Mtr Taylor Devine

Dear Friend,

Today's Daily Office Epistle reading which is typically read at Evening Prayer is from Romans 8. The first verses are often heard in a triumphal voice:
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

But when we get to the end of this Epistle that triumphalism softens - for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The reader's voice softens, the depth of this promise rings out, the repetition settles our spirits. Our Biblical narratives tell us that there is time for both - for glory and gratitude, and for the depth of knowing that all that hopes to separate us from God cannot.

The deep comfort of that knowledge is a place we can move from, whereas triumphalism might exhaust, that place of love can be energizing, a starting place, a reminder of whose we are. In a world that holds the paradoxes the Bible points us toward, may we lean on the abundance of grace offered by Jesus and which we sorely need.

In Christ,
Mtr. Taylor