He Knows and Cares - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 10/31/2023 •
Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week After Pentecost (Proper 25) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 45; Ezra 5:1–17; Revelation 4:1–11; Matthew 13:1–9 

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 25 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

“Too much going on,” sighed the man in the checkout line in front of me. He and the cashier had been trading stories about living through the times we are in.  

John, the writer of the book of the Revelation, might have said much the same: “Too much going on.” For his testimony to the gospel, he’s been exiled to the Isle of Patmos off the southwest coast of Asia Minor. Many Jewish people resist the message of Jesus as Messiah because conversion to faith in Christ brings expulsion from the synagogue (John 16:2). Rome has become increasingly hostile. Already in the mid-60s, according to traditional accounts, Nero has had Paul beheaded and Peter crucified; and, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, Nero has used Christians as human torches to light the streets of Rome (Annals 15.44). By the early 2nd century, confessing Christ could bring a death sentence (Pliny, Epistles 10.96). The churches in the western end of Asia Minor who look to John for leadership struggle with persecution from without, and with heresy, lovelessness, indifference, and materialism within.  

By telling John to “write these things,” the Lord provides perspective to John, the churches of his day, and also to believers in our day. The Lord wants John (and us) to know what’s really going on above the fray, in the unseen realm. The Lord’s will is that we find strength to persevere and even to overcome when it feels like there’s “too much going on.”  

Image: Ramon FVelasquez, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons 

After the transcendent and shimmering image of Jesus as “Alpha and Omega” in Revelation 1, the Lord addresses letters to each of seven struggling churches in Revelation 2–3. The Lord knows and cares about what’s going on in the trenches, about the hard places of people’s lives.   

Now, with Chapter 4, the Lord begins to pull back the curtain that, for now at least, separates earth and heaven. He shows John (and us) what’s going on behind the scenes: “…and there in heaven a door stood open!” (Revelation 4:11b). In his vision, John is taken, in the first place, to the throne room, where the Creator of heaven and earth still governs. Here, God the Father sits on a throne in a setting redolent with colors of the rainbow—his symbol that he is both creator and preserver of his good creation (Revelation 4:3). Worship ascends to the Father from all of creation: from wild animal life (the lion), from domesticated creatures (the ox), from the birds of the air (the eagle), and from humanity (the human face—Revelation 4:6b). Twenty-four elders (Israel’s twelve tribes and Jesus’s twelve disciples) represent the full sweep of the biblical story, humanity’s true history and destiny. Each of the twenty-four has his own throne and crown. In humble adoration, each lays his crown at the feet of God.  

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

“You are worthy, our Lord and God, 
    to receive glory and honor and power, 
for you created all things, 
    and by your will they existed and were created” (Revelation 4:11).  

It’s his good creation—all of it—and he’s not about to abandon it, nor leave us alone in it with “too much going on.” Stay tuned.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Yahweh Has Returned - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 10/30/2023 •
Monday of the Twenty-second Week After Pentecost (Proper 25)  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 41; Psalm 52; Zechariah 1:7–17; Revelation 1:4–20; Matthew 12:43–50  

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 finds us in Proper 25 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Zechariah: Yahweh has returned. According to Ezra’s account, work on the house of God stops for about 17 years due to Samaritan resistance that is reinforced by later Persian rulers (Ezra 4:1–24). Finally, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah rise up and exhort the people to recommence the building regardless of opposition (Ezra 5; Haggai 1:1–2:9).  

During this time, Zechariah brings words both of comfort and of promise to God’s people. Through a vision of a man standing among myrtle trees, Zechariah consoles the people with “gracious and comforting words” (Zechariah 1:13). Though God had used alien nations to discipline his people, God had not planned the level of pain those nations had inflicted—and in his own time and in his own way, he will right that wrong (Zechariah 1:15).  

Image: "Myrtus communis (I)" by Salomé Bielsa is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0  

Yahweh himself is now returning to Jerusalem “with compassion; my house shall be built in it … My cities shall again overflow with prosperity; the LORD will again comfort Zion and again choose Jerusalem” (Zechariah 1:16b,17—and for his departure from Jerusalem during the exile, see Ezekiel 10).   

Eventually, Darius II of Persia supports the resumption of construction (Ezra 6:1–12). It is indeed time for Yahweh’s people to celebrate the Redeeming God of mercy, compassion, and love. And it is time for them to give themselves to the task of rebuilding the temple, the city, the walls … and their lives.  

