Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
June 24, 2022
Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist
Invitatory
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.
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.
Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: Come let us adore him.
Reading: Isaiah 40:1-5
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
December words in June. We’re used to hearing this text in the run-up to Christmas, when the general mood shifts from whatever is happening in the world to a highly curated manufacturing of good cheer. Amid all the holiday lights and festive store displays and joyful social gatherings, Isaiah’s proclamation can have the effect of singing to the choir. It doesn’t shake the foundations in a startling way, though this is the dramatic disruption the text actually describes. It’s heard simply as an affirmation of the levity we already want to feel and share. That this passage mentions warfare and iniquity and punishment doesn’t register; there’s not much consideration of what actually causes a need for comfort in the first place. For the mirth of the season has all the momentum.
We assume that Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled in John the Baptist. The early chapters of Luke’s Gospel describe this fulfillment in a rather cozy way. Elizabeth and Mary share the delight of angelic visitations, and all the usual calamity associated with social revolution is replaced by accounts of childbirth that have become highly sentimentalized. But neither John’s life nor Jesus’ followed the trajectory of restoration set out by Isaiah. There was no comfort for John. He was an outlier. A curiosity. If he created a movement, it never gained much traction. And he was executed according to the whim of Herod’s wife, who took advantage of her husband’s drunken state. We don’t really dare say it in December, but John was a deeply tragic figure. He didn’t “change the world.”
And Jesus didn’t fare much better. No one remembered Isaiah’s prophecy when Jesus was on trial. And Jesus himself didn’t quote him from the cross, if even just to claim a comfort that no one else would understand. Jesus cried out that he had been forsaken. We prefer Christmas to be about innocence and warmth and the nuzzling of barnyard animals; we’d rather not be interrupted by words announcing the leveling of all things.
June, however, is at the opposite end of the year, and it doesn’t set us within any seasonal rituals or trappings, which, perhaps, affords us the possibility of freeing this text from the usual constraints that surround it. Unencumbered, we might be able to better perceive that whatever the “glory of the Lord” is, it required the tragedy of the lives and deaths of John and Jesus to be truly seen. And no less than this. General good cheer isn’t enough.
There’s a strong tendency in our era to focus on what we consider to be the social teaching of Jesus. He instructed us how to be better people and how to align ourselves with the expectations of God. He gave us rules for living. He was helpful, in an enduring and admirable way. But this misses the point of the Gospels completely. The Gospels don’t ask us to create the conditions of comfort that Isaiah proclaimed; we’ve never come remotely close to this. The Gospels announce that God will bring this redemption to fruition, even for those who suffer the worst imaginable tragedy. This salvation will be given us. It is our destiny. Which is important to keep in front of us as the tragedies of our own time grind on in horrific detail, scope, and inevitability. Hearing Isaiah’s words in June might help us grasp what it means to be able to “rejoice always.”
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.
