Broken Bodies - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 7/14/2023 
A Friday in the Season After Pentecost (Proper 9) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 16; Psalm 17; 1 Samuel 17:17–30; Acts 10:34–48; Mark 1:1–13 

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

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we bring to our lives that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Friday in the Season After Pentecost. We are in Proper 9 of Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.  

A single line from one of today’s psalms prompts prayers of thanksgiving based on today’s New Testament readings: “My lines have fallen in pleasant places” (Psalm 16:6).  

Because of all that Christ is, and because of all that our Heavenly Father has accomplished through him, and because of the fullness of life we enjoy in Christ by the Holy Spirit, there is SO.MUCH.TO.BE.GRATEFUL.FOR: 

Thank you, Lord, that you did not leave your people Israel in permanent exile, but you raised up a voice in the wilderness to prepare for the coming of the Lord of rescue (Mark 1:1–4). 

Thank you, Lord Jesus, for identifying with us sinners in the waters of baptism, so that you could wash our sins away (Mark 1:9; John 1:29–34).  

Thank you, Father, for the love you have had from eternity for your Son, for the love you declared for your Son at his baptism, for the love with which you brought him back from the dead, and for the love that you have for sons and daughters who are baptized in him (Mark 1:11; Acts 10:44–48).  

Thank you, Father, that in the Holy Spirit, you gave your Son every resource he needed to accomplish his mission on this earth: to resist Satan in the wilderness, and to go about doing good and healing broken bodies and oppressed spirits (Mark 1:10–13; Acts 10:38). Thank you, Father, for baptizing us with that same Spirit, manifesting your grace in so many wonderful graces within and through us (Acts 10:46; Romans 12:3–8; 1 Corinthians 12:4–11; 1 Peter 4:10–11).  

Thank you, Lord, that there is no place on the earth where, nor any people on this planet among whom, you do not accept those who “fear God and do justice” (Acts 10:35). Thank you for the confidence this truth gives us to go and tell of Jesus the Lord of all and the Judge of the living and the dead…who has come to bring peace! (Acts 10:36,42) 

Thank you, Lord, for raising up reliable witnesses of your resurrection and for providing foundational proclaimers of your gospel, so we can know that when we speak of Jesus’s dying for sinners and rising to make saints, we speak of true truths, things that are not fabulous fables, mere myths, and saccharine stories (Acts 10:41–42; 2 Peter 1:16; John 18:35; 21:24–25; 1 John 1:1–4).  

Thank you, Lord, that my lines have fallen in pleasant places, and that, indeed, “I have a goodly heritage” (Psalm 16:6). 

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+  

Here, There, and Everywhere - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 7/13/2023 
A Thursday in the Season After Pentecost (Proper 9) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 18; 1 Samuel 16:14–17:11; Acts 10:17–33; Luke 24:36–53  

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

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we consider some aspect of that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. On this Thursday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 9 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

This hopelessly romantic teenager spent hour upon hour pining for a love that could satisfy the longing in the Beatles 1966 song from the Revolver album, “Here There and Everywhere.”  

*Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., “Life-Giving Spirit,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 1998, p. 582. 

To lead a better life, I need my love to be here 
Here, making each day of the year 
Changing my life with a wave of her hand 
Nobody can deny that there’s something there 

Knowing that love is to share 
Each one believing that love never dies 
Watching their eyes 
And hoping I’m always there 

I will be there, and everywhere 
Here, there and everywhere. 

Harry Blamires, Christian thinker and friend of C. S. Lewis, says that youthful desires always carry about them a “sacramental cast.” When we are young, he argues, longings emerge within us that bear within them the promise of ultimate satisfaction and joy — satisfaction and joy that earthly relationships can only partially fulfill. Those desires can only be meaningfully fulfilled in this life if we see them as pointers to what lies beyond them: satisfaction and joy in being loved by and in loving God himself.  

The good news is that there is Someone who can be for each of us: “here, there, and everywhere.” That is the extraordinary truth that Luke brings home to us in the final two vignettes of his gospel.  