Matthew: Now that “God is with us.” From Matthew’s point of view, the coming of Jesus as Emmanuel (“God with us”) is even more dramatic and significant than the return of the exiles from Babylon. Today’s passage in Matthew offers a twofold caution to any of us who are tempted to make light of that fact. Jesus’s coming amounts to a sweeping campaign to thrust demonic presence from God’s beloved Land of Promise and from the hearts of his people. But the elimination of an evil spirit demands its replacement by a good spirit, specifically the Holy Spirit.  

When we fail to acknowledge the source of the goodness that has come to our hearts, we become susceptible to even greater wickedness. The kind of specter Scripture would have us avoid is tasting some of the good that the gospel of Christ brings, for instance, a sense of being freely forgiven, but then “deconstructing” and abandoning our faith. We may well find ourselves living in a prison of bitterness, of self-justification, and of the rationalization of all sorts of things we know to be wrong.  

Revelation: Keeping our eyes on Jesus. What the New Testament as a whole and the Book of Revelation in particular would have us keep in view is the portrait of the magnificence and the glory of “Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Revelation 1:5). If we see him for who he truly is, we can more readily let our identity be shaped by and our lives be governed by the fact that he has made us “a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father” (Revelation 1:6).  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

The Strong Man Bound - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 10/27/2023 •
Friday of the Twenty-first Week After Pentecost (Proper 24) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 31; Ezra 3:1–13; 1 Corinthians 16:10–24; Matthew 12:22–32 

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 24 of Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Ezra: Joy at the return. God’s people know it’s of first importance to rebuild the altar and lay the foundation of the temple. (They will soon discover the necessity of building the protecting wall around their city. But hurrah for their sense of the priority of worship!) They adorn their celebration with exuberant music. Tears of joy flow, as well as tears that recall the former days. (This rebuilt temple will not have the grandeur of Solomon’s temple.)  

1 Corinthians: Paul calls for courage and love. “[B]e courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love…Greet one another with a holy kiss” (1 Corinthians 16:13b–14,19) 

1. Have courage to live with hope rather than an over-realized eschatology that expects a life of privilege in the “now.”  

1. Let your fellowship be loving, marked by a “holy kiss.”  

1. Establish relationships that are warm with affection, and chaste with respect for godly boundaries.  

Image: Detail, stained glass, Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida 

Matthew: Jesus and the “strong man bound.” At his baptism (Matthew 3), Jesus receives power that enables him to begin to storm hell itself. By resisting the temptations of the devil in the wilderness directly after his baptism (Matthew 4), Jesus “t[ies] up the strong man” (Matthew 12:29b). He strips Satan of his power to deflect God from his plan to seek and save the lost. Then, under the empowerment of the Spirit, Jesus goes about exorcising demons from possessed people, forgiving people their sins, restoring broken limbs, and returning sight to the blind and speech to the voiceless. All this is in promise of the breaking of hell’s dominion by his death and resurrection. It is evidence of his receiving “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18). And it will encourage his followers on their mission among the nations to make disciples, baptize, and teach a way of life against which “the gates of hell cannot prevail” (Matthew 16:18).  

Jesus soberly says that deliberately to attribute all this amazing, redemptive activity to the forces of darkness would be to commit the final sin of Christopher Marlow’s “accursed Faustus, miserable man, that from thy soul exclud’st the grace of heaven.”  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Exile and Return - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 10/26/2023 •
Thursday of the Twenty-first Week After Pentecost (Proper 24) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37; Ezra 1:1–11; 1 Corinthians 16:1–9; Matthew 12:15–21 

For comments on 1 Corinthians 14:20–42, see the DDD for Year 1, Tuesday of Lent 5  

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 24 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

The Bible’s most consistent through-theme is that of “exile and return.” There’s the loss of Eden by our original parents, and our return to Paradise on that future day when earth and heaven will be made new. There’s Israel’s succumbing to slavery in Egypt at the end of the patriarchal age, and their exodus under Moses to freedom in the Promised Land. There’s Israel’s exile in Assyria and Judah’s exile in Babylon at the end of the divided monarchy, and Isaiah’s promised new exodus back to the Promised Land under Ezra and Nehemiah.  

Every story, every novel, every movie that tells of a quest to return home is a retelling of this motif, from Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey to Shadow, Chance, and Sassy in the movie Homeward Bound. Our waywardness separates us from the God who, in his love, made us for himself. God’s persistent love, tireless faithfulness, and non-negotiable holiness work to win us back—over and over and over again, until his love, faithfulness, and holiness yield a renewed planet and restored fellowship between our Creator and us. “Exile and return” is our story.  

