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Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany

January 22, 2024

Feast of Vincent of Saragossa, 304 CE

Invitatory

The Lord has shown forth his glory; Come let us adore him. 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading: Luke 12:4-12

“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows. “And I tell you, every one who acknowledges me before men, the Son of man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but he who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God. And every one who speaks a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. And when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not be anxious how or what you are to answer or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”

Meditation

After a long hiatus, it has finally snowed enough here for the snow to be more than a temporary inconvenience. I love how snow changes the experience of the evening hours, spreading light and diminishing the shadows. I love the playfulness that it brings to nearly every sloping hill; if not literally and physically, then at least in nostalgia. And I remember, with relish, even the many times as a youth in the Midwest that winter charged us with the task of getting vehicles unstuck from heavy drifts. The key to this, we discovered, was not to simply push a car forward, forcing it into ever more densely packed snow. The way out was to rock cars backward and forward, creating a rhythm and momentum that would eventually carry them over the drift rather than deeper into it. The process was progressive; each swing brought us closer to the goal until, finally, we could feel an exciting, culminating release.

I think it’s fair to say that the several verses appointed for today from Luke are not an easy read. It’s hard to get a sense of how they all hang together. One moment we are told not to be afraid; in the next we are abruptly warned of the terrors of damnation. Our tendency in reading Scripture is to try to continuously forge ahead, taking each statement of Jesus as one more straightforward directive, which, together with all the rest, will provide us a coherent picture of what God expects of us. Read in this way, however, this text effectively gets us nowhere, except perhaps deeper into the quagmire of not knowing either what God wants or how we will be judged. It’s like determinedly pushing a car further into the snowdrift.

An alternative way of reading this passage is to see it as engaging us in a literary rocking motion designed to get us unstuck from certain convictions that hinder us. For every statement in which we are told not to be afraid there is a corresponding statement that reinstills a definite anxiety. We are verbally moved forward and backward, forward and backward, forward and backward. Every consolation is met with the countering fear that the immensity of God’s grace will still prove inadequate to save us all.

But it may be that the fears that are voiced are ours and not the judgment of God. It may be that it is we who respond to God’s repeated assurances with the objection, from deep within ourselves, that God can’t be that gracious. In progressive steps, the rhythm of Luke’s text gives this resistance maximum force until, finally, it breaks us free. The rocking motion of these verses functions as a kind of therapy through which we are dislodged from our most resilient worries. For, more than a sparrow, we are of infinite value to God – which spreads such light that no shadows remain.

Prayer

You come to us, O Christ: you are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. All times and seasons are yours, and in you all things hold together and are brought to completion. Draw us by your Spirit into communion with you and one another and make us and all things whole and free in the full force of your deathless love.