“Here…” The resurrected Christ is really “here”: “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost (Gk, pneuma) does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). The Jesus who has returned from the dead is no mere “spirit” (Gk, pneuma), meaning in this context “ghost,” or “disembodied, nonphysical being.” It’s understandable that a fifth century manuscript introduced the term “phantasm” (Gk, phantasma). None of that is what the resurrected Jesus is. The God-Man did not mount the cross and enter his tomb only to emerge as Casper the Friendly Ghost, or as something on the order of the apparitional Obi-Wan Kenobi who guides Luke Skywalker after submitting to Darth Vader’s lightsaber.   

In proof of the physical nature of his resurrection-body, Jesus offers his hands and feet to his disciples’ touch. He asks for something to eat. “So they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in front of them” (Luke 24:42–43). The fact that his resurrection body can take in food raises (at least to me) all kinds of questions about his present (and our future) metabolism. However, the New Testament isn’t interested in speaking to a matter like that (one day, we’ll see what it means). What Luke is at pains to present is the fact that the risen Jesus is not a Savior who has rescued us out of our human, embodied existence. Instead, Jesus has risen as what theologian Richard Gaffin calls our “glorified humanity.”* Jesus has risen to redeem us in our embodied humanity. Praise be!! 

“…There, and Everywhere.” But while Jesus is not a pneuma (or “spirit”) in the sense of “ghost,” nonetheless, his presence among is mediated by the Holy Spirit. The last vignette in Luke’s Gospel illustrates what his traveling companion Paul describes in 1 Corinthians as the fact that “the Last Adam (Christ) has become life-giving Spirit” (also Gk, pneuma, but note the necessary capitalization of the word “Spirit” in English, which most translations miss—1 Corinthians 15:45). Luke portrays Christ ascending to the Father in his full physicality, so he can receive and pour out upon us the Holy Spirit. By that same Spirit, Christ returns to us and takes up residence among and within us.  

No, Christ hasn’t come back from the grave as a “spirit” (in the sense of being a ghost). But in his bodily form he does ascend to the right hand of the Father so that he can return to us in the person of the Holy Spirit. Two incredible things happen with his ascension. First, now one of us is there—in the very throne room of the Lord of the universe! As firstborn from the dead, the risen Lord Jesus represents us—there he intercedes for us, guides us in living and worshiping, proclaims the Father’s name to us and keeps our name before the Father, sings over us, and brings us bread and wine from God’s holy altar (Hebrews 2:12; 7:25; 8:2; 13:10).  

Second, the risen and ascended Jesus sends power from on high to enable us to witness and to see him work miracle after miracle of conversion and transformation. The power he sends is his own presence. The Holy Spirit among us is the Spirit of Christ himself. The amazing thing—the thing that is virtually incomprehensible to us—is that the resurrected Christ can be in two places at once: there at the right hand of the Father, and here residing in each of us and in all of us: “Here, There, and Everywhere.” 

Be blessed this day with his presence, “here, there, and everywhere,” 

Reggie Kidd+ 

The Heart - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 7/12/2023 
A Wednesday in the Season After Pentecost (Proper 9) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:1–24; 1 Samuel 16:1–13; Acts 10:1–16; Luke 24:13–35 

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

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we ask how God might direct our lives from that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. This Wednesday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 9 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Who I essentially am—what at bottom my basic life assumptions and drives and loves are—the Bible’s shorthand for all that is “heart.” The Bible’s message to me, further, is that my “heart” is set in one direction or another: it is set on God, or it is not.  

In the “not” column can stand many things: myself, my “people,” my country, a cause, money, nothing in particular (which I can cover by binging or by busy-ness)—just not God.  

In the “on God” column stand a host of graces, summed up in one: love … love of God and love of neighbor.  

Today’s readings provide a wonderful opportunity for a “heart” checkup.  

1 Samuel. What God is looking for in Saul’s replacement as king over his people is someone who is notable not for their physical impressiveness (like Saul) or their claim of birth (like Jesse’s first born, Eliab). “[T]he Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).  