Image: "The Father's Embrace" by Lawrence OP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

“Exile and return” in Ezra. Wonderful insights into God’s redeeming heart lie in today’s passage in Ezra. Yahweh “stir[s] up the spirit” of the polytheistic Persian King Cyrus to do enough homage to the one he calls “the LORD (Yahweh) the God of heaven” to return God’s people to their homeland and to call upon them to “rebuild the house of the LORD (Yahweh) the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:1,3). It’s an event that Judah’s prophet Isaiah had prophesied (Isaiah 45), and it shows God’s people they should never be surprised to find the Lord working through people who don’t even know that they are in the crosshairs of his unrelenting love.  

This return bears the marks of a “new exodus.” It repeats features of the original exodus. Cyrus’s decrees that Yahweh’s people may “go up” to Jerusalem, using the same verb that Moses had used in Exodus 32 to describe how God had brought Israel up from Egypt (Exodus 32:1,4,7,8,28). And just as the people of Egypt had provided gifts to the Israelites as they left (Exodus 12:35–36), so do the people of Babylon: “All their neighbors aided them with silver vessels, with gold, with goods, with animals, and with valuable gifts, besides all that was freely offered” (Ezra 1:6).  

“Bringing justice to victory” in Matthew. The Bible’s quintessential account of “exile and return” is Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Matthew’s gospel portrays Jesus’s death and resurrection as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision of God “bringing justice to victory” through his Servant (Matthew 12:20c, quoting Isaiah 42:3). God’s Servant will suffer in his people’s place to bear their iniquities and justify many (per Isaiah 53:11cd). By his rising, Jesus, as God’s servant, will fortify “bruised reeds” and rekindle “smoldering wicks” (Matthew 12:20a,b, quoting Isaiah 42:3).  

The victory of justice through Jesus’s exile into death and his return from the grave will be so complete that his victory will include Gentiles as well as Jews: “And in his name the Gentiles will hope” (Matthew 12:21, quoting Isaiah 42:21). For this reason, Jesus insists that people not trumpet his miracles and identity during his earthly ministry. He is not on a tour of self-promotion. Rather, his mission is one of “exile and return” that he might “bring justice to the Gentiles” (Matthew 12:18).  

1 Corinthians. Of all the early followers of Jesus, it is arguably the apostle Paul who most vividly sees the picture: God’s justifying love in Christ is winning the victory among the Gentiles. In fact, Paul spends much of his third missionary journey taking up a collection from the new Gentile churches for the sake of the financially struggling church back in Jerusalem. His mission is to create a tangible expression of the reunification of the human race that Jesus’s mission of death and resurrection has accomplished. All of humanity “exiled” itself from God’s presence through the disobedience of Adam, and all of humanity is included in the “return” marked by Jesus’s rising from the dead. The Gentile churches are themselves proof of that reunification, and so Paul instructs the believers in Corinth to set aside what they can to aid in that endeavor.   

Praise be that Cyrus responded to the prompting of his spirit by the Spirit of Yahweh. Such a lovely way for God to anticipate his justifying love among the Gentiles! 

Praise be that Jesus remained laser-focused on the mission of giving his life that all of us who are wayward could be brought home, and made straight and strong, vibrant and alive.  

Praise be for generous hearts in Christ’s church who respond to the call to invest in the church as the visible manifestation of God’s plan to bring all of humanity back home from the long exile of sin and death.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

The Trumpet Shall Sound - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 10/25/2023 •
Wednesday of the Twenty-first Week After Pentecost (Proper 24) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 38; Lamentations 2:8–15; 1 Corinthians 15:51–58; Matthew 12:1–14 

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 24 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Lamentations: God’s people have hit bottom. “Your wound is as deep as the sea. Who can heal you?” asks Jeremiah in his utter grief (Lamentations 2:14). Jeremiah personifies Jerusalem as an adulterous wife who has been exposed and cast aside both by her husband and her paramour. Now, she who was called “the perfection of beauty” is mocked by the nations as perfect only in ruined desolation. She had been called “the joy of all the earth” by virtue of the law that governed her, the wisdom that flowed from her, and the worship that adorned her. Now, it’s all gone. Jerusalem’s kings and princes are in exile. The temple has been leveled, and sacrifice and worship have been cut off. Prophets still speak falsehood, because they refuse to name the sinful idolatry that has been the people’s downfall. And in the streets, mothers offer what comfort they can to the babies starving in their arms.  

For some 70 years or so, Jerusalem and her people will languish thus, while, as Moses and the prophets had forecast, the land will enjoy its sabbath rest from idolatry and lovelessness (Leviticus 26:34; Jeremiah 25:11–12; 29:10–14; 2 Chronicles 36:21).  

