Stillspeaking Daily Devotional

A comfort & reminder, from today's by Phiwa Langeni: "Even as we do our best to nurture the ones in our circle of care, ultimately God attends to their growth."

Today's by Quinn G. Caldwell, "Penetrable":

What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. – James 4:14b (NRSV)

One day in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen was messing around with a cathode ray tube in his lab at the University of Würzburg when he noticed something odd. Whenever the tube was turned on, a nearby screen would start to glow, even when all visible light was blocked. When he held his hand up against the screen, he saw the weirdest shadow: not just the shape of his hand, but an image of its insides, bones and all.

When he reported his discovery of X-rays, the world went nuts. Not because of all the medical uses to which they would be put. Not because their discovery eventually birthed quantum physics.

It was because we had thought we were solid, and it turns out we aren’t. We believed we were fortresses: that only what we welcomed got inside, unless overthrown by force. Suddenly, we learned we are supremely penetrable; the world passes through us all day long, like somebody walking through a mist.

Radio waves, microwaves, neutrinos: all just mosey along on their way through the universe—and you—and don’t even notice you’re there. Nor do they cause trouble for you.

Not everything can pass through you without damage, though: alpha and beta particles, gamma rays, Röntgen’s X-rays, neutrons. Not to mention envy, malice, covetousness, cruelty, derision. Such things do fundamental damage on their way through.

Legislation, lead, and concrete do a pretty good job of shielding us from the problematic particles and radiation.

What do you do to shield you from the rest?

: Come, Holy Spirit, come. Enter in and make me impermeable to the worst the world has to offer. Amen.

Today's from Mary Luti, "Shame Is Us":

Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them take up their cross and follow me.” – Matthew 16:24 abridged (NRSV)

Biblical phrases and images often lose their teeth when they enter everyday parlance. Take “good Samaritan,” for example. In scripture, it’s the loathsome enemy who, shockingly, saves your life. Today, it’s the kindly stranger who rescues your cat from a tree. Nothing against cat rescue, but it doesn’t pack quite the same punch.

Likewise, “Take up your cross.” These days it means accepting life’s vicissitudes, as in “we all have our crosses to bear.” But Jesus wasn’t talking generically about bearing up under personal challenges, making a virtue of suffering. He was talking specifically about being paraded, in Andrew McGowan’s words, “from prison to gallows, carrying the instrument of torture and death.”

It would’ve been a familiar spectacle; the Romans weren’t stingy with crosses. Slaves, insurrectionists, robbers, people of low status and no hope whipped through the streets in processions choreographed for dehumanization. They were warnings, object lessons, the violent moral of the empire’s heartless story. To take up your cross was to join that humiliating parade, as Jesus himself soon would. And later, many of his disciples, too. For his sake, they became all shame.

Now, Jesus was no sadist. He didn’t want the cross for himself, and he never commanded us to run after torture and disgrace. But he did call us to love. And because a life that looks like love affronts everything that passes for wisdom in this world, that parade may yet await us. As someone once observed, “If you don’t love, you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.” We may yet become a warning. Christ’s shame may yet be us.

Prayer: Jesus, disabuse me of the notion that I can follow you without incurring rejection and ridicule. If I’m not yet all shame, grant me a closer following.

Today's from Kenneth L. Samuel:

Your path led through the sea, your way through the sea, your way through the mighty waters, though your footprints were not seen. – Psalm 77:19 (NIV)

The psalmist is in a funk, facing many of the same adversities that trouble us today: mounting antagonisms and increasing injustice accompanied by the stifling void of unanswered prayer. In solemn desperation, the psalmist plaintively questions God, “Will you reject forever? Will you never show favor again? Has your promise failed all time? Have you forgotten the merciful?”

But out of debilitating despondency emerges an upward inflection when the psalmist recalls his past experiences of God’s power to deliver. The psalmist remembers that the paths of God are not paved with smooth comforts and steady conveniences. In fact, the avenues of the divine stretch across the deep turbulence of the sea. Yet through the uncharted, unsteady vacillations of the deep, the life of the psalmist is held intact by the hand of God. And God’s pathway through seas of suffering and uncertainty lead God’s people to the promised land of liberty and self-agency.

Upon reflection I think we can all confess that our greatest lessons and revelations about life and about God have not come to us through pathways of pleasure and expediency. What we know about life and what we trust about God have come through waves of tribulation and gusts of contrary winds out on the shifting seas of time. Our faith has been forged in the fire and our salvation has been secured through rough waters and formidable conditions.

Perfect peace amidst tidal waves of calamity. Divine presence in places drenched in darkness. Secure salvation on the waters of debacle and destabilization. These are the receipts that confirm God as our anchor in any threatening situation.

Prayer: Lord in these troubled times, show us again the receipts of your saving power. Amen.

Today, Molly Molly Phinney Baskette asks: What is one impossible thing you wish for your local faith community?

Share in the comments! Also, linked in comments.

Today in the , Mary Luti considers accountability in the church.

"The practice of discipline doesn’t condemn the wayward. It acknowledges a need to start over. It doesn’t despair of anyone. It assumes a graced capacity for responding and repair. It doesn’t run out of chances. It assumes that when you’re finally ready, Mercy will be, too."

After Matthew The practice of discipline doesn’t condemn the wayward. It acknowledges a need to start over. It doesn’t despair of anyone. It assumes that when you’re ready, Mercy will be, too.

Today, Matt Laney considers the legacy of Paul:

Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. – Romans 10:17 (NRSV)

That’s a bold statement for someone who never met Jesus or heard him teach in the flesh.

Paul was not a disciple. In fact, Paul was a fierce opponent of the Jesus movement before he became its foremost promoter in Gentile territory.

However, Paul’s status as a “promoter of the Jesus movement” needs a mountain-sized asterisk.

The Christ he preached grew from a vision he never describes in his letters. The famous scene of Paul blinded by the light comes from Acts, written decades later by Luke.

Think about that. The most influential theologian in Christian history based his understanding of Jesus on a private experience, one he did not submit for peer review by Jesus’s appointed successors for three years. He intentionally avoided them. He said his spiritual experience outranked their human experience, so why bother?

Imagine someone claiming to have received a vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King that outranks the lived experience of those in Dr. King’s inner circle. Unlike King, Jesus left behind nothing but students—exactly who Paul dodged.

Because Paul answered only to his experience of Christ, Christ-ianity does the same by viewing Jesus through Paul rather than the other way around.

Yeah, I’m not exactly Paul’s biggest fan. But I’ll give him this: He had chutzpah, which is why you are reading this and why we have a church at all. Whatever my qualms with Paul, I’ll be forever grateful for his legacy: the Church that protects and proclaims the words of Jesus.

Paul got us here. The Gospels point us to Jesus.

: Help me balance my vision of Christ by attending to his words.

Today's encouragement: What opportunities do you have to support someone who is feeling buried by life? Think especially about hands-on opportunities to be supportive, no matter how small.

Unburying Souls : Jesus, when I am buried, take away my shame so I can ask for the help I need to begin again. And give me empathy to help unbury others you put in my path. Amen.