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Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany
March 3, 2025
Reading: Luke 9:
Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. He said to them, "Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money-- not even an extra tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there, and leave from there. Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them." They departed and went through the villages, bringing the good news and curing diseases everywhere.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
On Friday, I attended the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of Brahms’ First Piano Concerto. There were other works included in the concert, but I was there to listen to the Brahms. It has been my favorite piece of music (across all genres) for forty years, and I had never heard it live. I have played recordings of the Concerto so many times that I thought I knew every movement, great and small, within it. – I was proved wrong.
Hélène Grimaud was the pianist. And while she kept to the standard interpretation of the piece, every moment presented Brahms’ music afresh and anew. I heard things I had never heard before. It was thrilling. And once home, I found a recent interview with Grimaud, in which she had this to say about being a musical performer:
“You have to take your time. Time is part of the decision making process.
And that’s what’s beautiful, actually. That’s what makes us keep working,
playing again, revisiting the same works. Because they have such depth, such emotional expressive richness, that, in the end just one lifetime isn’t enough to fully grasp them. [The role of the performer is one of] transmission. And it’s really interesting because these works are sacred texts, they only come to life thanks to the mystery that is performance. This incarnation, this shared freedom, this communion in the same space, that’s what gives them life.”
Grimaud freely made use of religious language to describe her art, culminating in the idea that the performance of great and enduring music brings us all into communion with one another. One might wish that the same intentionality and goal was shared by those who transmit the Gospel. Grimaud’s reflections are a nearly perfect complement to Jesus’ charge to his disciples. Insert her statement at the end of Jesus’ instructions. How different transmitting the Gospel would be. It is as if sharing the Gospel were not so much the business of proclamation, which seems inevitably confrontational. It is more like learning, slowly, to invite people into a beauty that will never be exhausted. The disciples are stripped of all the usual things that provide them the comfort of independence. Jesus asks them, in essence, to be vulnerable to others and to take their time, conveying the Gospel as if it were music – which it is. Then Christianity won’t be perceived as a cold, objective set of doctrines: things that must be believed. It can be experienced, rather, as our engagement in things of “such depth, such emotional expressive richness, that, in the end just one lifetime isn’t enough to fully grasp them.”
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 from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
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