusalem and wrongly accused of allowing Gentiles to defile the Temple. 

Paul understood the limits of his authority and the extent of the risks involved in this innovative enterprise. Yet it was a “failure” only in a short term sense. Theologically, his arrest led him to some of his richest reflections on Gentile and Jewish oneness (Ephesians 2). Missiologically, his arrest provided him the opportunity to demand an audience with the Emperor.  

Today, in this second installment of “Holy Restlessness,” we’ve considered important lessons on worship leadership from Abbot Suger’s life: how discernment requires assessing accurately your authority, ascertaining the appropriateness of your idea, recognizing resources and risks, and estimating the effectiveness of initiating an innovation. In tomorrow’s third and final instalment, we will explore the way creative and successful worship leadership works with what resources are available and exercises innovative wisdom. Meanwhile, …

…be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

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

A Holy Restlessness Part 1 - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 1/11/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. 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 from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

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Holy Restlessness (Part One of Three)

Much of what insulated me from the toxic secularism of modern biblical scholarship in graduate school were the texts of the first half millennium of the church’s life. I came to recognize that across the centuries and across our cultures I shared much more with the likes of Ignatius of Antioch (d. 117) and the anonymous writer to Diognetus (early 2nd century) and Clement of Alexandria (ca. early 3rd century) than I did with the modern secularists who had come to set the agenda for modern biblical studies. 

When, many years later, Robert Webber invited me to consider not just the ideas of those ancient church writers but also their worship and their prayers and their songs, I came to realize that they thought so well because they worshiped and prayed and sang so well.

When I realized how chanting brought “head and heart” together, I began to introducing chant to my students. We practiced the basics of plainsong chant in the “Sacred Stairwell,” and returning students tell me they continue to chant during their personal devotional time. Among my students, there’s an excitement in learning to worship using these practices of the early church. As one student exclaimed on Facebook recently, “Chanting the Nicene Creed in Greek! How I love New Testament Greek!” I appreciate taking something old and making it new.

We are a creative bunch, we worship folk. Not only can we take ancient traditions and re-introduce them in new settings, we can also take ideas, and sculpt, chisel, mold, paint, project, pen, imagine, build them into something no one ever dreamed before.

A Peasant Monk

Enter one 12th century French statesman-abbot, known only as Suger (1081?-1151), abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. Abbot Suger was a small man of small beginnings. Born in northern France, his peasant family handed him over at age ten to be raised by the local monastery. Suger felt orphaned, and came to think of the monastery as his true family. He latched on to the “upward-leading” theology of his monastery’s patron saint: St. Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the two converts Luke names from Paul’s ministry in Athens (Acts 17:34). 

In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had brought the gospel to northern France. In reality, it had been a third century namesake who had done so. In legend, Paul’s Athenian convert had written several books of theology, with the theme of “God is light.” In reality, it had been a fifth or sixth century anonymous writer who had done so using Dionysius as a pen name. 

Regardless, “Saint Dionysius” (shortened to “Saint Denis”) was a voice from the ancient church who shaped Suger’s whole being: Saint Denis gave Suger an identity, an inspiration, and a mission. 

Though the pauper boy would eventually rise to become the monastery’s abbot, he was always conscious of his lowly origins: “I, the beggar, whom the strong hand of the Lord has lifted up from the dunghill.” 

Suger responded wholeheartedly to the generally “upward” lift of Dionysius’s theology, and especially to the theologian’s description of God as pure and creative light. 

Out of Darkness

By the year 1200, churches in the West had been accustomed for a thousand years to worshiping in the dark. First it was because of persecution. Before Constantine’s conversion, the church was – both metaphorically and literally – an underground movement. Churches had to meet in secret, sometimes in homes by night, often in catacombs by candlelight. After the Roman emperor’s conversion in the 4th century, the church moved above ground and experienced rapid – almost alarming – growth. The church’s success meant the building of larger and larger spaces for worship. Rather than private homes and small secret places, churches convened in large public spaces. But believers still worshiped in relative darkness because big buildings required strong thick walls to support the roof. Because windows would weaken the stability of the walls, windows were small and permitted very little light to enter the worship space. Thus, the bigger the building, the thicker the walls, and the tinier the windows. 

