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Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany

January 13, 2023

Invitatory

I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

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: Isaiah 42:14-16

For a long time I have held my peace; I have kept still and restrained myself;

now I will cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant. I will lay waste mountains and hills and dry up all their herbage; I will turn the rivers into islands and dry up the pools. I will lead the blind by a road they do not know; by paths they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I will do, and I will not forsake them.

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

Our reflections on God often serve, primarily, as reflections of us. They function like a mirror that shows us what we think of ourselves. The good and welcoming attributes we ascribe to God are the ones we’d like to see in our lives. Insofar as God is loving or faithful or forgiving or merciful, we assume that we should be the same. Similarly, the traits of God that we find daunting – God as all-knowing and just, who, thus, will be a judge – these reflect our own sense of guilt and the shortcomings we fear. God functions as the means by which we take our own measure.

In the same way, whatever we say to God, can also slide toward being deeply self-referential. Prayer can slip into little more than recitations of our concerns about us and our world, as we look for solutions that we can recognize at the level of our understanding. We’ll grant some time for this, briefly, with the hope that God might act on our behalf and in the manner that we have requested. But we have much less patience for waiting on God and listening, at length, for a reply that we have not already assumed or a response that would be unique to God and, thus, shockingly, revelatory of God. For we often trust that we already know what God should do. We trust that we already know who God should be – because God is more than just principled. God is, simply, and in fact, the eternal expression of the principles to which we already hold, the guarantor of the things we feel must be constant. And, thereby, God is reduced to an abstract idea, rather than a lively presence. 

Such a god has none of the messiness – the personal inscrutableness – that comes into play when we deal with anyone else – others who can retort, devastatingly, unpredictably, and with a keen sense of what would be maximally disruptive in any one, particular moment. And yet, this, in all of its eruptive contingency, is precisely the character Isaiah ascribes to God. It’s a jarring description. There’s no aloof coolness here, no intimations of a far-off yet omnipotent and omnipresent power hovering in the heavens. God is fully immersed in the travails of our world, even as one who is overwhelmed and left to react with the passion of immediacy, without the distance of forethought or objective calculation.

Imagine God gasping and panting, as if unable to catch his breath in response to us. Imagine God crying out because he literally cannot escape the pain of our ignorance and willful wanderings. We can wound God, viscerally – yet we almost instantly revert to thinking only about what this injury may mean for us; which makes confession merely a mode of our own escape from the consequences of our own actions. Isaiah rejects this. And he sets before us such a god as can only be seen as God, for God’s self – a god not already created in our own image. This God waits for us and, even more, yearns for us.



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.