As deep as the wound is, however, there is healing. Tomorrow, our Old Testament readings turn the corner with the Persian King Cyrus’s decree calling for the return of Jews to their homeland and for the rebuilding of Yahweh’s house in Jerusalem.  

Although our wounds, like Jerusalem’s, may feel “as deep as the sea,” there is always an affirmative answer to the question, “Who can heal you?” Yes, our Lord can and does.  

Matthew: Jesus is our rest. Yahweh had provided a sabbath framework to shape Israel’s life. Weeks, months, years, and cycles of years were designed to mirror God’s original creative acts (Genesis 1), and to afford humans regular relief and refreshment of body and soul. The expansion of the sabbath principle in the Jubilee year (Leviticus 25) and in Daniel’s prophecies of a great Jubilee at the end of seven cycles of seven years (Daniel 7,9)—these expansions gave promise of a whole new era of sabbath rest that would be inaugurated by the Son of Man when he comes to put an end to sacrifice and establish God’s Kingdom.  

For Matthew, that era has come because the Lord of the Sabbath has come. He has come to take away the sin of his people. And on the way, Jesus imperiously oversteps contemporary extra sabbath requirements that had made the weekly sabbath onerous and burdensome rather than joyful and restorative. And he does so to make the point that he is himself the joy and the restoration which the sabbath had long promised.  

Today’s account of the disciples gleaning in the fields on the sabbath illustrates yesterday’s saying from Jesus: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).  

1 Corinthians: the trumpet shall sound. It is helpful, I believe, to think of Jesus as our Sabbath “now-and-not-yet.” Now, in the present, he delivers us from self-justification and from sin’s dominion, by virtue of his cross, resurrection, and indwelling Spirit. At the end of history as we know it, he will draw us from the grave, and deliver us (along with all creation) from death’s cruel grip.  

The sounding of “the last trumpet” in today’s paragraph in 1 Corinthians is the sounding of one final Jubilee shophar (Leviticus 25:8–13), the signaling of our freedom at last from slavery to the corruption of death.  

Every time I come upon it, this passage evokes a welcome and redemptive earworm: the “The Trumpet Shall Sound” from Handel’s Messiah (rendered here by Dashon Burton and Music in the Somerset Hills). It’s an earworm that sustained me throughout my parents’ long descent into dementia, an earworm with promise of what lies on the far side of the withering of their bodies and minds. “The trumpet shall sound….” It’s an earworm that sounds in my head at every funeral I oversee. “The trumpet shall sound….”  It’s an earworm that helps me walk the halls of nursing homes with their strange juxtaposition of frail residents lying alone in rooms outside of which have been lovingly hung box frame collections of pictures of those same residents in their vibrant younger days. “The trumpet shall sound … and we shall be raised incorruptible.”   

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Revulsion, Rest, and Resurrection - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 10/24/2023 •
Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week After Pentecost (Proper 24) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 26; Psalm 28; Lamentations 1:1–12; 1 Corinthians 15:41–50; Matthew 11:25–30 

Reflections on Lamentations 1:1–12 here (Monday of Holy Week, 2020) 

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 24 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Today’s readings invite reflections on three things: Revulsion, Rest, and Resurrection 

Lamentations: Revulsion. There is plenty of grief in Jeremiah’s life to merit the moniker, “the weeping prophet.” He’s been falsely accused of treason, sequestered in a cistern, threatened with death, and forcibly taken to Egypt. But what breaks his heart and compels him to write out a tear-drenched lamentation is seeing the beloved Holy City, the place God chose for the dwelling of his name, razed to the ground. The psalmist had sung, “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, in the mountain of his holiness. Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King” (Psalm 48:1–2 KJV). But now, it’s reduced to rubble. And all Jeremiah can do is pour out his heart:  

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? 
    Look and see 
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, 
    which was brought upon me, 
which the Lord inflicted 
    on the day of his fierce anger (Lamentations 1:12).  

Just the other day, a friend sounded a similar note to me. Betrayed by a close companion and steamrolled by the complicity of enablers, my friend felt as violated and dishonored and despised and exposed as Jeremiah’s Jerusalem. All I knew to do was listen.  

Matthew: Rest. The Bible’s story line, though, is that the fierceness of God’s anger is turned not so much on us as it is on all that keeps us from being “beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.” Some other god might look at our mess and say, “You gotta fix this yourself.” The God of the Bible comes himself and says, “I’ve got this. And I’ve got you.”  

