Daily Devotions with the Dean
Today’s Scriptures (not from the Daily Office) are: Ecclesiastes 3:1,4,5b; John 13:1-20, 34-35; Philippians 2:4-11; 1 Timothy 5:10.
I’ll get back to the Daily Office tomorrow. Today, though, is Maundy Thursday, and I can’t not be thinking about what Christ-followers normally do today: wash each other’s feet, share the Bread and the Cup, and take stock of the New Commandment that we love one another as Christ has loved us.
Charged with caring for a portion of Christ’s flock, I’ve had to think hard and prayerfully about how we do those things in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.
Two strands of thought have been on my mind.
First, these words from Ecclesiastes:
For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven…
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;…
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing (Ecclesiastes 3:1,4,5b).
Above all things, Maundy Thursday is an occasion of love. After all, it’s named after Jesus’s “mandate” that we love one another. Given that there is a “time” for everything, I have to ask: if during this time, the close proximity of washing your feet means I may be infecting you with a virus, am I really loving you? If my hands are supposed to be ministering the Bread of Life, but accidentally dispense contagion, am I really loving you? And if our Cup of Blessing winds up being a cup of cursing, are we really loving one another?
If love is our mandate, it’s better, in my judgment, to see in our unique moment in history “a time to refrain from embracing.” I ache to celebrate these things, but I know that there will come again “a time to embrace.”
Second, an analogy commonly used to explain how Ministry of Word and Ministry of Sacrament complement each other offers this wisdom: We have two eyes, not a single eye, so that through triangulation, we can have depth perception. It’s not that we can’t see with just one eye, but with two we can more completely. So it is with spiritual sight: words speak to the more logical side of our brains, while taste and touch speak to the more intuitive side. When Word and Sacrament work together, we experience a wonderful sort of spiritual “3-D.”
However, following the mandate of love, we are relying, for the moment, more on the Ministry of the Word. In this moment, perhaps one benefit for all of us can be that we lean into and renew our sense of the power of the Ministry of the Word. Fasting from the physical bread and cup may possibly allow God’s Word freshly to impress upon us the wonder of Jesus himself being Bread from Heaven and the True Vine (John 6 & 15). And what joy there will be when we can fully engage both “eyes” again: sharing the Body and the Blood, exchanging the kiss of peace, kneeling in prayer shoulder to shoulder.
One of the great things about Jesus’s washing of his disciples’ feet is that it is fraught with symbolic significance. Since (unless you are going to practice your own footwashing in your home tonight) as a Cathedral family, we are having to forego taking towel & basin to each other’s feet this year, let me offer brief observations from God’s Word about its symbolic weight.
First, footwashing is a profound parable of the whole project of incarnation — nowhere else is the parabola of Jesus’ “stooping low” to raise sinners more graphically portrayed. After reading John 13, then read Philippians 2. See if Christ’s humbling himself with towel and basin isn’t a mini-tableau of the whole redemptive drama. He who was, and is, equal with God humbles himself in the profoundest service to humankind, and then is exalted to receive the Name that is above every name.
Second, Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet is a compelling picture of our need for his ongoing ministry to renew and cleanse us. Though, like Peter who comes to the meal already bathed, we have been completely washed in our baptism, and therefore don’t ever need to be baptized again; we nonetheless get our feet dirty, and, as humiliating as it is, we need to admit that truth and accept the ongoing cleansing work of Jesus through the Holy Spirit. We remain sinners in need of grace, and thus our baptism needs to be renewed over and over again. We do this, in part, by thankfully contemplating the benefits of our baptism, by humbly confessing the ways we walk contrary to our baptism, and by worshipfully endeavoring to yield to the Spirit’s ongoing work to transform us into the image of Christ.
Third, for the apostle Paul, “washing the feet of the saints” became shorthand for a lifestyle of meeting the needs of others. In Paul’s list of qualifications for “enrolled widows,” the phrase “washing the feet of the saints” stands between “receiving strangers and “relieving the afflicted.” The objects of service are different: “strangers, saints, and the afflicted,” but the same attitude is expressed to all: a spirit of humble self-giving (see 1 Timothy 5:10).
During this season, I urge you to take special thought to assume the posture of kneeling in service to others. That may very well not involve physically washing anyone’s feet, but it may mean:
• providing groceries for a food bank;
• being mindful of, saying thanks to, and even being ready to raise a voice on behalf of people who work at jobs at low wages and high risk to serve the needs of others who are sheltering-in-place;
• calling to check in on someone;
• ordering pizza for the local fire department;
• offering to do some chore in your home that’s not normally yours.
