Dcn Susan Erickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today’s readings from the Daily Office contain several verses that have long since become stock phrases, part of the common idiom:  “The wages of sin are death” (Rom. 6: 23); “out of the mouths of babes … “ (Matt. 21: 16; cf. Ps. 8: 2); and “faith moves mountains” (from Matt. 21: 21).

I can almost see “The wages of sin are death” painted in fading letters across the side of a barn somewhere in the hilly countryside around where I grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia. Possibly this verse covers a billboard on I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, where it likely provokes more eye-rolling than the devout West Virginia farmer’s sign would have. 

We use the verse “out of the mouths of babes” (or, as the NRSV translates it, “out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies … “) to describe some truth or insight precociously uttered by a child—something that often elicits chuckles despite its clear-sightedness.

And “faith moves mountains”? Jesus’s words are actually: “‘Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt …, even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done.’” To say faith moves mountains seems nowadays like hyperbole, maybe even to Christians.

We have heard such passages from the Scriptures so often, including in reincarnated, popular versions, that we tend to “have ears but not hear,” as Jesus and the prophets before him said.  We forget about the context. But when St Paul, for example, writes that “the wages of sin are death,” he isn’t making some fire-and-brimstone, judgmental declaration. He uses this phrase in the context of imagery of labor and enslavement. God has actually freed us from servitude to a life apart from God. God’s wages are literally infinitely preferable to sin’s. “But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification…but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

How many misconceptions about the Bible and its message might we correct if we spent time reading it carefully, even if it’s just a chapter at a time? What new insights might we have if we truly listened to Scripture being read and chanted in church? (I challenge you on Sunday to lift your eyes from the printed word and focus on the spoken word.) May we continually pray for God’s grace to assist us in studying and listening to God’s word.

— Dcn Susan