If rabbinic teaching held that Torah was the fullness of God’s revealed truth, Matthew offers Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us.” And Matthew’s Jesus says, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Jesus is God’s truth, in other words, come in person. If rabbinic teaching held that the Law was a yoke to take upon oneself to channel one’s energy and chasten one’s longings, Jesus says to take his yoke. His yoke, he insists, is easy and his burden light—largely, I think, because he promises to bear it with and alongside us. If rabbinic teaching says the Sabbath is when we rest, Jesus says he himself is our rest, 24/7. If other approaches to God and to life call us to prideful defensiveness and schemes for self-improvement, Jesus offers a hand of gentleness and meekness. I dearly pray there’s consolation for my decimated friend in Jesus’s offer.  

1 Corinthians: Resurrection. Paul believes on behalf of the Corinthians what they dare not yet believe for themselves: that their mortal and corruptible bodies will one day give way to immortal and incorruptible bodies (1 Corinthians 15:53). Paul calls upon you and me—and my brokenhearted friend—to believe the same for ourselves.  

And while there will be things about ourselves and our situations that will stubbornly resist our best efforts to fix them, one day all of it will give way to the irresistible force of God’s love. He will make all things right! The world will undergo its own purgation by fire (2 Peter 3:7,10). We will undergo our transformation from dishonor to glory, from weakness to power, and from the ephemerality of dust to the solidity of the image of the Man of heaven (1 Corinthians 15:43,48–49). I dearly pray there’s consolation here too for my friend, and for all of us.   

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Confidence in the Future - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Monday • 10/23/2023 •
Monday of the Twenty-first Week After Pentecost (Proper 24)  

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 25; Jeremiah 44:1–14; 1 Corinthians 15:30–41; Matthew 11:16–24 

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 finds us in Proper 24 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

The key to 1 Corinthians 15 (and indeed to the whole of Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians) is what he says in 1 Corinthians 15:16: “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised.” Paul is not dealing with people who deny Christ’s resurrection. He is dealing with people who do not understand what his rising from the dead means, who do not understand the bigger picture without which his resurrection is meaningless. What is at issue is not the fact of Jesus’s resurrection, but its place in God’s story and our story. 

Not only did Jesus’s bodily resurrection really take place in normal space-time history, teaches Paul, that happening was not a one-time, special exception to the general rule of death. Jesus’s particular resurrection was a foretaste and guarantee of the general resurrection of the dead. Paul calls Jesus’s resurrection an aparchē, a “first fruits”: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Corinthians 15:20). Every farmer knows that once the “first fruits” of a crop has come in, the rest of the crop will of necessity follow. Our general resurrection will certainly take place now that its “first fruits,” Christ’s resurrection, has occurred.  

In today’s passage, then, Paul makes two essential points.  

First: resurrection-less faith is vain and hedonistic faith. “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” — 1 Corinthians 15:32. If there’s no resurrection to look forward to, says Paul, the Christian faith is vain and empty, worthy only of being ignored, if not scorned. If there’s no resurrection to look forward to, we should just become Epicureans.  

What is stupefying to Paul is that the Corinthians are trying to adjust the faith to make it fit a belief system in which there is no resurrection to look forward to, no matter what happened to Jesus! Sadly, as we have seen in our read-through of 1 Corinthians, their relationships show them to be practical hedonists.  

For their part, the Corinthians have accommodated their Christian hope to prevailing attitudes about death, not unlike people today. Back then, people either romanticized about Elysian fields on the other side of death, or they resigned themselves to a sentiment expressed in the most popular tombstone of the day, “I was, I am not, I will not be. I care not.”  

 The Corinthians had a flair for worship, but when thinking about death, they seem eerily akin to people in our own world. Even if Corinthian Christians do embrace the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, they (at least the ones Paul addresses in this chapter) think the only resurrection that happens to them is in their minds, not their bodies.  

Today, even among many church people (especially in mainline denominations) there is as much skepticism about the entire notion of bodily resurrection as there is among the un-churched and the de-churched. People tend either romantically to think that death means they pass on to a ghostly eternity of golf tee-times with a spirit-Jesus, and of reunions with the spirits of departed relatives or spouses or friends or pets. Or, with gritty realism, they resign themselves to death as a real and final terminus that has been made palatable by the knowledge that they have lived as best they can “as if” they had been raised to newness of life by the myth/legend/story of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. 

Second: resurrection faith produces wonderment and genuine charity. We only know so much about how our resurrection bodies will be constituted, but we can expect to be amazed: “…as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be…” — 1 Corinthians 15:37). God will give us a body “as he has chosen,” with a materiality and a glory appropriate to the age to come. But we can count on the fact that we are moving from this present age of “lesser” (less substantiality, less glory) to that future age of “greater” (greater substantiality, greater glory). We will be astounded at what we will be, captured nicely in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, “everlasting splendors.”  

