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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost

August 29, 2022

Beheading of John the Baptist

The 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 earth is the Lord’s for he made it: Come let us adore him.

Reading: 2 Corinthians 4:5-11

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.

Meditation: Jo Ann B. Jones

Let’s take a moment to remember Paul’s encounter with Christ that resulted in Paul’s conversion. He was traveling to Damascus to arrest the members of a Christian group in order to return them to Jerusalem for execution. While on the road he is surrounded by an intense and blinding light, the power of which causes him to fall from his horse. From the core of this powerful radiance a voice speaks and the face of the crucified Christ emerges.This experience is central to Paul’s theology. God speaks to Paul with the voice of Christ, challenging Paul and his current mission. What he has encountered is both the risen Christ and a vision of someone in whose life the lives and sufferings of his friends and associates are fully bound up. It is to this light to which Paul now refers in these opening verses of this portion of his second letter to the Corinthians.

The first reference to light in the story of creation presents it as physical, the basis of life. It draws attention to the wonder of existence, an existence born of nothingness, that, nonetheless, has power. This power has taken up a place in our fragile bodies, what Paul calls clay jars. It’s astounding that such power doesn’t reduce us to rubble.

Because this power is not ours, we are terrorized when we sense its absence. This underscores how vulnerable we are, both physically and spiritually, to those challenges and oppositions of life that will always confront us and lead us to our most feared outcomes: debilitation, abandonment, persecution, execution. Paul reminds us here of the power of Christ’s light to overcome all of these fears and terrible outcomes.

Jesus is presented as the one who bears God’s intense glory on the one hand and as the one who represents, by virtue of the manner of his death by crucifixion, that one most estranged from God. What Paul has worked out for himself is that in his glory, Jesus transcends law and power. He has acted on God’s behalf to take on human estrangement from God giving to us the Good News that no feared outcome is too deep or dark for God to heal. It is in this way that Paul proclaims “the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.”

The Church remembers the beheading of John the Baptist today. John opposed both Herod’s divorce and subsequent marriage to Herodias, the wife of his brother. At the celebration of Herod’s birthday, Salome, daughter of Herodias, danced for those gathered at Herod’s celebratory banquet. Her dancing so pleased Herod that he promised to give her whatever she desired. After consulting her mother, she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. John was so executed in prison. John died for Christ since he was killed for speaking the truth. He who baptized Christ prepared the way for Jesus’ own sacrifice. What Paul proclaims in his theology concerning Christ speaks powerfully to this day.

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.