Closing today with this hymn, a prayer of thanks to Jesus for coming in lowliness and humility, so he could raise us to heavenly heights:
Thou who wast rich beyond all splendor,
All for love’s sake becamest poor;
Thrones for a manger didst surrender,
Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor.
Thou who wast rich beyond all splendor,
All for love’s sake becamest poor.
Thou who art God beyond all praising,
All for love’s sake becamest man;
Stooping so low, but sinners raising
Heavenwards by thine eternal plan.
Thou who art God beyond all praising,
All for love’s sake becamest man.
Thou who art love beyond all telling,
Savior and King, we worship thee.
Emmanuel, within us dwelling,
Make us what thou wouldst have us be.
Thou who art love beyond all telling,
Savior and King, we worship thee.
Frank Houghton, 1934, © OMF
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Noonday Prayer
Daily Devotions with the Dean
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 55; Lamentations 2:1-9; 2 Corinthians 1:23–2:11; Mark 12:1-11
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 14 (Prayer of Manasseh, BCP, p. 90); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)
Collect for Wednesday in Holy Week. Lord God, whose blessed Son our Savior gave his body to be whipped and his face to be spit upon: Give us grace to accept joyfully the sufferings of the present time, confident of the glory that shall be revealed; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Had I come upon this cluster of passages at any other time than Holy Week, my reflections might have gone in a different direction. But here we are, in the middle of this Week of weeks.
…had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me, … But it was you, a man after my own heart, my companion, my own familiar friend. — Psalm 55:13,14. During this week, who cannot not read about King David bemoaning being betrayed by a friend, and not think of the Friend of Sinners who is turned on by one of his closest friends, Judas Iscariot (a “familiar” enough “friend” to have been entrusted with the moneybox!)? Just to think about Jesus “loving his own to the end” so much that he would stoop to wash their feet, knowing that one of those whose feet he was washing was just waiting for his chance to slip out into the night to ready a fateful kiss: “So, after receiving the piece of bread [Judas], immediately went out. And it was night.” (See John 13, especially, verse 30).
The thought stings. It stings when I ask what kind of friend I am—to Him, and to those who count me friend. Lord, have mercy.
The Lord has become like an enemy… — Lamentations 2:5. In the first chapter, Lamentations portrays Jerusalem/Judah violated & kicked to the side of the road. It is a pathetic, pitiable sight. In the second chapter, Lamentations turns to a different subject: God. The picture is jarring. Yahweh has “bent his bow like an enemy, with his right hand set like a foe… he has poured out his fury … he has demolished without pity” (2:4,17). He “withdraws his right hand from” his people because of emotions that are difficult for us to accept: he is angry, merciless, wrathful, burning like a flaming fire, furious, fiercely indignant, scornful. (See the cascading terms in verses 1-4, 6-7.)
I wanted to avert my eyes in chapter one. I want to close my ears in chapter two. This is supposed to be the loving, rescuing, redeemer God, right? Instead, this sounds like the “fire and brimstone” God of caricature that keeps people away from church—like a cosmic tantrum-throwing, petulant child, who’s had a toy taken away.
But then … if God isn’t at war with that within us which is at odds with him, we are lost. The long story of redemption is one of God’s implacable enmity towards the sin that destroys us. That’s what I need to see when I behold the bloody mess of this Holy Week’s cross.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone…” — Mark 12:10. Thus, there is so much packed into Jesus’s quote of Psalm 118. The One “whipped and his face…spit upon,” as today’s Collect puts it, is God-in-flesh, absorbing the wrath his “enemies” deserve, so that, by some mysterious divine reckoning, God-in-heaven reconciles us to Himself, and counts us friends (Romans 5:10). Christ, have mercy.
But if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but to some extent—not to exaggerate it—to all of you. … [Now]…you should forgive and console him, so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I urge you to reaffirm your love for him. — 2 Corinthians 1:5,7. Somebody in Corinth had caused a crisis in the church. The congregation has dealt with it to Paul’s satisfaction, and the person has repented. Some, though, are not ready to let it go. Paul says: I’ve forgiven him, so you need to as well. In Christ, we have been reconciled, so we become reconcilers. Forgiven, we become forgivers.
The close quarters of shelter-in-place confinement exposes us to the best and the worst in each other. Work versus home boundaries are gone. Assumptions about who does what chores are out the window (or should be). Irritations mount, along with boredom—not to mention the constant stress of coping with a world that has become the movie set for a surreal pandemic horror flick.
