Mtr Taylor Devine

Good morning,

Two words stand out today in Morning Prayer today, one is Joy and the other is Fear.

The Jubilate, an Invitatory Psalm that can be said at the beginning of Morning Prayer, stands out to me because at Seminary it was frequently sung, and in that form it worked its way into my heart. Also known as Psalm 100, It has invited people to prayer for generations in both Jewish and Christian liturgies.

Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands;
serve the Lord with gladness
and come before his presence with a song.
Know this: The Lord himself is God;
he himself has made us, and we are his;
we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving;
go into his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and call upon his Name.
For the Lord is good;
his mercy is everlasting;
and his faithfulness endures from age to age.

The excited invitation to praise God and the recognition of this good, everlasting God echoes with hope. With time this prayer can ground the community praying. That mooring is important as we are invited to hear texts and respond to them in faithful prayer, preparing for a new day in which to listen for how we are to love and serve this God.

The word Fear comes up in Isaiah 8, a prophecy:
...and do not fear what it fears, or be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread...

There are sometimes markedly different messages when we encounter the Biblical texts together. Depending on when and where we encounter them, they can be sources of comfort or of a call to repentance, and sometimes they are both. In the case of the Isaiah 8 passage, there is this comfort and calling dynamic where a reminder is given: God you shall regard as holy. Not the other things that can so easily seem monumental and require our attention, God is the holy one. The Lord himself is God.

As Fr. Mark wrote yesterday, all our reachings toward God still leave us without a full understanding of God's mercy, goodness and holiness but this is not a point of despair, but an invitation into awe. A paraphrase of Philippians 3:12 where Paul is speaking: "I count not myself to have grasped; but as one that has been grasped, I press on," speaks to this dynamic of awe-faith-unknowing that comes with a relationship with the living God who is so unfathomable and yet so present in Christ through the Spirit.


In Christ,
Taylor

Paraphrase from Underhill, School of Charity, p. 13