“There’s got to be a better way.” A voice from a different time and place might alert you to a biblical value that is missing from your own time and place.  The biblical value won’t leave you alone. There’s a gap between your reality and your vision. Great seeds of innovation often develop by rooting yourself in another reality – one that can give you a holy restlessness with what “is,” and the mental and spiritual space to imagine what “can be.” 

So it was with Abbot Suger. 

When, at the age of about 40, Suger was elected abbot of his monastery, he inherited a church building that was in ruins. For years he had meditated on the leading ideas of his theological hero, Dionysius. If, as the Bible teaches and as Dionysius had expounded, God is light and in him there is no darkness (1 John 1:5), why does our worship have to be done in the dark? And why in such a dismal and dilapidated building?

It seemed to Suger that a church ought to have a beauty and a loft to it that took us “from the material to the immaterial.”  Its interior should be filled with light so that the worship space would itself remind us that God is “the Father of the lights” and that his Son is “the first radiance” who reveals the Father to the world. 

Was there a way to rebuild the dim and deteriorating building? Could it be done in such a way that brought into worship the light and resplendence of which he had been reading?

Today, we’ve considered the way this peasant monk discovered a theology of light. Tomorrow we’ll explore the way an audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "Louvre ext. 32" by Maryade is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

From the Catacombs, A Song of Life - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 1/10/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. 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 from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

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From the Catacombs, a Song of Life

Life was cheap and fear was everywhere. A culture of death ruled, and the world seemed out of control. Through fortune-tellers and animal sacrifice, people hoped to pacify the whims of hostile deities and spirits. Deformed or wrong-gender babies lay abandoned on mountainsides. 

Because it was illegal to worship another King besides Caesar, the Christians of 3rd century Rome met in underground burial caves. While death was pervasive above ground, in the catacombs the gathered Body of Christ found life and courage in the One who had come in the flesh, and who continued to come among them in the Bread and the Wine.

By candlelight, the persecuted church would gather and chant a prayer to celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death, and to consecrate the Bread and Wine that would nourish them in their daily lives. 

Above ground, these Christians told anyone who would listen that the world had been forever altered. Christ had triumphed over the evil one. The heavens had been made peaceable, and were now filled with the glory of their Creator and the kindness of our Redeemer. Above ground they scoured the mountainsides and rescued unwanted babies. Above ground, they testified to the truth that death had given way to resurrection. They found strength for life above ground because Christ met them underground in the Bread and the Wine, and in the song of his victory. 

Now, as then, we live in a culture of death. So too now, life is cheap and fear is everywhere. In our society to be conceived “unwanted” is a death sentence. Sex trafficking is a worldwide plague. Movie theatres aren’t safe. Neither are kindergartens. Gun stores can’t keep ammunition on their shelves. Soul-devouring idolatries are everywhere: whether consumerism and secularism and militarism, or tribalism and spiritism and despotism.

Still now, the world is hungry to know peace, to have courage, to have an anchor and context for life’s realities. Christ continues to call his people apart to sing of the world's one true King. We offer the truth that in his Son, God took all the suffering into himself and reaches out wounded and loving hands of love. 

We may no longer gather underground to sing and chant by candlelight, but we continue to meet, in large and small groups, for strength and encouragement – and as a sign to the world that its true story ends in life, not in death. In the same Bread and Wine shared by the early church, we find ourselves filled with a courage and strength and love that are not our own to take our part in extending Christ’s hands into the world.  

Twenty friends recently huddled around a table that was set with Bread and Wine. We were husbands and wives called to ministry, and we were on retreat, looking to the Lord and to each other for strength to keep going. The room was dark and, by the light of smartphones and tablets, we chanted that same 3rd century Eucharistic prayer that came from the persecuted church of Rome:

In fulfillment of your will
he stretched out his hands in suffering
to release from suffering
those who place their trust in you
and so won for you a holy people.

He freely accepted the death
to which he was handed over,
in order to destroy death
and to shatter the chains of the evil one;
to trample underfoot the powers of hell
and to lead the righteous into light;
to fix the boundaries of death
and to manifest the resurrection.*

Amen.

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

* The prayer is an excerpt from the Apostolic Tradition. Though tradition attributes the prayer to the Roman pastor-theologian Hippolytus, current consensus scholarship questions Hippolytus’s authorship. The prayer is normally dated about A.D. 215. 