Of utmost importance for the Corinthians and for us, is that this confidence about the future will make us different people in the present. As Lewis put it in the closing of his famous “Weight of Glory” sermon — a passage worth citing at length: 

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. 

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

A Few Facts - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 10/20/2023 •
Friday of the Twentieth Week After Pentecost (Proper 23) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 16; Psalm 17; Jeremiah 38:14–28; 1 Corinthians 15:1–11; Matthew 11:1–6 

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 23 of Year 1 of the Daily Office Lectionary.  

“…I handed on to you as of first importance…” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Paul felt it was important to remind the Corinthians of a few facts. Perhaps it’s worthwhile for us to recall them.  

“…Christ died for our sins…” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Jesus of Nazareth was the only human who ever lived who did not, by God’s standards, deserve to die. He died for one purpose. It was not, as some think, to give us an example of heroic resignation in the face of life’s inevitable end. He died to receive in his own person the consequences of his people’s sin. Unjustly killed, he won for us forgiveness at the bar of justice.  

Image: Detail, stained glass, Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida 

“…he was raised on the third day…” (1 Corinthians 15:4). As his death was “for” us, so was his resurrection. By his rising from the dead, he takes us by the hand and lifts us with him, as the Book of Common Prayer says, “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life” (BCP, p. 368). Because he lives, we live too: no longer subject to sin, to guilt, to shame, to endless death and separation from God.  

“…in accordance with the scriptures…in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3,4). Paul repeats this phrase to underscore the point that Scripture provided forecast after forecast both of Christ’s death and of his resurrection. As Jesus had explained on the road to Emmaus on the day of his resurrection: “‘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).  

The foreshadowing of Jesus’ death appeared when Joseph was lowered into a pit by his brothers and sent to prison by Pharaoh, when Moses was set afloat in the bullrushes, when Jeremiah was lowered into the cistern, when Jonah was swallowed by a fish, when David was persecuted by his enemies, when Hezekiah lay on his sickbed.  

The foreshadowing of Jesus’s being raised appeared when Joseph was lifted from his pit by nomads and brought from prison to rule on Pharaoh’s behalf, when Moses was rescued from the bullrushes by his mother, when Jeremiah was pulled up out of the cistern, when Jonah was vomited from the fish, when David was delivered from his enemies, when Hezekiah was raised up from his sickbed. 

“Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved…” (1 Corinthians 15:1). Paul reminds us that we are not free to invent our own story. We belong to a story that has been given to us, and we are called upon to pass it on unvarnished, unembellished, and unchanged. We are not free to substitute a theology that sneers at Christ’s substitutionary death for sin or dismisses the hope of a resurrection like his.  

“…as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles…” (1 Corinthians 15:8–9a). When the staggering truth of Jesus’s death and resurrection hits home, it prompts a reassessment of oneself. For Paul, that truth meant realizing he wasn’t as special as he had thought—from which posture, of course, he was able to receive as a gift a new status and a new calling. For us, I pray that the staggering truth of Jesus’s death and resurrection “according to the scriptures” calls forth from us a similar combination of sober self-reflection and joy-filled reliance on “the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

Peaceability - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Thursday • 10/19/2023 •
Thursday of the Twentieth Week After Pentecost (Proper 23) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 18; Jeremiah 38:1–13; 1 Corinthians 14:26-33a,37-40; Matthew 10:34–42 

For comments on 1 Corinthians 14:20–42, see the DDD for Year 1, Tuesday of Lent 5  

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 23 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Just when you think you’ve got Jesus figured out.  

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus highlights peaceability as a prime feature of life in his Father’s family: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). In that same vein, the apostle Paul, whom many think of as having a bit of a cantankerous streak in him, says, “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (Romans 14:19), and “God is a God not of disorder but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:42b).  

It’s strange, then, perhaps jarring, to read of Jesus saying, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Not peace, but a sword? What gives?  

You don’t have to look far to find points of contention in our world. Some are innocent, even fun: Who’s your favorite team? Some are serious and difficult, threatening to rip our social fabric: What should be the role of police in our community? What is our responsibility to the unborn? 

Image: Adapted from "auntie helping with a cup of water" by thepinkpeppercorn is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

Where do we draw the line, and, in the name of Jesus, say, “Not peace, but a sword”?  

In the context of Matthew 10, Jesus seems to me to have three things in view:  

Individuation. “…I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…” (Matthew 10:35).  Who we are, what we are going to believe, what our loyalties are going to be, and how we are to live, each of us has the responsibility to choose regardless of anybody else’s expectations.  

