Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

What an incredible image of the mightiness of God’s salvation we’re given in the Psalm appointed for this morning! And what a deliverance is described! The imagery of “the breakers of death” and “the torrents of oblivion” crashing over the soul, attempting to drown and submerge it in deadly despair all recalls Ancient Near Eastern cultural associations of death with the sea...which allows God’s deliverance to be read as an instance of the liberation of God’s people from bondage in Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea: “The beds of the seas were uncovered,” cries the Psalmist! And as God parts the heavens to save and redeem, the theophany is breathtaking: smoke and fire, cherubim (not cute little putti, but flying hybrid creatures with four faces—lion, ox, eagle, human—the body of an ox or lion covered with wings) fiercely flying, eruptions of incandescence that scholar and translator Robert Alter notes are so powerfully bright that everything around the blazing presence of God bursts into flames, becoming fiery coals, filled with the Divine presence, the world suddenly revealed to be one vast burning bush of revelation, revealing the salvation of God who conquers death and oblivion through “the blast of the breath,” through the Spirit of Life, reaching into the waters to rescue us, deliver us, to set us into an open place, for the sake of God’s infinitely loving delight.

I find all of that imagery wonderful and powerful. And it becomes more wonderful and powerful to me the more I consider: this is an image of God saving one person. One. Person. This is an image of God who, hearing the cries of one person, manifests the fullness of God’s awesome power and glory to save them. This is the spiritual reality behind the parable of the lost sheep; behind the story of Jesus reaching through the waves to rescue a drowning Peter; behind the cross, the harrowing of hell, and the resurrection; it’s a reality that courses through the sacrament of baptism. God brings to bear the fullness of God’s Glory in the redemption of each person in and through Jesus Christ.

Beloved, I pray that this day and all our days, we may become more and more aware of the Glory of God blazing about us and in us and through us, accomplishing God’s work of redemption; and I pray we may allow ourselves to become, by grace, living flames of the Glory’s central fire so that, alive with the brightness of God’s love, we can bring to bear the fullness of our lives in the liberating work of the Gospel unfolding in the world.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+