The Daily Office for July 13, 2012
Scriptures
Psalm 22
Deuteronomy 31:7-24
Romans 10:1-13
Matthew 24:15-31
Reading (Psalm 22)
Reflection
When Wayne Gordon, founding pastor of Chicago’s Lawndale Community Church, taught inner-city high school students, one of his best pupils was fatally shot. Reflecting on the other students’ reaction to this senseless death, Pastor Gordon said, “They gave me the news as if it were a weather report. Their young lives had already been numbed to violence and death”. How do we account for such callousness to evil? God calls it “spiritual darkness”.
In Jonah God said that the Ninevites didn’t know their right hands from their left. Most likely, He was declaring that the Assyrian people had lost all sense of good and bad. Right and wrong. They were hopelessly lost, cut off from the truth of their Creator. Which explains why God sent a prophet to them. He wanted the people of Nineveh to have a basis by which to measure their lives and actions. And what was that standard? The light of God’s holiness and righteousness. If the people turned from their sins and asked for God’s mercy, they would be spared destruction.
For darkened hearts, like those at Pastor Gordon’s school, life itself has little or no meaning or purpose. Existence is a short time in a shadow world where right and wrong disappear. The goal of people living (or perhaps we should say dying) in darkness is not to please the God who created them but to live for themselves and for the gods of their own creation. For these people, satisfying immediate desires becomes the all-consuming goal. The more they pursue worldly desires, the farther away from God they move. And since He is the Light of the World, running from Him only takes them further into the darkness.
If you have a hard time believing that God would care so much about people living in spiritual darkness, fast-forward some 750 years and witness a strange star twinkling above a ramshackle stable in Bethlehem. On a dark night comes an infant in a manger who would grow up to be the Light of the World. In this One lies hope for everyone who stumbles in the dark.
Collect for the Day
Almighty God, send down upon your Church the riches of your Spirit, and kindle in all who minister the gospel your countless gifts of grace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.