Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany
February 21, 2022
Invitatory
Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.
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.
The Lord has shown forth his glory: Come let us adore him.
Reading: II Corinthians 5:16-21
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
“I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its own time.” These lines from the book of Ecclesiastes are often read at burial services. I’ve had hundreds of occasions on which to think on them, and not just as the kind of general, abstract wisdom we seek to find in texts: words that can serve as a veneer covering over the real and craggy details of life. At funerals these lines are attached to a singular life. Someone who has died, who is now gone and can not be called back, is remembered. And what is remembered are the times of his or her life that were beautiful – across the full span of his or her years. These lines draw out the beauty that resides deep within us at each stage of life. There’s a beauty to childhood that is all its own. But it can neither be indefinitely sustained nor retrieved later in life. Just as there’s a beauty to aging that only time can reveal. It can’t be rushed. There’s a beauty that can be found in ease. A very different beauty can be discovered in hardship. It can even be located in suffering. I marvel at this persistence across all change.
In the text appointed for today, Paul’s claim that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away” is an immediately attractive statement. Especially in our era, when so much is defined by planned obsolescence, newness is given supreme importance. The “new” sparkles with the promise of ever-greater opportunities and capabilities; it is a word that alerts us to what may be unprecedented – to developments or things that may even change our deepest expectations and hopes. But how, then, does this “newness” apply to our selves? What does it mean for us that we “are a new creation?” Where exactly do we identify this newness?
This is a vital question. For it is also the character of our era that nothing that is old is allowed to pass away. The past has become, perhaps in an unprecedented way, very ripe ground for digging up unresolved responsibilities and obligations. Imbalances and injustices abound there. There’s no end to the moral archeology that can be done, unearthing and raising up ancient issues. And this is accompanied, now, with the demand that nothing can be made new until everything is first made right. And there will never come a time when everything is made right. So, effectively, newness does not apply to us. There’s simply too much past from which we cannot shake loose.
Unless what becomes “new” in us is what we take “right” to mean.
Paul tied “the new” to reconciliation, which he explicitly defined as the “not counting” of past sins. Reconciliation doesn’t require dismissing the past, but it does demand that we do not allow the old to get in the way of creating or sustaining relationships. It’s not overlooking what has been; it’s choosing to see it in a different light. And here the persistence of beauty comes into play. Jesus never demanded rightness from anyone. He rarely spoke of it. He did, however, speak about the righteousness of God, and he lived according to it. He approached others with the bearing of righteousness, which never condemned in judgment but always granted others, and his interaction with them, a beauty appropriate to their time. Even in crucifixion. God’s righteousness, then, is not the final imposition of what ”from a human point of view” counts as right. It is the revelation of a good that is greater than what is right – we might say, a more enduring beauty.
And granting this beauty precedence would be an act of astonishing “newness.”
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
