Theology for Breakfast: Forward Day by Day, August 2019

The quarterly periodical Forward Day by Day gives an Episcopalian the day's readings as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer along with personal reflections by a different writer for each month.  I've used this resource with the short service for morning (BCP p. 140) for years, now, marking any meditation that strikes me for collection on this blog every three months.  I made so many check marks in August that I can't wait until the next quarter. The author is  Cathy Tyndall Boyd, rector of St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Boyd likes to focus on parts of Biblical stories that seem inexplicable or even abhorrent to us.

• For no apparent reason, David refuses the honor of caring for the ark of the Lord (2 Samuel 6.10); Boyd reflects on how she, too, once wanted to refuse an obligation to serve a stranger, and how the kindness of that stranger turned out to be a memorable blessing. She asks, "When have you said, 'no thanks,' and wished you had chosen differently?"
• "David's command to have Uriah murdered and his coercive intercourse with Bathsheba are not momentary lapses in judgment -- this is David's long game." She goes on, "God knows what utter savagery David is capable of committing -- the same kinds you and I are capable of -- and loves us anyway. This boggles the mind. Thanks be to God."
• Boyd writes similarly of Paul, a "problematic character." Granted that, she asks, "what do we do with Saul of Tarsus... a terrible, awful, mean person." Again, "It is a great mystery and a deep mercy that God's purpose can be worked out by angry, spiteful, mean people."
  
• About Paul, she writes, "I suspect he was a pretty serious dude," but she draws our attention to a joke that Paul makes as a prisoner when the governor Agrippa accuses him of trying to convert him: I pray to God that not only you but also all who are listening to me today might become such as I am -- except for the chains (Acts 26.29). Boyd concludes that "Jesus's friends and disciples are real people who tell jokes, enjoy shared meals, and value humanity more than legality."
• About Act2 28.9, how Paul healed many people of illness and blindness, she ponders how we usually think of Paul: "Agitator, preacher, orator, persecutor, letter - writer, sure -- but a healer?" She cautions us, "Sometimes we are blind to the full picture because we con't want to see the soft, lovely, kind parts of people we usually find hard, irritating, or abrupt."

Boyd writes, anent Mark 9.32 They did not understand what he was saying, that Jesus "isn't an orderly guy - at every turn, he upends the political and theological status quo," and "Christianity is not a very orderly religion." I love the next line: "God is more of an artist than a mathematician -- things rarely add up." So "our lives of faith are not so much about possessing the truth, exacting certainty, or bending God's will to our will," but a life in Christ -- the "community" of His body, the church. She advises us to "be flexible and open to a bit of miraculous Holy Spirit chaos."

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom, says Jesus (Luke 12.32). Because "life is a creative process," Boyd writes, we can see a shape or design in retrospect, but during the events, "trying to picture an invisible and unknown future, it's easy to be afraid."

Boyd imagines that great cloud of witnesses in the first part of Hebrews 12.1 as the crowd cheering us in our own individual races imagined in the second part, urging us to persevere; and we are in that cloud of witnesses, too. Nice way to tie all together. She writes that the entire chapter 12 is a love letter to "forerunners" in the Jewish faith.

Boyd makes me reconsider the lengthy Psalm 119, one that I've found tedious to read or sing. She quotes verse 145 (!), I call with my whole heart; answer me, O Lord, that I may keep your statutes. She writes

When I need help expressing the depths of despair or the heights of joy, I can find the perfect words here [in the Psalms]. During times when I am angry or feel persecuted, I am comforted that the psalmist has been there before me. When I have hostile thoughts that I am reluctant to call "prayer," I go to the psalms and find the words. Given that this poetry is thousands of years old, it appears God can handle all my feelings. For this I am grateful. ...The God who made us knows us and loves us fully.

About Psalm 131.2, I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me, Boyd observes that all the readings assigned for August 22 "burst with intrigue": Absalom's rebellion, the plot to silence Paul, and the effort to entrap Jesus in heresy. Boyd reminds us how often Jesus tells us that this kind of intrigue continues throughout our lives. She concludes

It is a necessary spiritual discipline to resist occupying ourselves with things -- or people -- we can't control. The God who made heaven and earth can handle being God; our job is to bask in that truth and let the rest of it go. [emphasis mine]

Boyd's benedictory final meditation responds to the bleak sentence from Mark 14.50, All of them deserted him and fled. She observes that Liturgical Christians associate this passage with Holy Week, but it pops up again and again. "The life of faith," she writes, "like the liturgical year..."

...is a circular thing. We learn things, we grow; we forget the things we have learned, we fall, we get back up -- and we learn more things. Lather, rinse, repeat.... Jesus is our model of faithfulness to God.

People let us down, she adds, but "we are not meant to do our lifework alone. Thanks be to God."