All of which makes this an especially important time to tune in to each other’s emotional well-being, and to be, as James puts it, “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). To be especially ready to extend forgiveness and to ask: Lord, have mercy.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Stations of the Cross - Tuesday
Daily Devotions with the Dean
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalms 6 & 12; Lamentations 1:17-22; 2 Corinthians 1:8-22; Mark 11:27-33
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 13 (BCP, p. 88); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13, BCP, p. 94)
Collect for Tuesday in Holy Week. O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Without sugar-coating reality, the Bible carries about it an irrepressible hopefulness, a stubborn hold on a sense that glory and goodness will finally prevail, no matter what. The ugliness of judgment is always pregnant with the promise of redemption. Suffering inspires the singer. Punishment prompts the poet.
The book of Lamentations begins with four chapters of acrostics, each verse or stanza beginning with successive letters of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet (chapter 3 is a triple acrostic, so it’s 66 verses long). The last chapter (chapter 5), though not an acrostic, has the same number of verses as the Hebrew alphabet.
Judgment, in other words, runs from “A to Z.” Judgment has a beginning. But it also has an end, as we will see in Good Friday’s reading. In the very center of Lamentations (in Hebrew poetry, the center is often the “crown” of the poem) we find this: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end… Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone” (Lamentations 3:22-33).
On the torturous journey to “the steadfast love,” today’s verses from Lamentations acknowledge the guilt of sin and they bemoan the shame that attends sin’s guilt: “Jerusalem sinned grievously, and so she has become a mockery; all who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness” (Lamentations 1:8).
As if in answer, the BCP’s Collect for the Day points us to the cross, “an instrument of shameful death” that God made “the means of life.”
The shamefulness of Christ’s death on the cross lay, in the first place, in the fact that Jesus had been spurned by his own nation, and then had been turned over to pagan Romans for a degrading non-Jewish execution. Deprived even of the benefit of a “good” Jewish stoning or even a “dignified” Roman beheading, Jesus was given over to what Scripture had always thought of as a repugnant, cursed death for infidels: hanging on a tree (see Deuteronomy 21:23).
The humiliation of Christ’s execution lay, in the second place, and almost in fulfillment of Jeremiah’s lament that Jerusalem’s mockers “have seen her nakedness,” in the fact that Jesus, according to Roman custom, would have been crucified naked. Victims of what Cicero called “the unlucky tree” were stripped, and then nailed or tied to crosses prominently displayed in public places.
Even into the 4th century, Christians in Jerusalem would remember “the nakedness of Christ on the cross, who in his nakedness ‘disarmed the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree’” (Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, Mystagogy 2). The marvel is that such shame worked such grace, such rejection effected such fellowship, and such a curse won such blessing.
We were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead — 2 Corinthians 1:8b-9. You can see Christ’s triumph in Paul’s life, when he talks about being “unbearably crushed” and having “received the sentence of death,” yet relying on “God who raises the dead.”
You can see that same triumph in the likes of the 72 year old Italian priest, Don Giuseppe Berardelli, who, stricken with the coronavirus, maintained his greeting to everyone, “Pace e bene,” and then when it came time for him to go on a ventilator, insisted it go to another. “Pace e bene,” indeed: the eternal “peace and well-being” Jesus has secured through his death and resurrection.
In the days ahead, Lord willing, your “sentence of death” will take a lesser form; but even something as simple as having to be cut off from loved ones can bring its own anguish.
I pray that you and I, like Jeremiah of Lamentations, can bring a hope-tinged grace and beauty to the ugliness of the day. I pray that you and I, like the Apostle Paul and Father Berardelli, will discover the glory of Christ’s cross, and count our own share in its “shame and loss” as something gladly to be borne.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Stations of the Cross - Monday
Daily Devotions with the Dean
This is part of a series of devotions based on the Daily Office, which is found in the Book of Common Prayer.
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 51; Lamentations 1:1-12; 2 Corinthians 1:1-7; Mark 11:12-25
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12:2-6, BCP, p. 88); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (Revelation 15:3-4, BCP, p. 94)
Collect for Monday in Holy Week. Almighty God, whose dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BCP, p. 220)
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people — Lamentations 1:1. This first chapter of the book of Lamentations is one of the most gruesome in all of Scripture. The “weeping prophet” Jeremiah (by tradition, the author of Lamentations) looks out over a city he loves, left desolate in the wake of the Babylonian destruction of 586 B.C.—like a bombed-out Dresden or Hiroshima or Aleppo. Jeremiah imagines Judah/Jerusalem as though she had been bride to a husband, Yahweh, who now is dead to her: “How like a widow she has become.” Worse, she had given herself to false lovers who had failed to care for and protect her. And now she has been violated by despoilers (“she has seen the nations invade her sanctuary”), only to be promptly tossed aside (“her uncleanness was in her skirts”—Lamentations 1:9,10). It’s among the ugliest scenes Scripture ever describes. I find it hard to take.
