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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost

May 31, 2023

Invitatory

Lord, open our lips.

And our mouth shall proclaim your praise.

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: Deuteronomy 4:25-31

“When you have had children and children’s children and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it but will be utterly destroyed. The Lord will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the Lord will lead you. There you will serve gods made by human hands, objects of wood and stone that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. From there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul. In your distress, when all these things have happened to you in time to come, you will return to the Lord your God and heed him. Because the Lord your God is a merciful God, he will neither abandon you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them.

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

Where does complacency begin? Or how? It usually sneaks in unannounced.

I can’t remember a time when I have ever declared my intention to be complacent about something. Nor have I ever heard anyone promote it as a virtue. One doesn’t decide to be complacent; it’s more a matter of things falling from sight and, thus, from notice. And this happens most easily when we presume that we have a certain ownership over much in our lives. We are in control, and change won’t come unless we choose it. Or, oppositely, we think an issue or a reality is of such magnitude that we can’t possibly have agency enough to effect a change. It is what it is. So we can’t be bothered. Many think of climate change in this way.

And God often falls in this latter category, too. For we continually idolize God, making him as inert as any object of wood or stone. As a matter of routine, God is safely constrained within doctrines or ideologies. God is merely the originator of a set of rules that are boringly taught and preached, rules that we are told do not change and will not change. Their authority comes from their infinite constancy. And faith, then, simply follows suit. It’s our conceding to laid out habits and actions, bolstered by the conviction that these are what God has commanded. And religion twists, then, on the question of sheer obedience.

How dull this is, especially when so much in the world is vastly more interesting and engaging and dynamic. No wonder complacency in faith sets in. Summer is its finest season.

The jolting expression from the Deuteronomist is the intimation that the true God sees and hears and eats and smells – not necessarily literally – but as an indication that God is actually alive. God is engaged in the thick of the world, just as we are when with all our senses we take in the full of our context. Think of what happens when you see an old friend or hear someone tell of their devotion to you. Eating marks the occasions we love most; smells viscerally bring back memories that had been long forgotten. Our senses shatter complacency. They surprise us. And God is alive in the same way; as one who in every way understands us more keenly than all others, and as one who desires that we try to understand him just as keenly, alert with all our senses. One who is alive commands an attention that is roving, swift and happily vigilant.

Complacency, in comparison, is deadly. It sweeps away all the vibrancy from living things: God most of all.

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.

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold