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Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent

February 27, 2023

Feast Day of George Herbert

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.

Reading: Ecclesiastes 5:7

With many dreams come vanities and a multitude of words; but fear God.

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

It stops you short, this one line. Its effect is more like running full speed into a solid wall.

We are awash in a turbulent sea of words. People are talking twenty-four hours a day, somewhere and everywhere and nowhere, all at once. All you need is to be plugged in. Earbuds have become ubiquitous. And with them so have politicians and sports commentators and excited influencers and experts eager to share their brilliance and TED talk gurus of every imaginable stripe. And it’s easy to find the voices with which you agree. And it’s just as easy to feel assaulted by the voices with which you disagree. They seem always ready to impose themselves, tearing away at the comfort you’d like to enjoy. Our dreams aren’t all the same.

And for all of this, it’s not immediately clear that we’re better off or that progress is accelerating at blinding speed or that we simply have a firmer understanding of who we are and what we want in life and what life will grant us. Dreams are often just dreams - fanciful vanities.

Once stopped, however – however abruptly – there remains a compelling question: what does it mean to “fear God” and how is this different from all the other dreams we weave. Isn’t this just one more variation of what we ourselves conjure? We often treat faith this way, searching for the particular God we’d most like to claim or leaving faith behind as a vanity that’s long been already discredited. But “fear” here, of course, doesn’t mean fright; it means coming to see the very opposite of vanity and all that amuses us as it flits by. “Fearing God” is coming to terms with a reality that is not ours to change at whim. Instead of dreams we are firmly set within a drama, with a beginning and an end, forged in the thick of creation and redemption, characterized by the inescapability of destiny and promise, fulfilled in hope. Dreams slip through fingers; nothing falls from the hands of God. For God is the one whose words “do not return empty; they accomplished that for which they were purposed.” To “fear God” is to admit the beauty and immensity of this truth.

Prayer

A wreathed garland of deserved praise,

Of praise deserved, unto thee I give,

I give to thee, who knowest all my wayes,

My crooked winding wayes, wherein I live,

Wherein I die, not live : for life is straight,

Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,

To thee, who art more farre above deceit,

Then deceit seems above simplicitie.

Give me simplicitie, that I may live,

So live and like, that I may know thy wayes,

Know them and practise them : then shall I give

For this poore wreath, give thee a crown of praise.

George Herbert