Each of us is more than the status into which we were born. Each of us receives a certain genetic makeup and a particular set of shaping forces: parents, siblings, nationality, neighborhood. We may be raised by “yellow dog Democrats” or “blue blood Republicans,” hair-on-fire fundamentalists or above-it-all progressives. But Jesus calls us, at some point in our lives, to be willing to separate ourselves from others’ expectations, and embrace our own loyalties and our unique identity. Sadly, that responsibility can leave us on the outside looking in. Except… 

The Cross. … Except that the line of demarcation is the Cross of Jesus Christ. “[W]hoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38). Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr maintains that there is only one dividing line within humanity that is worth talking about: some of us believe we need a redeemer, and some don’t. When we realize that we—individually and societally and globally—are broken and in need of repair, and that repair has come in Jesus Christ, we find ourselves irreversibly and resolutely and unapologetically on that side of the line.  

We find we must take up his Cross. We must follow him, even though we realize that we may therefore find ourselves on the opposite side of a chasm separating us from people otherwise closest to us. In the light of the Cross of Christ, we find ourselves freshly evaluating everything, from religious expressiveness to how justice is furthered and how humans may flourish in a fallen world. Jesus is telling us in today’s passage that when we take up his Cross, not everybody will necessarily “get” us anymore, because we will think, feel, and live differently — but that’s OK because …  

Identification. … That’s OK because when Jesus’s Cross becomes ours, ours becomes his: “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Matthew 10:40). As a corollary, Jesus takes everything we do for him as being done to him directly, even the cup of cold water we offer to one of his little ones (Matthew 10:42). The risk, then, of rejection by others, even of those closest to us, is more than offset by acceptance by him and by the new family of other so-called rejects.  

Later in Matthew, Jesus will hint that those of us who have taken up our Cross will unconsciously find that the Cross we have taken up has led us to serve him in the hungry, the imprisoned, the naked, and the sick (Matthew 25:31–46). And because we have become as much his as he has become ours, we will rejoice to hear him say, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34b).  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

To Read and Ponder Jeremiah's Life and Times - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Wednesday • 10/18/2023 •
Wednesday of the Twentieth Week After Pentecost (Proper 23) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:1–24; Jeremiah 37:3–21; 1 Corinthians 14:13–25; Matthew 10:24–33  

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 23 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Jeremiah: God’s “weeping prophet.” I look forward every morning to immersing myself in the grand story of God’s redeeming love. I confess, however, that going through the period of the divided monarchy these past few weeks has been rough. Despite the occasional “good” king of Judah and the minority voices of “my servants the prophets,” the constant drift is toward judgment, destruction, and exile for the people of God. I’m reminded of God’s people as a whole standing on Deuteronomy’s Mt. Ebal, calling down the curses of covenant disobedience upon their heads. It’s not a pretty picture.  

Image: "Michelangelo, Jeremiah lamenting the fall of Jerusalem, detail of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, 1508-12" by Prof. Mortel is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

It’s especially difficult to round out this portion of the history of God’s people by focusing, as we do this week, on the latter part of the career of Jeremiah. He’s often called “the weeping prophet,” and for good reason. From childhood he was called as prophet, and from the very beginning he knew that his was not to be a life of ease. “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). Opposition was going to come, and it was going to be fierce: “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:8). 

Yahweh touches Jeremiah’s mouth and puts his own words in his prophet’s mouth (Jeremiah 1:9). Ultimately that means Jeremiah gets treated with as much respect as the One for whom he speaks. And so, earlier this week we saw the contemptuous burning of the scroll upon which Jeremiah writes the words of Yahweh. Today, we see him arrested and falsely charged with treason, and then beaten and thrown into prison. Tomorrow we will find him cast into a muddy cistern: “Now there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud” (Jeremiah 38:6).  

Friday’s and Saturday’s readings recount how Jeremiah is brought up from his cistern prison and given an audience with King Zedekiah. Jeremiah knows that the Babylonian captivity is inevitable, and that it is a matter of Yahweh’s restoring sabbath rest to the land, doing a “reset” of his plan for redemption through Israel. So his counsel is straightforward: Surrender. But Zedekiah is as stuck in mire spiritually as Jeremiah was physically in his cistern: “Your trusted friends have seduced you and have overcome you; Now that your feet are stuck in the mud, they desert you” (Jeremiah 38:22). Zedekiah cannot bring himself to heed Jeremiah, and the destruction the Babylonians bring is the more terrible for Zedekiah’s being “stuck in the mud.” 

And still, despite the resistance, despite what must feel like failure, despite his grief over the suffering that God’s people are bringing on themselves, Jeremiah rises from his cistern to proclaim a message of hope:  

…[W]hen Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. Jeremiah 29:10-14.  

