View as Webpage

Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent

March 10, 2023

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: John 5:30-31

“I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me. If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true.”

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

How is greatness attained? It’s a wish that many of us harbor, which, in turn, becomes the driver that pushes us to succeed by sheer, relentless activity. Maximum busyness might be the answer. And it’s hard not to fall in line with this, especially when so many around us are constantly on the run at full throttle. But this is exhausting and demands a long view – thousands of hours of effort all collected together.

And what often occurs amid all this busyness is a strange inversion. Greatness itself becomes more important than whatever is done to achieve it. It’s not the excellence that’s recognized; it’s the person. Or, stated another way, greatness morphs into celebrity; and excellence is just the means by which we hope to acquire it.

What has become increasingly apparent in our time, however, is that when greatness morphs into celebrity, then excellence is, actually, not necessary at all. All that’s required is being absolutely unabashed at ceaseless self-promotion. Welcome to the age of influencers. And it doesn’t matter what one does or says or tries to sell. All that matters for influencers is that they have an audience. Lies have no consequence. Nor do scandals. For anything detrimental is erased from memory as long as they can occupy the select spaces of public attention. Then all remains golden.

At least until others figure out how to steer the talk and attention to themselves.

It’s commonplace to say that Jesus didn’t chase after greatness. We usually hear such a comment with a laudatory shrug: good for him. But with barely a pause we continue on, then, in our busyness. Yet what we miss in our casual indifference is that Jesus assiduously rejected celebrity too. He repeatedly stated that there was nothing about him that was of note. He didn’t want to be seen as someone. He claimed no authority for himself. Imagine that – and he didn’t state this tongue-in-cheek. The Anglican theologian Donald MacKinnon wrote of Jesus that “after the Last Supper, he seem[ed] to have surrendered all attempt to give significance to what he [was] about, in so far as significance [was] in his hands to confer. He [was] given to the Father in complete abandonment of all personal prerogative whatsoever.” This was, in a manner of speaking, “his finest hour.” For Jesus’ only intent was to reveal the excellence of God, which he did, not by means of a spectacular miracle that got everyone talking, but by making no attempt to show himself to be exceptional. Jesus chose instead to allow himself to be the one through whom God’s glory could be manifest.

And oddly, he has yet to be surpassed or forgotten or displaced by a flashier celebrity – even after two thousand years. So maybe we’re chasing after the wrong things and running in the wrong direction. 

Prayer

To Thee, O God, we turn for peace. But grant us , too, the blessed assurance that nothing shall deprive us of that peace, neither ourselves, nor our foolish, earthly desires, nor my wild longings, nor the anxious cravings of my heart.

Søren Kierkegaard