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Morning Devotion for the Season of Easter
April 8, 2024
Invitatory
On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
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: I Peter 1:3-12
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; by his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time; in this you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; without having seen him you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy, as the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of your souls; the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory; it was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the good news to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.
Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings
“If we have forgotten who God is, resurrection will proclaim it to us, it will tell us what He is, what He wills, what He can do and continually does, and what an awful thing it is for us to think about this God!”
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
Big questions are easy to ask. Answering them is another thing. Pilate infamously wondered “What is truth?” Two thousand years later, no definitive answer seems yet to be forthcoming.
The question “Who is God?” falls in the same category. If you were asked this, what would you say? What would you need to say in order to distinguish God from all the other, lesser options that are so breezily talked about. Any reply that begins with the words “My God is…” will probably be more a reflection of the speaker than an actual revelation of God.
You may have noticed in the reading above from First Peter that there’s a curious lack of periods. Nine verses and yet just one period. It’s a classic example of a run-on sentence. Yet it’s not simply that Peter didn’t have an adequate grasp of grammar. It’s more the case that he had a passionate grasp of who God truly is, which he tried to express in the succinctness of one comprehensive expression. This, said Peter, is where one has to begin – one sentence with fifteen clauses. Answering the question “Who is God?” can only be started by taking into account the entire, unwieldy warp and woof of his statement. Read it as written, with barely a pause allowed. The usual habit of offering a relatively static definition of God becomes, instead, an ever crescendoing description of who God is by telling what God has done. And thereby, God ceases to be an object to examine or an idea to contemplate. God is identified through his disposition towards us, shown in his acts.
I’ve often thought that Peter’s description would be most useful if it began where he ended. God is that “into which angels long to look.” Not a judge. Not a king. Not any of the terms attributed to God that fall inert like stones. God is best described in the mode of yearning. Everything else that’s true follows from this, with patience enough to see the power and beauty of all the rest that Peter included – which is just the beginning.
Prayer
Risen Christ, in the midst of grief and despair, at the very point when all seemed lost, you stood in the midst of your friends in the fullness of your resurrection reality and proclaimed your peace; a peace that reorders and renews all things.
May the same peace find a home in us and, at the urging of your Spirit, may we be today and every day bearers of hope and enablers of peace in the power of your name.
The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
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