There is a profound and humbling cruciformity to Jeremiah’s life, for in many ways he anticipates the cross-shaped ministry of Jesus, his Savior and ours. That’s why it’s altogether instructive to read and ponder Jeremiah’s life and times.  

Matthew: becoming “little Christs.” Israel’s and Jeremiah’s story is a fitting background for our ability to identify with Jesus’s instruction to the twelve disciples as he sends them out on their first mission. As God’s “peculiar possession” and “kingdom of priests,” Israel was incubating God’s plan to have all the world’s sin be gathered up and assumed in One True Israelite who could stand in for all the world’s sin. Matthew’s entire gospel is the account of this One, whose name is “Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).  

Jesus sends the twelve, warning them, “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! … So have no fear of them …” (Matthew 10:24–26a).  

If I may paraphrase and extrapolate: “If they treat you badly it’s not you with whom they have issues. They are rejecting me and taking it out on you. Evil, sin, and death will be conquered by my suffering evil, absorbing sin, and embracing death. If you hold me to be your Christ, you need to respond as “little Christs,” because that’s the way we win.”  

No matter what the response is—whether we meet receptivity, resistance, or indifference—we know, per Jesus’s promise: “[E]ven the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven” (Matthew 10:30–32).  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+ 

God Has Given Us Gifts - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Tuesday • 10/17/2023 •
Tuesday of the Twentieth Week After Pentecost (Proper 23) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 120: Psalm 5; Psalm 6; Jeremiah 36:27–37:2; 1 Corinthians 14:1–12; Matthew 10:16–23 

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 23 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Riffing on Paul’s approach to tongue-speaking.  

Ours is a conversational God. He creates by word. He instructs by word. He promises by word. He warns by word. He rewards by word. He punishes by word. How we respond to his words is of great consequence. 

As bearers of his image, we are conversational creatures too. Therefore, what we do with words is also of great consequence.  

If King Jehoiachim were not aware of the power of Jeremiah’s prophetic words, he would not have burned them. Whether he burns Jeremiah’s scroll out of sheer contempt for God’s words or out of an attempt to thwart them, Jehoiachim’s exercise is a “bonfire of the vanities.” Jeremiah’s predictions of doom come to pass.  

Unlike Jehoiachim, the Corinthians are not contemptuous of God’s words. Rather, they are cavalier with them. They have received God’s words gladly, embracing the truth of the gospel and reveling in the flourishing of the gifts of the Holy Spirit among them. However, for too many Corinthians, the ministry of the Holy Spirit is being pressed to narcissistic ends.  

In his later letter to the Romans, Paul may hint that the gift of “glossolalia” (speaking in either angelic languages or human languages that a person had not learned) has the capacity to provide a safety valve for troubled souls. He says that the Holy Spirit releases groanings from our inner being (Romans 8:26). Paul describes the groanings as wordless (alalētoi), but many people argue that he has glossolalia in mind. If so, Paul holds out to individuals the prospect of therapeutic value in tongue speaking, as glossolalia could help us in the weakness of our inability otherwise to lift our subconscious struggles to the Lord.   

In Corinth, however, such “private tongues” (as they are often called) are being used for egotistical ends. People are speaking out in uninterpreted strange languages in church. Paul says (I paraphrase): “Keep that stuff to yourself. At home, that practice allows you to speak in a mysterious way to God. In church, you’re just showing off, and ‘speaking into the air.’” What Paul wants us to see is that in church, everything we do—everything—is for the good of the group that is gathered. Church is where we look to build each other up, to encourage one another, and to bring words of consolation from God to broken and wounded hearts (1 Corinthians 14:3). That’s why Paul says that in church, tongues must be interpreted if they are to be spoken at all. Otherwise, words that are to be offered are to be as distinct, purposeful, and artful as notes from a well-played flute, harp, or bugle (1 Corinthians 14:7–8).   

There are broad-ranging implications here for the ordering of worship services, and for the shaping of church life in general.  

Ego needs to get left at the door. A person doesn’t get asked to sing a solo because they need to sing a solo. A person gets asked to sing a solo because the congregation will best be served by that particular voice paired with that particular song. Same with lectors who read, eucharistizers who eucharistize, and, of course, preachers who preach.  

Stepping back another level, the church doesn’t call and ordain a person to ministry (or whatever a church’s governance calls their practice) because that person “needs” that call and ordination. Especially if a person “needs” said call and ordination! God gives gifts of ministry for, well, for ministry.  

He gives us whatever gifts we have because he expects us to use them to serve others, not ourselves! As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:12, “So with yourselves; since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for the building up of the church” — I repeat, “… for the building up of the church.”  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+