But the writer of Lamentations, whether the “weeping prophet” Jeremiah as tradition holds, or an anonymous poet worthy of the attribution, does what only a great artist can do: create haunting beauty from something grotesque. Picasso’s Guernica, a visual lament of the 1937 Nazi and Fascist bombing of that Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, is just such a piece. Guernica wrenches the cry, “How long, O Lord?”, from deep in my soul.
Just so, the book of Lamentations, one of the most beautifully crafted series of poems in all of Scripture (I’ll describe its overall architecture tomorrow), provides some of the most exquisite language for bringing to God our anguish and grief over human suffering.
Today’s Lamentations reading ends with a verse that has inspired one of the most powerful choral pieces I’ve had the privilege to sing, Z. Randall Stroope’s “O Vos Omnes,” a Latin rendering of Lamentations 1:12:
O vos omnes (O you people),
Qui transitis per viam (Who pass this way),
Attendite et videte (Look and see)
Si est dolor (If there is any sorrow),
Sicut dolor meus (Like my sorrow).
Recordare Domine (Remember, Lord),
Intuere et respice (Consider and notice)
Opprobrium nostrum (Our humiliation).
Here’s a YouTube link to a recording of Stroope conducting Canticum Novum, with visuals from Auguste Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” (commemorating the Hundred Years’ War)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjPeqih9fxc
The book of Lamentations presents one of the many ways that the Old Testament anticipates the desolation of abandonment that Jesus would endure for us on the cross. Holy Week is an extended invitation to embrace what today’s collect calls “the way of the cross.” Whatever form “the way of the cross” takes for you this day and this week—especially if you are wondering, like Jeremiah, “if there is any sorrow like my sorrow”—, I pray you embrace that “way” with both honesty and courage. I pray that you find it indeed “none other than the way of life and peace, through Jesus Christ.”
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Palm Sunday Worship
Daily Devotions with the Dean
This is part of a series of devotions based on the Daily Office, which is found in the Book of Common Prayer.
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 137:1-6; 144; Exodus 10:21–11:8; 2 Corinthians 4:13-18; Mark 10:46-52
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 12 (“Song of Creation,” BCP, p. 88); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (Revelation 15:3-4, BCP, p. 94)
Consequential words from Paul.
We know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus — 2 Corinthians 4:14. What’s at stake in the question of whether on that first Easter Sunday Jesus actually, literally, bodily rose from the dead isn’t just the truthfulness of the Apostles’ claims that he did so. (Not that truthfulness isn’t important for its own sake. It is.)
More critical than the bare fact of Jesus’s resurrection, though, is its meaning. Because the Father raised Jesus from the dead, insists Paul, he “will raise us also with Jesus.” If Jesus rose, we will rise. Really. If he didn’t, we won’t either—at death we’re done (at best).
That’s what’s so momentous about the medical crisis swirling around us: nobody gets to dodge the issue. I’m “all in” on the confession “Christ is risen.” Because he is, we will be as well.
Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day — 2 Corinthians 4:16. Believing that Jesus’s resurrection is sure, and that your own resurrection is secure—such believing brings an equilibrium that can face the inevitable: “wasting away.” Sometimes that “wasting away” is a long and graceful glide. Sometimes it’s an abrupt and ugly crash. Sometimes it’s a protracted and brutal deterioration. Regardless, it can be faced with equipoise and peace.
I’ve been in ministry long enough to have seen too many people so desperately pinning their hopes on the preservation of this physical body that, when faced with news of terminal disease, they spent their remaining months, weeks, or days, in denial of what was happening to them. Claiming a “healing” that wasn’t going to come, they became distant from the God they thought they must be disappointing because of a lack of faith. They deprived themselves of the opportunity to experience what Paul describes here: “our inner nature is being renewed day by day” (v. 16).
We do not lose heart…because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal — 2 Corinthians 4:16, 18. I’ve known others who knew where they were going, and were thus able to entrust themselves to the Lord who knew the way.