Thinking Large - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 1/7/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. 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 from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

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Sing a Widescreen, HD Paradise

I am unutterably grateful when a Christian artist enables me to see spiritual reality in widescreen, high-definition. Ephrem the Syrian, a brilliant hymn writer for his era (ca. 306-373), does that for me. His lyrics – especially his Hymns on Paradise– still captivate. 

The beauties (of Paradise) are much diminished
by being depicted in the pale colors
with which you are familiar.*

Sing the Power of Metaphor

Ephrem trumpeted the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. He resisted the demands of those who “over-thought” the faith. They insisted on a straightforward explanation of Christ’s person, one that fit normal categories of reason: God or Man? Which is it? 

One group wanted to make Christ just like us, merely human. OK, maybe not merely human, but certainly more human than divine. A different group wanted to make Christ so divine that his humanity was nothing more than apparent – “drive-by” at best. 

Ephrem’s response: God doesn’t give us neat, tidy definitions. Instead, he provides a profound relationship with Someone the Bible describes in elegant metaphors and similes:

[God] clothed Himself in language,
so that he might clothe us
in his mode of life.

In one place He was like an Old Man
and the Ancient of Days,
then again, He became like a Hero,
a valiant Warrior.
For the purpose of judgment He was an Old Man,
but for conflict He was Valiant.

Grace clothed itself in our likeness
in order to bring us to the likeness of itself.

He gave us divinity,
We gave him humanity.

Sing the Whole of the Human Story

Ephrem celebrated the scale and sweep of Christ’s mission. He refused the heresy of mystical Narcissism. Back then, many were looking for a personal experience of “mystery,” just a little spiritual “somethin’ somethin” to help them get through. Today their spiritual descendants turn to Jesus as some sort of “rabbit’s foot,” a personal avatar they can enlist to make their lives (of which they remain firmly in control) turn out better.  

To counteract the spiritual Narcissism of his day, Ephrem wrote his Hymns of Paradise against a backdrop that includes the whole of the human story. My salvation comes with everybody else’s; everybody else’s includes mine. Thus (though it rather stretches the actual biblical text), Ephrem built on Hellenistic Jewish notions about Adam’s name coming from a Greek acrostic: 

“A” (Anatolē = East)
“D” (Dusis = West)
“A” (Arktos = North)
“M” (Mesēmbria = South). 

[God’s] hand took from every quarter
and created Adam,
so has he now been scattered in every quarter…
For progression is from the universe to Adam,
and then from him to the universe. 

The old Adam is all of us (“from the universe to Adam”); the new Adam came for all of us (“from him to the universe”). For this reason, Christ’s followers come from all quarters of the globe and our mission is to go to all quarters of the globe. 

Sing the Whole of Christ’s Work

And while then as now, many well-meaning believers whittle down Jesus’s work to one manageable dimension, Ephrem challenged believers to think large so they can thank large. 

Thus, Ephrem sings redemption’s story across a wide canvas: from original Paradise to a new, pristine Paradise. From the loss of Adam and Eve’s original “Robe of Glory,” to the Second Adam’s “putting on the body” from Mary, to His laying aside the “Robe of Glory” for us in Jordan’s baptismal waters, to our “putting on Christ” in our baptism, and finally to our being “Robed in Glory” at resurrection. Ephrem sings that the angel’s sword barring us from the Tree of Life becomes a centurion’s lance opening the way into Paradise:  

Whereas we had left that Garden
along with Adam, as he left it behind,
now that the sword has been removed by the lance,
we may return there.

Sing Widescreen, HD

At the invention of the small-screen, black and white, low-definition television, who could have imagined today’s widescreen, color, HD home theatre systems? Today’s experience makes yesterday’s seem, to use Ephrem the Syrian’s terms, “diminished” and “pale” by comparison. 

Ephrem offers us a glimpse into a reality that “has come” and “is coming” where the colors are even more vibrant and the definition even sharper than we’ve yet begun to imagine. 

May God grant the grace to grow in our capacity to worship in yet bolder colors, more vibrant textures, sweeter sounds, and sharper shapes. The reality is that good. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: iStock

* All quotations from Ephrem are in Ephrem & Sebastian Brock, St. Ephrem: Hymns on Paradise (St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1998).