In David, Yahweh sees someone who has learned, in the first place, the humility to be overlooked for kingship. More fundamentally, Yahweh sees in David someone who has learned, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” (Psalm 23)—that’s the kind of person with the heart for shepherding His people. Such a shepherd will know how to nourish and protect God’s flock, for he himself has experienced Yahweh’s nourishing and protecting grace. Despite the glaring flaws (of which we will read shortly), David’s whole being is defined by his love for and dependence upon Yahweh—and Yahweh can work with that (1 Samuel 13:14; 16:7).  

“[F]rom that day forward…” — 1 Samuel 16:13c. In contrast to the sporadic, even spasmodic, experience of Saul, David’s experience of the Spirit of God is permanent and abiding (see Psalm 51:11–12). It’s almost as though Saul’s experience of God’s Spirit had been a series of “possessions” — it certainly was not an indwelling. Saul’s heart simply had no room for the living God.  

Sidebar: The difference between “Spirit-possession” and “Spirit-indwelling” is something to keep in mind when miracle workers arise. Do their lives testify to the Spirit’s “indwelling” presence and remolding work. Or is their experience more like a “possession” that leaves the person unaffected? Does a person with flashy signs also evidence the deeper fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5)? Or are the signs accompanied, instead, by the fruit of the world, the flesh, and the devil (lawlessness, deceit, lust, greed, pride, arrogance, envy, bitterness—see Galatians 5:19–20; 1 John 2:15–16)? Just asking.   

In Acts, we are treated to a study in the way God the Father has been preparing for the pouring out of his Spirit upon “all flesh.” Over the course of his life, the Roman centurion Cornelius’s heart has become aligned with that of the God of the Bible. Presumably from a pagan background, Cornelius has been attracted to Israel’s God. “He was a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God” (Acts 10:2). That heart-orientation and those practices put him in a position to respond well when God’s angel visits him: “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. Now send…” (Acts 10:4b–5a).  

Luke tells us about two disciples who confess, “Were not our hearts burning within us?” Theirs had been broken hearts at the beginning of today’s passage. But these were hearts that had been able honestly to acknowledge their disappointment and dismay at the dashing of their hopes and dreams for Israel’s redemption when Jesus was executed.  

Their hearts, in other words, had already been set in the right direction. What was needed, and what was supplied, was for Jesus to meet them with healing power for their receptive yet broken hearts. He tells them, at length (it probably took a couple of hours to walk the 7 miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus), the whole biblical backstory to that weekend’s events: “‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:26–27).  

What grace! Even so, more grace than the mere telling of the story is required—and more grace is given! At the table, Jesus repeats the fourfold acts of the Eucharist he had shared with his disciples that last night—“he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them” (Luke 24:30; see Luke 22:19). It’s this combination of Word and Table that breaks through the gloom … and begins the restoration of hope and the rebuilding of despairing hearts.    

May your heart and mine be ever set, like David’s, on the love of God. May your heart and mine be shaped, like Cornelius’s, by the disciplines of devotion, of poor-relief, and of prayer. May your heart and mine be ever ready, like Cleopas’s and his companion’s, to be joyfully surprised when Jesus meets us in our deepest grief, with his life-giving Word and his Body and Blood.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+

God's Regret - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 7/11/2023 
A Tuesday in the Season After Pentecost (Proper 9) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 5; Psalm 6; 1 Samuel 15:24–35; Acts 9:32–43; Luke 23:56b–24:11 

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

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we draw insights from that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. This Tuesday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 9 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

It is fitting that we read Luke’s account of Jesus’s resurrection alongside 1 Samuel’s account of the definitive rejection of King Saul and the final dispatching of King Agag, on the one hand, and the account in Acts of the healing of Aeneas and the raising up of Dorcas/Tabitha, on the other. 

The Bible’s larger story is one of God’s persistent, insistent, and ultimately irresistible intention to redeem humankind. The heart of the story is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Luke 23 and 24). That unimaginable narrative forces an either/or choice for every one of us: we either accept it with a hearty “I’m all in,” or we reject it, with either a resolute, or a shrugged, “nah.”  