When the transitory nature of this life hits you in the face like a two-by-four, you can’t help but stop, and go, “What just happened?” The gift of that jolt can be the dawning recognition of a singular grace: the opportunity to pay attention to, and to nurture, the inner self through cultivating friendship with God.
I suppose that’s why it’s become so important to me to begin the day with the Daily Office’s Scriptures, Canticles, and Prayers—sometimes basking in them, sometimes puzzling over them, sometimes letting them flow over me. Writing devotions like these, then, is part of what reminds me of the difference between what is merely temporary and what is eternal.
If you find yourself being reminded these days of just how frail you are, how tentative all your plans have to be, how impossible it is to place all your hopes in this life, I pray you find something being “renewed day by day” deep within you: the abiding sense that “this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory…” (2 Corinthians 3:17).
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Daily Devotions with the Dean
This is part of a series of devotions based on the Daily Office, which is found in the Book of Common Prayer.
This morning’s Scriptures are:
Psalm 22; Exodus 9:13-35; 2 Corinthians 4:1-12; Mark 10:32-45
This morning’s Canticles are:
following the OT reading, Canticle 14 (Song of Moses, Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13, BCP, p. 94)
Each Scripture setting offers me today reason to cry out to God during this hard time we are all sharing:
Plagues 6 & 7: Boils & Hail. The plagues become more severe. The plague of hail is the first of the plagues against Egypt to threaten human life. But then, just as the threat accelerates, so does God’s counsel to provide and to seek shelter (Exodus 9:19-21). An offer of mercy in the midst of judgment, shelter in the storm.
Lord of heaven and earth, may the storm sweeping our world soon pass. Protect those providing what shelter they can. Have mercy, Lord, and spare lives. Soften and transform hearts that have been hardened into indifference to your presence. Reclaim hearts that have drifted into inattention to your care for them. In your mercy, Lord, hear our prayer.
Psalm 22 anticipates, by a thousand years, Jesus descending into the abyss of abandonment to death (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), so he could rise to lead the praise of the God who rescues those “that fear him … the poor in their poverty … those who worship him … all the families of the earth … all who go down to the dust … [and] … a people yet unborn” (Psalm 22:1, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 30). What a powerful prelude to Holy Week!
Lord Jesus, Friend to sufferers, there’s no pain we’ve felt that you have not felt, no fear that’s unfamiliar to you, no loss that has not touched you. Please be near to all those for whom you have given your life in agony and rejection. Please strengthen especially those who feel most abandoned and forgotten. Remind them that you are there: a very present help in time of trouble. In your mercy, Lord, hear our prayer.
In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul marvels at the way God places the light of knowing him in the hearts of his people. We are as frail and fragile, and as broken, as clay lanterns that have been put back together with semi-transparent glue. God lets his light shine out all the brighter through the cracks.
Being more aware of the fact that we are vessels of clay makes knowing the hope of Easter more real. There’s no way to be glibly triumphalistic about Easter this year. No Easter egg hunt in our courtyard. No chance of being mindlessly superficial with the traditional, “He is risen indeed.” This year the Easter smiles come at a cost: the cost of declaring Christ’s victory in the very midst of an ongoing titanic struggle against disease and death and dislocation. This year, every one of us declares Christ’s victory knowing that tomorrow we could wake up with the fever and the cough and the fatigue that mean the struggle for life has suddenly become intensely personal. And because any one of us may need assurance of resurrection on the far side of death sooner than we had anticipated, just so, Easter matters the more.
God of Light, you who make your light to shine in the darkest of places, shine the light of your glory through the cracks of my frailty. Perfect your strength in my weakness, and give all my brothers and sisters a joy this Easter that comes in the very midst of trials and tribulations. In your mercy, Lord, hear our prayer.
Thus it makes sense, finally, that in Mark 10, as Jesus heads for Jerusalem and Holy Week, he makes it crystal clear to his followers that the kind of power he embodies and is preparing to release into the world through his death and resurrection is not available to the ambitious, the proud, and the self-promoting.
The coronavirus is a great equalizer. You may be the queen’s son, or a server at a bar on Nowhere Street. You may be the governor’s brother and a media celebrity in your own right, or a minimum wage grocery bagger who just got coughed on by an unthinking shopper. The coronavirus makes our pretensions irrelevant. We can take Jesus at his word: our pretensions were never in the least relevant. All that matters is the generous heart of the One who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
Lord Jesus, Son of Man, show me this heart. Make me glad in the service of the One who gave his life a ransom. In your mercy, Lord, hear our prayer.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+