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Morning Reflection
August 25, 2026
“The dream of a perfectly unified human community is probably as old as human thought about society. There is no reason to expect that this dream can ever become true except in the cruel form of despotism. Our lives are by nature full of conflicting, mutually irreconcilable loyalties: to our families, to our friends, to our countries, to practical causes and universal principles. Each of these loyalties, if taken to its logical extreme, would require the neglect, if not the outright elimination, of the others. We only navigate between them by being in some sense inconsistent. Indeed, strictly speaking, it is only thanks to inconsistency that humanity has kept alive on this earth.”
Kit Wilson: “Modernity’s Patching Up” - porticoquarterly.com
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
Each Sunday, after the Old Testament or Epistle lesson is read, the lector concludes with the statement “The Word of the Lord,” which is followed by the assigned response “Thanks be to God.” These are familiar declarations, usually made with all the enthusiasm that rote habits can muster. But what are these statements actually meant to assert or accomplish?
My guess is that most people would say that they establish the worthiness or the authority of the text. Whatever is read, by acknowledging that it comes from God, we grant it a certain unassailability. Our assumed responsibility in turn, then, is to listen and to adhere to these words. For they endure. And by enduring they become a refuge; for they counter all the transience that we experience in life, all that comes and goes, often without a trace. And we need to know what we can depend on.
Often, however, this effort to hallow the text is overplayed and the authority invoked is hardened into absolutes. The word becomes law. And the long witness of Scripture is twisted into a vast and inviolable set of truths, to which we must conform. Against all the inconsistencies we face, we can resort to wielding chapters and verses that offer up the world exactly as God intended – in such a way that everything would be fine if only everybody believed as we do.
But this is a dream that, even within the church, results only in cruel despotism. Too easily, we put our trust in texts alone rather than in the hope that, by means of them, we can be set in a place and condition whereby we can hear God speaking in a new way. Strictly speaking, the “Word of the Lord” isn’t the text that was read; it is something that we wait upon following the reading. And offering our thanks, then, so promptly, is a bit premature. For worship isn’t an exercise by which we merely reinforce a set way of understanding – our version of the world set against all others. Worship is meant to be an active dialogue with God, who doesn’t resolve all our inconsistencies by providing us answers; rather, God provides us a way to navigate through our inconsistencies, not by law but through the grace of love, which is always in search of fresh expression.
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