Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent
March 4, 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: Philippians 4:4-9
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
I had expected that this meditation would be easy to write. Paul’s exhortation from Philippians is among the most encouraging in all the Scriptural texts. Such was not the case.
This doesn’t seem to be much of a time for rejoicing. I am struggling these days simply to tamp down an anxiety about what the day will bring and a feeling of encroaching despair that the world is too much with us, driven by powers that can’t be bothered by any gradations of evil. There seems to be only one rule: take whatever you can using whatever force you can muster – and let no one stand in your way. This seems to leave little room for thanks.
We’re used to the habit of offering thanks only intermittently, as distinct occasions of joy and happiness arise. And, thus, we mark such occasions as unusual, over against the general run of hours and days and years which may be engaging, rewarding, and even exciting, but still, somehow, fall short of the bar of causing us to consciously rejoice. Paul’s urging can lose its urgency and become a simple reminder that, here and there, we’ll have special reasons to celebrate.
It’s a nice enough thought. But this is not what Paul had in mind. As is typical of him, he used his rhetoric to drill down through the indifference that comes with a sense of ease to the point where giving thanks can be seen as the very bedrock of life: there is no time when rejoicing is removed from us – and there is nothing, then, that can legitimately get in the way of giving thanks. This is not a simple thought; it requires effort to get to this point – especially when the delusions of power of one man can endanger so many millions of others.
But the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins also took the opportunity to redirect us. Like Paul, he took full account of the world but saw within it, at a more enduring level, a glory that cannot be expunged, worthy of praise, and not attributable to any of us:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I have long ago lost much use for the usual form of repentance commonly practiced in Lent. Such apologies and tokens of abstinence seem to accomplish little. They are mere occasions. The far better repentance, as Thomas Cranmer noted, is the “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” – taking Paul to heart, drilling down to find whatever is true, honorable, and just; the “dearest freshness deep down things.”
Rejoicing.
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.
Closing Prayer
O God, it is your will to hold both heaven and earth in a single peace. Let the design of your great love shine on the waste of our wraths and sorrows, and give peace to your church, peace among nations, peace in our homes, and peace in our hearts; through your son Jesus Christ our Lord.
