Here’s a picture of a Bible and some coffee—not mine, but someone or others:
There are a variety of settings options on the Daily Office app/site that my church uses every day for morning prayer. You can get through the lections in a year by showing up in the morning and the evening, or you can stretch it out over two years, knowing that by the end of the day, you won’t make it back to your prayer life. If you are exceptionally holy, in other words, you would have heard a portion of the trial of Jesus this morning, along with some chapter from Exodus. But for those of us much less holy people, we’re still stuck in Proverbs and Ephesians. The only way we unholy people would even have known it’s Holy Week is because of the collects and the opening sentence, “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.”
I guess I’m ok with my own mediocrity because I found the lections challenging enough. Ephesians this morning included this bit:
Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.
Our wide-ranging conversation (did you know you can literally be on Zoom with a bunch of other people in the early hours and talk about the Bible for ten minutes? I didn’t know until Covid came into the world and taught me so many things) took in the curious idea of a king being someone who “searches things out” and the importance of self-control, and finally landed on the question of slavery. The term “bondservant” is probably a bit gentle. It should probably say “slaves.”
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