Image: Emoji One, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons 

1 Samuel portrays King Saul’s attempt to have it both ways: “I’m kind of in, and I’m kind of not in.” The message of 1 Samuel is that a pretend or equivocal allegiance, a “meh, ok,” is no allegiance: “…you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you…” (1 Samuel 15:26).   

“And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel” — 1 Samuel 15:35b. The sad tale of King Saul sends the message to each of us: don’t make the God of the universe regret (and there are a thousand caveats that could be offered here) he ever put you here, the way he regretted putting the kingdom of God in Saul’s hands.  

The hewing of King Agag by God’s prophet is a difficult passage to read. We must understand that it is a ritual execution decreed by Yahweh himself, the God of pure justice and holiness—and the God who ultimately will not let condemnatory death have the last say. In the mystery of his own counsel, Yahweh allows his own “righteous” Son to undergo a similarly gruesome and horrific execution (see Luke 23:47). Yet Jesus endures his execution not on his own account. He does so on behalf of others who are as wicked as Agag and as faithless as Saul, uttering “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). He carries their iniquities, their rebelliousness, their betrayals, their arrogance into the tomb; and he leaves their offenses in the tomb behind him when he emerges alive again.  

In his Book of Acts, Luke describes the life-giving power that Jesus’s resurrection unleashes.  

In Acts 9, we find the apostle Peter ministering in the territory of classical Philistia. This is the region to which Jesus had taken the disciples right after declaring all foods clean. When Peter and the disciples rebuked the Canaanite woman, Jesus commended her faith and healed her daughter of an unclean demonic spirit (Matthew 15 and Mark 7).  

Aeneas of Lydda rises from his sickbed, his own elegant, if tacit, “I’m all in!” in response to the divinely personal overture given through Peter: “Aeneas, Jesus the Christ heals you. Get up and make your own bed” (Acts 9:34). Many turn to the Lord as a result. 

Dorcas/Tabitha of Joppa lies dead. She’s good and dead, her body washed and prepared for interment. Surrounded by artifacts of her beneficences and by the laments of her beneficiaries, it appears that her earthly ministry of mercy is over. But, no! Peter addresses her dead body: “Tabitha, get up.” Luke tells it dramatically: she opens her eyes, sees Peter, sits up, and, accepting Peter’s extended hand, she stands. Presented alive to the other widows and saints, she becomes the occasion for the conversion of many in Joppa. 

A fitting coda to today’s Acts passage is Luke’s brief note about Peter staying in the home of Joppa’s Simon, “a tanner” … in Jewish eyes, an unclean profession. Peter has come a long way since his sharing in the rebuke of the Canaanite woman. Next stop, the home of Cornelius, the Roman centurion! 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

God’s Instructions - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 7/10/2023 
A Monday in the Season After Pentecost (Proper 9)  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 1; Psalm 2; Psalm 3; 1 Samuel 15:1–3,7–23; Acts 9:19b–31; Luke 23:44–56a 

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

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we explore that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd. Thanks for joining me. This Monday in the Season After Pentecost our readings find us in Proper 9 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

For my wife and many others who cook, recipes are invitations to creativity. For them, the joy of cooking lies in substituting ingredients and changing measurements at will, seemingly whimsically at times. The results can be spectacular, resulting in meals that taste better than if directions had been meticulously followed.  

By contrast, I once had a job assembling lawnmowers. The instructions were clear: “Turn this screw two and a half times to secure the motor to the frame. If you turn the screw only two times, the motor will eventually come loose from the frame, and the customer will not be happy. If you turn the screw three times, you will strip the threads and we’ll have to throw the frame away.”   

Sometimes it’s OK to take instructions as suggestions. Sometimes it’s not.  

Wisdom knows when to improvise, and when to do what you’re told. In the Bible, it’s a matter of the heart, a matter of discernment. Somebody once noted, “Saul had no heart for God and lost the kingdom. David had a whole heart for God and saw the kingdom united. Solomon had half a heart for God, and we see the kingdom divided after his death.” The narratives of Samuel and Kings bear out these observations.  

