Devotion for Monday, March 16

Lessons from the Daily Lectionary – Monday, March 16, 2009

Psalms 43,140; Jeremiah 7:1-15; Romans 4:1-12; John 7:14-36

Meditation: Yesterday’s Gospel lesson told the story of Jesus’ outburst at the Jerusalem Temple. Overturning the moneychangers’ tables and driving out the animals to be sacrificed, it catches one’s attention. So who could skip over the Jeremiah passage today with that on one’s mind?

“The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord” – Jeremiah mocks the Israelites of his day because they segment their lives while expecting integrated results. “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal and go after other gods . . . and then come and stand before God in this house, saying ‘We are safe!’ – only to go on doing all these abominations?” Jeremiah makes it sound like Jerusalem was a wild, unlawful city. I’m guessing, however, that murder and divorce rates were rather tame compared to some of our statistics and that there wasn’t nearly the religious pluralism that we could see if we looked around a bit. I imagine their daily reality mirrored the complications of life we know which pull against a spiritual “center.”

Jeremiah’s Jerusalem would come to disaster when the Babylonians sacked it in 587 BC. Under the leadership of King Nebuchadnezzar, the Jews there would be marched to Babylon in a forced exile while the city was razed, the central Temple building demolished stone by stone. In the annals of World History, this would be because Israel was on the land bridge between Babylon and Egypt and the Emperor from the East did not want the Pharaoh from the West to get testy and aggressive on his Palestine flank. But for Jeremiah the issues were much more about a society whose strength was in its wholeness, in the bonds of an ethical community and in the promise of the liberating God who it honored. When the people were given to distractions – theses showing up on evening TV news reports of the breaking of the societies’ 10 Commandments – Jeremiah saw his people’s fragility. He saw that the fractures in his community could not be compensated by fleeing to the Temple for refuge. In a word, the center was gone.

I find these morning devotions to bring an opportunity for centering. I hope that they are not mere flights to the Temple for refuge. Daily Prayer grounds one in a nurtured spiritual life. It’s where one can go with a venting to God about what went wrong the day before. It’s where we can remind ourselves of what is faithful. It’s where we can reinvigorate ourselves before a God who is merciful, gracious and asks us to respond to such mercy and goodness by faith. God isn’t out to get us. God doesn’t stand at the ready hoping to condemn for our sins and failures. But God does invite us to a center, which gains us a way to stand with wholeness, even bring that wholeness to our day.

Prayer: Here we are God, in the quiet of this moment, present only before you. No one is standing looking over our shoulders to check off that we have done the religious thing. But we do have the privilege of taking a moment to open ourselves to your ways through this prayer. Give us a ground to stand on that is firm and centered by this. String out the day before us as a way to live out your grace in the world. So we bless you Lord, from the house of the Lord, where Jesus came and brought his zeal. Amen.