Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent
March 25, 2022
Invitatory
Rend your hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil.
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 is full of compassion and mercy: Come let us adore him.
Reading: Mark 6:47-52
When evening came, the disciple’s boat was out on the sea, and Jesus was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea. He intended to pass them by. But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
Everything about this text is slightly off-kilter. Well… more than slightly. It’s actually absurd, which may be why it never appears in the Sunday lectionary cycle. But I love the sheer comedy of it: that Jesus peers out from the shore in the evening and sees his disciples making no headway on the sea; that he seems to wait until very early in the morning to take any action; that his response is to walk out on the water; that his only intention was to walk past the boat; that he’s mistaken for a ghost; that he ends up terrifying the disciples; that when he gets in the boat and the winds stop the disciples seem clueless, not only about what has just happened but also about Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand. This is all quite hilarious in the telling, and it’s made even more hilarious when, out of habits of piety, people try to read this too seriously (usually by emphasizing Jesus’ miraculous powers that the disciples seem unable to comprehend). But it’s a text that makes me laugh - meaningfully.
What makes it funny is that it’s completely comprised of non-sequiturs. And we, in contrast, are very dedicated to the work of making sense out of what we experience. One of our deepest commitments is that of drawing the world into alignment. We presume that there must be an order to all that happens; and our task, then, is to discover it so that we can better manage and control our lives. This is why we’ve come to so highly value science, technology, engineering, and math in educational curricula. For the path of progress is the steady reduction of the unpredictability and surprise that puts us at risk. And, by the force of this presumption, God – in so far as we’re willing to contemplate God – must share this same nature: God must be the supreme orderer of all that is ordered. This is why we read Scripture with reverence. We grant it the authority to call us into order.
This little interlude in Mark, however, calls our presumptions into question. It’s meant to. Nothing really follows from what came before. And thus, with each ensuing statement the logical order of things is disrupted by some odd twist – which may be more true to life than the order we’d like to impose, especially when God is the topic under consideration. Mark uses humor to inform us that God is not constrained to conform to the picture of God that we hold in our heads, not even the characteristics that we take to be necessary and indisputable. God has a greater freedom, which Mark puts in play throughout the whole of his Gospel. For who would have predicted, ultimately, that God in Jesus would defeat death by dying? But it’s the total surprise of this that makes it powerful.
In spite of our best efforts, we have not, of ourselves, pulled the world into perfect alignment. Maybe we are getting to the point where this will seem both lamentable and laughable. And God will become again uncanny and a surprising presence – not in any threatening way, but in a wealth of blessings we would not ourselves foresee. Laughter disarms us so that we can imagine this. So that we can pray “thy kingdom come.”
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.