1 Samuel. Because David had a heart for God, his improvisations on God’s commands were acceptable, as when (as we will read next week), he and his men ate the “bread of the Presence” (1 Samuel 21:1–15). Because Saul’s heart is far from God, however, his improvisations on God’s instructions backfire. Yahweh puts the Amalekites, inveterate enemies of Israel, completely under the ban. For that reason, Saul is commissioned to impose God’s sentence of judgment. Saul improvises: he spares Agag the Amalekites’ king, and he allows his soldiers to spare “the best of the sheep and of the cattle and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was valuable” (1 Samuel 15:9).  

After the fact, Saul makes a show of piety. He builds an altar purportedly for sacrifice. In reality, however, it is a monument to his own ego. The altar is, as the New International Version nicely renders, “in his own honor” (1 Samuel 15:10). Taken alive, Agag is potentially worthwhile to Saul as a walking trophy, a constant reminder of his own military prowess. And the booty (“… all that was valuable”) that the soldiers were allowed to “swoop down on” (1 Samuel 15:19) and take as plunder—well, it was just that, plunder, not sacrifice. The “sacrifice” is just theatre.  

No, King Saul’s mandate from God is like the instructions I received to turn the screw exactly two and a half times. His situation is not like my wife’s, where the instructions on the page invite her to see potential beyond the words on the page. What Yahweh has been inviting from Saul throughout his life is an aligning of Saul’s heart with his. Yahweh’s “delight” would have lain in finding Saul delighting in Him. Instead, Saul proves his unerring instinct is for self. And his show of religiosity is a cover for rebellion and arrogance (1 Samuel 15:23). He has rejected Yahweh’s overture, and Yahweh has reluctantly (oh the mystery!) said, “OK, Saul, have it your way. You want to be a law unto yourself, you are free to go.” Lord, have mercy, on me a sinner! 

Acts. The sad demise of King Saul sets in striking relief the redemption of his namesake and fellow Benjamite (Philippians 3:5), Saul of Tarsus.  

Claimed by Christ and newly baptized, Saul of Tarsus finds Scripture’s story coming alive with Jesus-as-Son-of-God-and-Messiah as its centerpiece. He begins to give powerful voice to that reality in Damascus, among the believers whom he had been sent to persecute: “For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’ All who heard him were amazed … Saul became increasingly more powerful and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Messiah” (Acts 9:19b–21a,22).  

The result of Christ’s work in Saul of Tarsus’s heart is that we begin to see the transformation of a meticulous instruction-follower who thought he had been given a mandate like that of the earlier Saul: kill the infidels! Now, humbled and made new by the cross and resurrection of Christ, he reads the biblical story more deeply. Now, he adjusts and adapts to whatever situation the Lord puts before him in order to carry out his new mission: to tell the good news, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Romans 1:16).  

Case in point is this Saul’s willingness to undergo the first of many humbling experiences for the sake of the gospel: he lets himself be lowered from the city wall of Damascus in a basket, he permits himself to be scrutinized by (understandably) skeptical Christ-followers in Jerusalem, and he submits to being secreted out of Jerusalem to his hometown Tarsus. 

This is not the most direct route to the position of prominence the Book of Acts will assign to him. Then again, this heart is being molded after the likeness of the Christ who conquered through defeat, and who ennobled others by suffering ignobility himself. As a result, this Saul, unlike the previous Saul, will come to embody the deeper reality Scripture had always sought beyond “burnt offerings and sacrifices”: the presenting of one’s whole being as a sacrifice, “living, holy, and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:2).  

With that same power at work in you, may you be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Bread & Wine - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 7/7/2023 

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

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

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

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

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

Bread & Wine 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Singing in Our Midst - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 7/6/2023 

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

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

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

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

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

Singing in Our Midst 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Declaring the Father's Name - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 7/5/2023 

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

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

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

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

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

Declaring the Father’s Name 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Prayers for the Rescued - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 7/4/2023 

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

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

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

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

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

Prayers for the Rescued 

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

A New Kind of Priest - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 7/3/2023 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Kind of Priest 

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+  

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

Friday • 6/30/2023 

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

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

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

“A Campaign Only Love Can Win” 

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

Image: Cover art, Blues Brothers DVD 

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

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

Singing Is Not the Only Worship 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+