Richard Kuns

Dear friend,

Super Bowl Week--Super Bowl Sunday. The hype is everywhere! You can’t escape it. Nor can you mistake which team people support. They wear team shirts and paint their team logos on their faces. Everything about them declares their team identity!

Showing your team identity is expected and obvious.

As I was considering the readings in today’s Daily Office in light of the unending chatter about football, I reread the intriguing translation of Psalm 40 by Martin Samuel Cohen (Our Haven and Our Strength: The Book of Psalms). It is evident that the poet experienced dreadful, even life-threatening problems (vv 2-4a). That experience defined the poet’s identity and “his team colors.”

As a result of that experience, I said, “Since I have come in the guise of a scroll with writing all over me, I naturally desire to do Your will, my God: Your teaching is planted deep within my bowels.” (vv 8-9)

Pamela Greenberg translates verse 8: Then I said, “Behold, I have come, in the scroll of the book that is written upon my body.” (The Complete Psalms: The Book Prayer Songs)

The poet is making reference to the Torah and he envisions himself as a living, talking Torah that is so deeply engrained in his heart (our comfortable term for the Hebrew “bowels”) he can do nothing else but speak, sing and praise the One who transformed his whole life. Everywhere he goes, he is literally and figuratively identified with God. It’s written all over him.

I am reminded of this sentence proclaimed upon baptism: N., you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever. Amen (BCP 308). We bear the indelible marking of Christ and we are called to wear that mark visibly to the world.

GATHERED IN LOVE -TRANSFORMED BY GRACE - SENT TO SERVE

Those are the words that “imprint” us, the people of God, within the community we call St. Philips In The Hills.

What do those words mean to you?

To me, it means that the AGAPE LOVE that gathers and embraces me so overwhelms my life that I am forever transformed (the Greek word is “metamorphosis” - Romans 12:1-2) into the living, walking, talking image of the One who made and calls me BELOVED. I have no other choice but service in His glorious Name.

Richard Kuns