Highlights from "Forward Day by Day" Oct. 2017

October's issue of the daily devotion booklet Forward Day by Day offered meditations on the October lectionary by Eileen O'Brien of the Houston Canterbury ministry associated with the University of Houston.  She highlights bits of scripture that I'd not noticed before.

Tuesday, Oct. 10:  Assigned to write on 1 Corinthians 11.2, 17-22, O'Brien plays on the familiar London warning to "mind the gap," asking what we miss when the lectionary leaves out verses 3-16, which have been used "to silence female voices," and used in turn by others "to silence the voice of scripture itself."  She concludes, "Sometimes taking scripture seriously means not agreeing to everything Paul says but rather taking up his invitation to 'discern for yourselves' (1 Cor 11.13)."

Sunday, Oct. 22: The story of "giving unto Caesar" reminds O'Brien of theologian Stanley Hauerwas's calling "security" and "personal freedom" the "great idols of middle-class America."  They sound good, surely, but, she writes,

Security cannot be the most desired good of a people who proclaim a crucified God, who came vulnerably into an unsafe world to live as we live and to die as we die.  Unfettered personal freedom cannot be the most desired good of a people who follow the one who 'came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many' (Mark 10:45).  How then shall the Christian relate to a government that claims to prioritize and provide these things?

Thursday, Oct. 26, responding to Ezra 1:2-3, O'Brien observes that some of the Hebrew exiles chose to stay in Babylon.  She asks us about "powers" that hold us "captive."

The next day, the story in Ezra3:12-13 concerns elders among the exiles returned to Jerusalem,  the sound of their weeping mixed with the celebration of the construction of the new temple's foundations.  "Sometimes it is not until we see the new foundation that we fully realize that is is not the old. There is something irretrievable about the past that must be grieved."  She tells us to "[honor] grief alongside joyful shouts as expressions of thankfulness for what had been and amidst gratitude for this new beginning."

She calls Revelation "the crazy uncle of the New Testament family," but sees that "the text defiantly calls out" to the powers of the world, "You are big and bad and scary, but we see through you!"